As we all know by now, Quebec police officers disguised themselves as protestors to infiltrate the demonstrations against the August 2007 Security and Prosperity Partnership meeting at Montebello. A videotape taken at the event clearly shows one of the agent provocateurs holding a rock, refusing to heed the protestors telling him to drop it, and finally pushing through the police line to be handcuffed and led away. The police say that he was given the rock by a protestor, and that he had no intention of throwing it or otherwise behaving in such a way as to discredit the demonstrators.

Stockwell Day, our esteemed Minister of Public Safety, didn’t need to examine the evidence before siding with the police. On August 24 he said, “The thing that was interesting in this particular incident, three people in question were spotted by protesters because they were not engaging in violence . . . They were being encouraged to throw rocks and they were not throwing rocks, it was the protesters who were throwing the rocks. That's the irony of this.”

I’m more skeptical than Mr Day. The officer in question held onto the rock even when protestors asked him to relinquish it, he then dramatically forced his way into the police, and for days thereafter the Quebec police denied that he was one of their own. Given this behavior, I’m inclined to believe Dave Coles, the president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union. Coles was at the protest and said, "I would testify in a court of law that these guys were lying. They were pushing me around. They had rocks . . . . They were trying to incite violence. They were trying to get others to throw rocks at the store." Is this so hard to believe? Police forces have done this sort of thing for ages. During the Vietnam War, for instance, police officers and FBI agents infiltrated the American anti-war movement. According to Noam Chomsky, these spies stood out because they tended to advocate the most violent forms of anti-war resistance. The infiltrators knew that violence helped sway public opinion against the movement, and so they did everything in their power to encourage it.

Even a cursory review of the historical record reveals that the abuse of police power is fairly common in Canada. To take the most notorious example, during the FLQ crisis in the 1970s, the RCMP monitored election candidates, stole a Parti Quebecois membership list, opened mail without authorization, engaged in 400 break-ins, electronically spied on at least one Member of Parliament, and even burned down a barn in Quebec.

Sometimes these abuses have lethal consequences, especially when the police are dealing with Natives. In May 2007 Justice Sidney Linden ruled that the Ontario Provincial Police, along with the Federal and Provincial governments of the time, were responsible for the events leading to the police slaying of an unarmed protestor named Dudley George at the Ipperwash protest in 1995. In 1990, Saskatoon police officers abandoned a 17-year-old Native youth named Neil Stonechild in a field on the outskirts of the city in freezing temperatures. Stonechild wasn’t the only victim of this practice: two Saskatoon officers were sentenced to eight months in jail for doing the same thing to an Aboriginal man named Darrell Night in February 2000. Night and other Natives have survived this ordeal; Stonechild wasn’t so lucky.

Closer to home, in 2002 the Pivot Legal Society released a report titled To Serve And Protect: A Report on Policing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The Society collected fifty affidavits documenting a range of police misconduct, including “Beatings, torture, unlawful detention, illegal strip searches, illegal entry into homes, abusive language and unlawful confinement.” The RCMP investigated the report’s allegations in 2003, but 54% of the Vancouver officers accused in the report and 69% of the officers named as witnesses failed to co-operate with the complaint process. In the end, the RCMP found that nine of the cases were substantiated. In response to the RCMP’s findings, and in a blatant refusal to be held accountable for their actions, the VPD held a secret, internal investigation, at the end of which Police Chief Jamie Graham stated that none of the cases were substantiated.

In line with the Pivot Legal Society’s findings, one of the world’s foremost human rights organizations, Human Rights Watch, released a report on May 7 2003 entitled Abusing the User: Police Misconduct, Harm Reduction, and HIV/AIDS in Vancouver. According to the report’s press release, “Human Rights Watch documented cases of police officers beating and otherwise mistreating drug users in custody, conducting public strip searches, and using petty allegations such as jaywalking to justify stop and searches. The report also documents a significant reduction in the use of needle exchange programs and other life-saving services related to fear of police abuse and harassment among drug users.”

These abuses can’t be explained away simply as the misbehaviour of a few bad cops. They point to something deeper, to systemic issues involving both the culture and the social function of policing. Police forces arose everywhere as enforcers of the social order. In hierarchically stratified societies this role requires police to reinforce the hierarchy, to serve the interests of the powerful while suppressing the dissent of the powerless. This suppression occurs both through direct attacks on political dissent like the attacks that occurred at Montebello and Ipperwash, and through the kind of psychologically debilitating terror tactics inflicted on socially marginalized populations in Saskatoon and the Downtown Eastside.

Police forces protect hierarchies in capitalist, communist, and fascist regimes. One of the primary aims of democracy movements in any of these settings is to challenge this hierarchy-preserving function by forcing the police to submit to mechanisms for public accountability. Both the police and the elites they serve do everything they can to eliminate these restraints. This basic conflict between the police and democracy is obscured by hierarchy-maintaining propaganda like police dramas. This propaganda mythologizes the police by giving them starring roles in the metaphysical war between the forces of order and chaos, of life and death. We’re all frightened of chaos and death, and so in order to preserve our sanity we cling to symbols of order and life. By turning the police into one of these symbols, the propaganda creates an enormous psychological barrier that prevents us from seeing the police for what they are. The realization that police forces are necessarily opposed to democracy carries with it the psychological threat of a mythological reversal. Not only does this realization rob us of one of our symbols of life, it can also burden us with a new and powerful symbol of death. There is little that can make a person feel as vulnerable as the fear of a hostile and unaccountable police force.

I’ve never been abused by the police and I’m not a member of the groups the police normally target for harassment, but I have some small understanding of what this vulnerability feels like. A few years ago I attended a public forum on police abuses in Vancouver. Halfway through the forum a burly middle-aged man entered the meeting hall and stood by the doorway watching us. The forum’s participants were drawn largely from the lower classes, and their fear of this man was palpable. I shared that fear, discovering for the first time the power of the mythological reversal. I wondered: if this man was a police officer, and if he was marking us for later harassment, how could I possibly protect myself? The police bureaucracy protects its officers, lawyers are expensive, and our courts hardly guarantee justice for complainants in matters such as these. I understood, in a way I hadn’t before, the existential terrors of social marginalization.

Those of us who aren’t elites don’t want to be afraid of the police, and so we often ignore evidence that the most important interests they serve are not our own. This soothes our nerves while aggravating our peril. In the end, it’s the democracy that keeps us safe, not the police. It’s through democracy that we ensure that our interests are met, that we obtain the services we need to make us healthy, happy, and strong both as individuals and communities. When police undermine democratic processes, as they clearly did at Montebello, they gravely threaten our safety and, for the sake of our own self-preservation, they need to be reined in.