What Really Happened at the Montréal May Day Protest?
From Peaceful Protest to Police Brutality
The police line as they are about to charge
Peaceful beginnings
Onward and Upward
The first sign of trouble
Heading down the financial district
The Charge! (it's blurry because we all had to run)
this "march" replaced the one they dispersed
protecting the bank
arresting protesters
throwing protester face-down on the ground
Girl taken away on stretcher
The remains of the day
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The story, as they tell is, goes like this: it started peacefully just after 5 p.m. (this part is true!), and then it "was declared illegal by police at two minutes after 6 p.m. following violent clashes." A police spokesperson (who apparently is the only person the media chose to interview for their article) said that, "injuries to a citizen, police officers and vandalism on cars and property were the reasons for declaring the march illegal." The article then blamed "black-clad youth [who] were seen hurling rocks at store windows," after which the police began to launch flash grenades, and the riot police moved in after 6 p.m. "using batons to disperse the crowd." At 7:10 p.m., "a full hour after declaring the demonstration illegal, police announced that anyone who refused to leave would be arrested."
The CBC went with the headline, "More than 100 arrests in Montreal May Day riot." CTV reported that of the 100+ arrests that took place, "75 were for unlawful assembly, while the remaining 34 were for criminal acts."
So, arrested for "unlawful assembly": what does that mean? It means that when the police unilaterally declare a protest to be "illegal," everyone who is there is "unlawfully assembling," and thus, mass and indiscriminate arrests can be made. In Part 1, Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it is stated that "[e]veryone has the following fundamental freedoms": conscience, religion, thought, belief, expression, media, communication, association, and "freedom of peaceful assembly."
Having been at the protest from its beginning, I can say that it was a peaceful march. While there were individual acts of vandalism (the worst I saw was drawing on a bank's window with a black marker), if police action were to be taken, it should be to arrest the specific vandal. Instead, they implemented collective punishment for exercising our "fundamental freedoms."
read full article here What Really Happened at the Montréal May Day Protest? | The Media Co-op
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