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Finally: G20 charges coming against Toronto police commanders
May 17, 2012 - 4:29pm
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But don't get your hopes up very high, as the worst thing that could happen to them is they could lose their jobs.
G20 charges coming against Toronto police commandershttp://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2012/05/17/g20-police-charge...
A handful of senior Toronto police commanders are expected to be charged in coming weeks for a variety of misconduct offences over their leadership at the G20 summit in June 2010, CBC News has learned.
The charges are in addition to 28 frontline officers slated to have disciplinary hearings for a range of misconduct offences, including unlawful arrests and use of excessive or unnecessary force against prisoners.
The details of charges come on the heels of a report released yesterday by Ontario's top civilian complaints watchdog Gerry McNeilly, head of the Office of the Independent Police Review Director.
He concluded in a "systemic review" of the G20 in Toronto that police leaders were poorly prepared and launched a crackdown that led to illegal mass arrests, arbitrary searches and unlawful detentions of more than 1,000 largely peaceful protesters and bystanders.
"Mr. McNeilly is recommending charges to be laid against about a half dozen senior officers," confirmed Toronto Police Services board chair Alok Mukherjee in an interview with CBC News on Thursday.
Mukherjee said those who face misconduct hearings include "people who were in decision-making roles … that go pretty high in the organization. He has identified some people who are at very senior ranks."
Toronto’s police union this week was in an Ontario court attempting to have all G20 disciplinary charges against officers thrown out due to lengthy delays.
But a panel of Ontario Divisional Court judges ruled against the union, clearing the way for disciplinary hearings to proceed in the coming months against 28 officers that could result in exonerations or punishments ranging from docking of officers' pay to outright dismissal.
http://www.thestar.com/news/torontog20summit/article/1179573--dimanno-th...
Blame is not a concept that appears overtly in the OIPRD report released Wednesday, the most comprehensive post-mortem of sorry events thus far amassed — and it’s taken them nearly two years to produce it. But blame, whether director Gerry McNeilly uses the word or not, drips from the findings.
Blair is to blame.
Warr is to blame.
Fenton is to blame.
The federal government is to blame for giving law enforcement authorities only four months to prepare for the G20 Summit smack in the middle of downtown Toronto.
Senior incident commanders who lost control of the situation — couldn’t even find their own busloads of front-line public order officers on occasion (at least one of whom, corralled to Toronto from an outside police department, had to pick up a rudimentary city map from a subway box to orient himself because none was supplied) — and then overreacted in the mad scramble to assert control, are to blame.
The Black Bloc is to blame, don’t forget them.
But anarchists, by definition, don’t follow the rules. And police commanders disregarded their own clearly codified regulations on containment of unruly crowds: Arrest everybody and let God sort it out later. Dispersal orders couldn’t be heard. Exit routes weren’t provided. Elite command became increasingly dysfunctional and arbitrary, with those at the top seized by a worry-about-the-legality-later mentality, simultaneously removing the decision-making capacity of commanders on the ground.
It was a perfect storm for disaster.
Long-established law pertaining to arbitrary searches was tossed out the window, even Blair misinformed about the proper application of a resurrected World War II era codicil that, in practice, led cops to believe they could stop and search people throughout the downtown core and not just in the immediate vicinity of the perimeter fence around the Metro Convention Centre, where the summit leaders were palavering.
“Following orders’’ became the one-law-fits-all mantra, with police directed to stop anyone with a backpack or wearing a disguise — though, for weeks leading up to the summit, protest participants had been urged to protect themselves against tear gas by wearing masks, swimming goggles or bandanas soaked in vinegar. Yet, as the report notes, police had unilaterally invoked a new description of “suspicious individuals’’ to conduct arbitrary searches, oblivious to any of the “reasonable grounds’’ usually required.
Police weren’t dealing with a spontaneous riot situation by the Saturday evening or the Sunday afternoon — they were creating it, with gunpoint rousting of sleeping occupants inside the Graduate Students’ Union building at the University of Toronto, hauling off peaceful protesters by the hundreds, and ignoring all the well-established Charter rights that cover peaceful assembly.
Although it’s not in the report, McNeilly confirmed that of the 356 G20 complaints his office investigated, 107 were substantiated. Ninety-six of those were deemed serious enough to warrant a police hearing. The disposition of those cases is utterly unknown. The Toronto Police Services Board won’t tell us.
At the bottom end of the G20 shambles, two officers have been charged with assault. Where is the accountability at the top?
http://www.thestar.com/news/torontog20summit/article/1179440--walkom-wha...
More than 100 police officers face disciplinary charges for G20 actionshttp://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/more-than-100-polic...
G20 policing report an arresting document
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1180026--hume-g20-policing-report-an...
At last the whistle's been blown on the G20 carnival of police excess
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/tabatha-southey/at-last-the...
Why won’t Chief Bill Blair say sorry for police actions during G20?
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1181139--dimanno-why-won-t-chief-bil...
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