Another angle:

Toronto G20 - Snatch & Grab Squads from techcafe on Vimeo.

Message to 'law' enforcement in Canada and the U.S.:

You are eroding years of good faith between yourselves and the historically peaceful modern protest movement in the U.S. and Canada by mimicking the worst practices of the most despotic regimes on the planet.

Hopefully you won't look back on these videos in a few years trying to pinpoint just exactly when protesters started flinging molotovs and in general stopped treating you like human beings.

Hopefully that is a future you will prevent by starting to treat protesters now as human beings.

You still have time.

But not much.

Anyone going to bother explain why these specific people were taken away in vans?

I vote this a *quality topic for discussion, despite the video spelling. Try to count the number of plainclothes cops involved in the snatch and grab and you'll run out of fingers.

Without additional evidence, in presence of what appears to be a peaceful assembly, can we not begin to reason from this video that the police are openly waging war on our will to conduct peaceful protests? If so, it's time to start conducting protests as though in war. No more megaphones, or enough distributed through the crowd to make it impossible to grab every 'leader'. No more cameras swirling around certain individuals, thus revealing their rank. Anonymity. Manpower. Strength. I don't know nor care what the protest is about anymore - this behavior cannot stand.

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by Kevlar.

There were three people pulled from the crowd on Sunday, due to warrants they had from Saturday. The girl in particular was wanted on Arson and endangering the public. Also plain clothes cops have special rules in TO, they have to wear an armband that says they're a cop, unless they have a special court order saying they can go undercover. You can see the arm bands galore from the queens park protests.

>> ^Bruti79:

There were three people pulled from the crowd on Sunday, due to warrants they had from Saturday. The girl in particular was wanted on Arson and endangering the public. Also plain clothes cops have special rules in TO, they have to wear an armband that says they're a cop, unless they have a special court order saying they can go undercover. You can see the arm bands galore from the queens park protests.


Bwaat?

you.. you mean.. the police were actually doing something like getting a woman who had a warrent for her arrest but was trying to hide in a place with peaceful protesters so she wouldn't get caught?

And they weren't just kidnapping for the sake of fearmongering? they had a reason? and the people of the sift are yet again going to take this out of context and we'll soon see another batch of "Fuck the police" comments even though this has been explained?

Well, i'll be damned then.

Additional context:

@theali

That adds little context.

Basically, what I saw in that second video, was right at the beginning they say "If they ask us to disperse, move away calmly in groups"

when asked to move back, people sit like lumps.

Then, we mysteriously lose a lot of footage at the 7:17 mark, and come back to riot geared cops suddenly standing on the front lines.

The guy on the bike who was tackled, I'd like to know what he did, he was unfortunately off-camera, but I doubt he deserved that. The rest of them though.. until I see what they did to make the cops bring out riot police, I'm siding with the police. You generally don't edit footage that dramatically unless you're hiding something.

>> ^Shepppard:

>> ^Bruti79:
There were three people pulled from the crowd on Sunday, due to warrants they had from Saturday. The girl in particular was wanted on Arson and endangering the public. Also plain clothes cops have special rules in TO, they have to wear an armband that says they're a cop, unless they have a special court order saying they can go undercover. You can see the arm bands galore from the queens park protests.

Bwaat?
you.. you mean.. the police were actually doing something like getting a woman who had a warrent for her arrest but was trying to hide in a place with peaceful protesters so she wouldn't get caught?
And they weren't just kidnapping for the sake of fearmongering? they had a reason? and the people of the sift are yet again going to take this out of context and we'll soon see another batch of "Fuck the police" comments even though this has been explained?
Well, i'll be damned then.


Well said, Shep. Watching people get shoved into vans that then sped off tugged at my ragestrings. Any links would be appreciated.

sheppard.
while i agree with many of your points concerning these videos i.e:editing and such.you really need to research the peaceful protests from the civil rights movement to vietnam.
historically in times of protests the police become the element of disruption and infiltration and hide behind laws specifically engineered to not only discredit the protest (by way of sabatoge,violent acts etc) but also to empower the state.

while i may admire your respect for authority i do not share it in this context.
this is when police become the true arm of the state and work at its behest at the expense of the common man.
this betrayal of their oath is what i find most abhorrent.
i am curious to find out how the police who participate may have rationalized what they have agreed to do to their neighbor and fellow citizen.
now that would be an interview!

