What's got into them?

The police, like all groups visible to the public, wish to be careful about managing their public image and countering those who would smear it. But when they deploy themselves in force in doing so, they have abused the institution of the police.

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

It's difficult to appreciate that legitimate, widespread fear of police is possible in a country like Canada. Numerous allegations float through local media and in our courts about excessive use of force by police. Some end in charges and more than a few lately end in convictions for police brutality. But the allegations are never connected up to form a whole picture. Instead, they remain anecdotal, unattached to each other, and outside any recognized pattern. New charges, therefore, each on their own, remain less credible than they otherwise might deserve to be.

When charges of police brutality are made, they are invariably leveled by someone appearing to be outside our mainstream ideas of how best to dress, clean oneself, and talk. When a judge in full robe and regalia declares that Vancouver peace officers used excessive force and are guilty of brutality in taking petty street corner drug dealers to Stanley Park and subjecting them to beatings, the citizens and their newspapers take solemn note and hope justice is served in finding appropriately stiff penalties for the offenders.

But when kids in dusty black rags shout the very same thing about the very same corp of officers, as two dozen did Sunday June 6 in Grandview Park, there is a noticeable skepticism among the witnessing citizenry. They look too different to believe.

It's easier to condemn police brutality in Iran or China, and even to purchase tickets to swank Art Gallery fund raising dinners in sympathy. From this distance, the victims there don't look any different from all the other people around them. It's not inconvenient to believe their stories.

Look closer, though, and it's always the case that victims of systemic police brutality the world over have been singled out by police because they challenge excessive deployment of police authority, both moral and legal. There is never a reason to suppose that one's own place is any different from all others.

The pattern is utterly repetitious. When victims of excessive use of police authority show up in a protest, there is, like there was at Tiananmen Square 15 years ago, a vast overabundance of authority deployed to intimidate or crush that challenge.

When police deploy en masse to squelch condemnations of individual police, it isn't anymore just an abuse of power by an individual officer that is at issue. The whole idea of a democratic, civilian-controlled police force is threatened when a deployment of overwhelming force is called out by the chief.

When protests erupt against, say, the government's policies on gay rights, a few police are deployed to ensure peace and order-and reasonably so. When a protest comes up against the police themselves, there is no inherent reason why a similar number of police can't be deployed to ensure peace and order are maintained. Police should be blind to the statements made in protests, and aware only of what public safety hazards are presented by them. Anything beyond the minimum deployment necessary, and we have to ask: are the powers of the police force itself being abused to intimidate and put down dissent aimed at police specifically?

If there is not only abuse by individual police of their powers, but also an institutionalized abuse of the powers of the police force itself by its chiefs, then there is good grounds for a broadly probing inquiry.

The 20 or so kids who marched up Commercial Drive June 6 and gathered in Grandview Park to shuffle about and yell a few condemnations about Vancouver police had organized themselves only that morning, and were not a formalized group. They had been prompted to march by the arrest and alleged rough treatment meted out to one of their friends earlier in the day. They had one sign reading "No authority but yourself," a fairly benign message not dissimilar to what is repeated in the many nearby yoga studios. They had no leaflets to hand out, no professional publicists to work the crowd, no petitions to sign, no plan, and not even any appointed spokesperson to talk to me when I approached them sitting in the park.

The point of their exercise was to draw public attention in the only way available to them to their individual allegations of police brutality-allegations we know cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Who knows about these allegations? There have been recent cases before the courts, some ending in dismissal of charges, others ending in convictions against the police. We don't know what these latest ones are all about.

But we can be certain about the police reaction to this innocuous and small protest, because that was played out in full view before several witnesses. The 20 protestors were followed, surrounded, and watched from near and far by no fewer than 24 police officers, plus a number of undercover officers, not all of whom were noticed and counted. Police videotaped the marchers, raced around the park in their cars, motorcycles, wagons, and bicycles. Senior gray-haired supervisors showed up in person to look on.

I tried to ask some of the many officers what alerted them about this group to react with such an overwhelming presence, but was told "That is an ignorant question, sir! You try to go in there and arrest one of them, and tell me what you get!"

I asked another how many of them had been deployed, but was rebuffed with the comment, "You have proven yourself unable to conduct an intelligent conversation, go away."

While the police exhibited a great nervousness about what appeared to be a few shabbily dressed kids making vague assertions, the kids were amazingly at ease, at one point getting up to dance and sing. I asked them if they were nervous about the heavy police presence. They immediately answered that they were, but added that they were accustomed to it, and their fear, though high, was not unlike any other day for them.

I left before anything happened, but it sure felt like something might. I wasn't a member of their protest, but I felt threatened by the police presence. The air felt electric with the vibes between the police and the group of kids, and it felt like something could explode.

Gone was the sense of the police being the calm interveners in civilian disputes that they were ever meant to be. They had been pegged by this group as interested parties in a serious dispute, and their massive deployment to the park, their attitude toward questions, and their encirclement of, and glaring at, the members of the protest left little doubt that they were indeed party to the dispute, and were interested in affecting its outcome in the ways available to them.

I know nothing about individual allegations of police brutality. But I witnessed a definite case of institutional police abuse of authority when I watched the excessive deployment of police power to Grandview Park to coral a few harmless rag-tag kids. I don't expect a swish awareness-raising dinner attended by the concerned matrons of Point Gray. Nor, have I heard it said, did the matrons of the west side of Santiago care too much about Pinochet's disappeared, or the cream of Beijing, the students of Tiananmen .

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