G20 Toronto Protests

Okay, so this is pretty old news, considering the G20 summit happened, well, *looks at watch* oh, a week and a half ago, but I thought I’d talk about it anyway since I was too glued to the TV during the ordeal that I wasn’t even thinking about blogging about it.

G20 By jen takes pictures on Flickr © All Rights Reserved

An insane amount of security measures were taken to protect all the world leaders that were in Toronto for the summit, including thousands upon thousands of police officers and gigantic fences meant to protect the area surrounding the summit. Despite the mobs of police, a disgusting amount of vandalism took place, among the peaceful protesters.

Clearly, a small group of anarchists took the weekend as an excuse to cause trouble, which overshadowed any sort of peaceful & potentially productive protesting that could have taken place.

While the vandalism and violence that took place is absolutely disgusting and disgraceful, in my opinion, there was a lot of disgusting behaviour by the police, who had trapped crowds of violent protesters, peaceful protesters, viewers, photographers, media and unwitting passers-by.

My opinion is that many of those who were in these crowds were not attempting to cause violence or harm to anyone, but were merely pissed off that the police were given special authority during the G20 weekend, which effectively took away rights and freedoms of innocent civilians. Burning police cars to the ground and smashing the windows of storefronts is not an effective way of making one’s point about this issue, but I can understand where many of these people were coming from. The police were basically given the power to harass and interrogate anybody who was in particular areas at particular times. There was even an incident in which an officer told a young man that he was no longer in Canada.

Overall, I think everybody was drunk with power and a lot of unnecessary shit went down. Both sides went too far, and both sides over-reacted.

disproportionate force. By ronnie.yip on Flickr © All Rights Reserved.

Can’t we all just come to an agreement?