@enoch

I respect your opinion, I'm not defending the police for what they did, I'm defending them in the sense of "Until we know what provoked them, I'm not judging them."

I dislike videos that have been edited together in this sense, very quick scene change from peaceful protesters, to who knows what or how long the camera's been off.

If you want to be angry with police, then read this facebook post about what happened to Tommy Taylor:

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/note.php?note_id=397205503638&id=511491565

Granted some were broken by what happened, and others were just plain dumb and doing illegal things.

Why do Canadians say "south" and "again" weird?

>> ^blankfist:

Why do Canadians say "south" and "again" weird?


I have no idea what you're talking aboot.

@Bruti79 People are not particularly angry with the police, they are more angry at a legislature that was secretly passed by our provincial cabinet. The Public Works Protection Act was repurposed to give the police extraordinary powers for the G20 summit.

We need a public inquiry to find out exactly how this legislature was passed and who voted for it.

*nod*

No justice is going to come from it, Dalton McGuinty isn't saying anything about it, yet, and he's not going to run again in the election. Probably because he's going to lose badly. Your point about being angry at the government was my first spot of anger. I'm all for debate, I love it, I love to do it, and when you leave it out of the process, I get angry. I've already sent my written letter to the Premier, I doubt I'll get a response until the winter time =P

The other areas of concern are the Steve Paikin incident, which connects to the Detention center and the Queen & Spadina incident, the rights abuse lump them all together. This also needs an independent investigation. I'm trying to find the video, but apparently the weapons on display also had some LARP'ing foam weapons seized from a LARP'er and put on display *hand/forehead*

Do people realise yet that protesting makes no difference at all ?

what do they plan to achieve with the protest? its not like the g20 r going to stop been cooperate hores because of a couple thousand people been slightly rowdy.

I mean the biggest protest people could make would be to stop buying products, remove all there money from the large banks or high street banks and move to communities that grow there own food and generate there own electricity.

@westy
So its a binary choice? As individuals, we can either go into isolation or be slaves our entire life.

How about a third option, where the elected officials make choices which benefit the collective, instead of a selective few with power?

It is possible, just requires imagination to devise a alternate system and a willingness to deploy that system.

History is full of gradual shifts in the global zeitgeist, it is much like evolution, while not visible when looking at individual instances, it is there; and one day when you look back, the contrasts are easily visible.

I agree you can change things and it might be a gradual process.

but I don't think you can beat the capitalist system with protests like this.

you have to ether get into government get rich , or do something like "the real news" , standing around on a street protesting ( and not even bing clear in what you are protesting) is utterly futile.

thats why i say this is just an unproductive waist of time these guys could spend the amount of time they r spending here doing other stuff that might have an impact.



>> ^theali:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/westy" title="member since July 25th, 2006" class="profilelink">westy
So its a binary choice? As individuals, we can either go into isolation or be slaves our entire life.
How about a third option, where the elected officials make choices which benefit the collective, instead of a selective few with power?
It is possible, just requires imagination to devise a alternate system and a willingness to deploy that system.
History is full of gradual shifts in the global zeitgeist, it is much like evolution, while not visible when looking at individual instances, it is there; and one day when you look back, the contrasts are easily visible.

Move along, there's nothing to see here.

>> ^Bruti79:

There were three people pulled from the crowd on Sunday, due to warrants they had from Saturday. The girl in particular was wanted on Arson and endangering the public. Also plain clothes cops have special rules in TO, they have to wear an armband that says they're a cop, unless they have a special court order saying they can go undercover. You can see the arm bands galore from the queens park protests.


There methods are flawed. If you can see by the backlash against them in comments. They should not resort to these sorts of snatch and grabs. Warrants or not. Some of you will say, "Well how else would they have gotten them?"

That's easy. Everyone has to sleep.