Toronto Police and their partner police forces during the G20 Summit were sometimes overwhelmed and caught flat-footed by the “scope and intensity” of the “sustained, serious, and widespread criminality and public disorder” they faced, an internal force after-action review admits.
Postmedia News obtained an advance copy of the 70-page document, which was posted late Thursday afternoon on the police website.
The report, written by unidentified senior Toronto officers and civilians who reviewed extensive video footage and police files, paints a terrifying, almost minute-by-minute portrait of the modern mob in full throttle.
“Last June, we saw levels of violence we had never seen before in Toronto,” Chief Bill Blair says in a brief forward. “This report takes a hard look at what happened. Many things we did very well.
“Some things we did not.”
The review identifies several critical weak spots, among them a lack of mobility of well-trained and protected public order units (POUs), which couldn’t get to the fast-changing locations where protesters were using “Black Bloc” tactics; the reliance upon less trained officers who weren’t inculcated in the notion that first contact with protest groups “should be low-key and measured” and who may have inadvertently inflamed the crowd temperature by their approach, and long delays in the processing of protesters arrested after a crowd was “kettled”, or contained, on the Summit’s final night and who were given no chance to leave the scene before being arrested.
If the report is not the mea culpa police critics would demand, it is at the least a frank and sobering assessment of a shocking weekend in Canadian police history.
In some instances, a collision of bureaucratic or cultural values — the Toronto Police way of doing business versus that of the provincial court services in charge of processing prisoners, for example — seem to have exacerbated problems.
In other places, the report hints at clashes among the multiple police jurisdictions involved (the RCMP, which was in charge of Summit security and led the Integrated Security Unit, the Ontario Provincial Police, Peel Regional Police and 22 other police forces) or between commanders on the ground and at the Major Incident Command Centre.
It is the Toronto force, which had on the Saturday and Sunday more than 4,050 of its 5,740 officers working the G-20, which was left to carry the can — or as the report more delicately put it, “left to address some of the controversial issues … that were in fact the collective responsibility of a number of police agencies.”
But the single greatest challenge faced by the police, the review says, “was the virtually unprecedented situation of having to consider the physical safety of large numbers of non-POU officers who possessed neither the full range of less-lethal use of force options nor the specialized protective equipment required to safely challenge riotous demonstrators.”
As a result, over the three days, groups of vulnerable officers on bicycles and horses were regularly ordered out of various downtown areas when protesters were seen arming themselves with rocks and bricks or when hostile crowds were physically bearing down and threatening to overpower police.
Officers were at first under general instructions not to “engage” or confront the protesters or even direct the routes they took.
No fewer than eight times on the Friday and Saturday, the latter the day violence and vandalism reached a peak, officers made “assist police” calls on their radios, the traditional cry for help from a cop in serious trouble.
Another three times, they called for POU backup, one an “urgent” plea for help from officers who were surrounded.
Public order officers arrived to their embattled Queen Street West location within minutes, but it wasn’t for almost another hour that the trapped group was able to be safely extracted.
What is most alarming about the report is the kinetic, sometimes frantic, pace of events and the size and sophistication of non-peaceful protesters.
The G-20 weekend exactly a year ago was preceded by a week of well-organized demonstrations, most of them peaceful and focused on a wide range of issues.
What distinguished them from regular protests, however, was the protracted time frame involved (marches, rallies, prayer meetings, mass bike rides and the like spread over 10 successive days) and “the considerable degree of planning and co-ordination linking the many disparate events together.”
Organizers even had spotters, just as the police did, on a downtown rooftop, apparently directing crowd movements.
They arrived in the hundreds on buses, most from Montreal.
Some, dressed in the most benign costume imaginable — as clowns — “were observed dipping handkerchiefs and other items of clothing in vinegar,” a homemade antidote to tear gas.
Starting at 4.51 p.m. on that kickoff Friday and ending at 7.51 p.m. on the following Saturday, a total of six Toronto Police cars were burned — and by the final torching, Toronto firefighters were asking for a police escort before entering the area to put out the fire.
The earlier weekday events, the report says, acted “as a launching pad for the more militant protests of the G-20 weekend itself,” just as the smaller groups of violent protesters, the so-called Black Bloc, used the larger crowds as protective cover.
But the Black Bloc group, usually described as comprising just a tiny slice of the protesters, didn’t number merely in the dozens.
The review is replete with descriptions of significant-sized groups — “30 Black Bloc members” spotted “putting on masks and balaclavas” in the Allan Gardens Park downtown; “100 Black Bloc members at University and College Streets “donning masks”; “300 more congregated” just a long block away; “40-50 protesters who had covered their faces” behind a police line; “a large group of Black Bloc members…running eastbound on Queen St. W.”; “hundreds of members of the Black Bloc” at Old City Hall; “200 Black Bloc members…running northbound to Queen’s Park”.
Sometimes, these groups appeared simultaneously at different locations downtown and were clearly disparate packs; on other occasions, it appears that a large crowd of Black Bloc members simply split up and ran in different directions, melted into the much larger peaceful protest, and masked up again at another location.
Regardless, they were a force to be reckoned with, or as the report says, this after the worst of the looting and window-smashing was over but with thousands of people still in the streets, “police resources were spread out over multiple locations throughout the downtown core, making it difficult to assemble a sufficient number of officers to safely contain large and aggressive crowds.”
The Black Bloc members were not only shielded or able to take cover among the bigger groups, but also were occasionally more actively enabled by other protesters.
For example, the report notes that at 4.08 p.m. on Saturday, a violent group “an estimated 1,000-strong” was marching up Yonge Street from Dundas, “armed with sticks and hammers and breaking storefront windows.”
Add to all this were the non-G-20-related events police had to cover, among them a Toronto Jazz Festival concert, three World Cup soccer matches, a daily protest by the Falun Dafa at the Chinese consulate and at Queen’s Park, a Toronto hotel workers strike and rally and a large but peaceful Somali demonstration.
In ways large and small, the city was profoundly affected by the long, large protests spread out in the narrow core. At one point for instance, there were as many as 10,000 people at Queen’s Park and another group of 1,000 just down the street outside the U.S. consulate.
At various times over the weekend, protesters attacked the underground PATH walkway system, where management several times invoked a full or partial lockdown; threatened the repatriation ceremony for Sergeant James MacNeil directly behind police headquarters; blocked major intersections and tried to breach the infamous security fence and caused five dialysis patients scheduled for treatment at Toronto General Hospital to be turned away because the area was deemed unsafe.
Where host cities of previous G-20 Summits had two years to prepare, Toronto had just six months.
According to the report, a total of 1,118 people were arrested, 39 of whom reported being injured, 885 of whom were released from the special detention centre set up for the Summit in the city’s east end.
That facility was often overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of prisoners, the report says, and some faced 36-hour waits before being seen by a Justice of the Peace.
Ninety-seven police officers were also injured.
The report makes 10 recommendations, several dealing with better training for public order management.
“There were times when crowd dynamics, coupled with the scope and scale of the mass disorder, overwhelmed police capacity,” the review concludes, particularly in preventing and responding to Black-Bloc tactics.
The force should develop procedures to better identify and extract such individuals from bigger crowds to avoid the infamous spectre that unfolded at the G-20, when “persons not directly involved in such activities were, at times, nonetheless subjected to those techniques.… It is clear that current tactics and processes cannot be executed without considerable time, resources and unwanted impact on affected individuals.”
As Chief Blair says in his preamble, police have to get better at the fine balance of facilitating very large protests and arresting those who choose violence, because there will be more such events.
Postmedia News
cblatchford@postmedia.com
No comments:
Post a Comment