Ten days after the G20 meeting, debate continues about the way massed police treated protesters (and passersby) around the downtown Toronto site. Inevitably, there is still considerable disagreement about the facts of many incidents reported. But it's not too soon to draw one central lesson with important implications: Police will use the powers they are given, use them too enthusiastically sometimes, and exceed them sometimes.
The moral is that society and government must be vigilantly prudent about what powers we do give to our armed guardians of order.
We need to be safe, certainly. But who will protect us from our protectors?
To be sure, there were among the G20 protesters plenty of bad apples, from dedicated anarchist cranks to simple would-be looters. And we should keep the disorders -and the police response -in perspective: As we have already noted in this space, by the standards which pass for normal around the world this was a day at the beach. Nobody died in these protests, no buildings burned down, nobody was seriously injured, nobody tortured, nobody made to disappear.
Thank goodness. But ludicrous complaints -no vegan food in jail was our favourite -do not make the whole event a laughing matter. This appears to have been the largest mass arrest in Canadian history; more than 900 people were tossed in jail, almost twice as many as under the War Measures Act during the 1970 October Crisis. But very few of those arrested in Toronto have been charged, suggesting strongly that police were hauling people in wholesale for no good reason.
An impressively wide array of anecdotes of people rousted and arrested, supposedly without cause, suggests the same thing. Plenty of reputable people have spoken of enduring, or at least seeing, police using force for no or insufficient reason. Frequently, police seem to have disregarded basic civil rights, breaching the important first bulwark separating rule-of-law countries from lands where police are above the law.
The Ontario government, prodded by the federal government to keep this summit safe, gave police extraordinary powers of arrest around the summit site. Combined with a security fence, huge numbers of police, and other measures this contributed, we surmise, to emboldening both senior officers and rank-and-file cops. In this atmosphere they apparently believed that the usual rules had been suspended. This was a mistake which Ontario, Ottawa, and all our government must be sure does not happen again.