Police State

..to read this i had to get a free 30-day digital subscription. there is much important info in this piece. i only post a small portion as it is lengthy.   

Enforcing injustice, keeping the colonial peace

One of Canadiana’s most recognizable images is that of the Mountie: sitting tall on horseback in a bold red coat, high leather boots and pristine beige Stetson, a long-revered symbol of Canadian tolerance, civility and peacekeeping.

The history of Canada’s policing, however, has not been as civil as the imagery would suggest.

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The histories of Canada’s policing have often been written by the victor, says University of Winnipeg instructor Fadi Ennab.

Studying parliamentary archives in Ottawa, Ennab, whose graduate research centred on the history of Canada’s policing, found the official records of Canadian policing were "not necessarily overtly violent."

"That’s why some historians have argued that the Canadian frontier is quite peaceful, but the absence of those physical encounters doesn’t mean that it was a peaceful arrangement," says Ennab.

When confronted with conversations about discriminatory policing, Canada is quick to distinguish itself from the violence seen in the United States, where police are responsible for civilian deaths on a near-daily basis. Protests have reached a peak in recent months, as names like Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, and George Floyd have become ubiquitous — providing rallying cry after rallying cry against a culture of violent policing.

Like police across the United States, however, Canada’s national and municipal police agencies were originally designed to aid in the settlement of Indigenous land and make room for white settlers to accrue wealth — often at the expense of marginalized people.

The commonly understood history of Canada’s frontier, Ennab says, presents "the myth of the police officer" as a peaceful, law-keeping force.

"Sometimes they didn’t necessarily use overt physical violence, but they’ve had other ways of controlling movements," he adds.

It is these histories at the foundation of the mistrustful and often tumultuous relationships between police and marginalized communities today. It is these histories that ignite the cries for abolition, defunding and other dismantling of police forces across Canada and the United States.

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A pattern quickly emerged: when the government needed to secure land, build railways or quell the voices of Indigenous people asserting their treaty rights, the Mounties would arrive. Tactics of intimidation, harassment and cultural erosion became commonplace as the government expanded its lands and forced Indigenous peoples onto smaller and smaller reserves.

"The government knew exactly what they were trying to do and were determined to do the usual divide-and-rule thing," says Brownlie.

"The police were used to forcibly drive people out of those areas, to deny them the reserves that they had asked for, to which they had a right under the treaties."

Mounties threatened to cut Indigenous women’s hair, pointed cannons at communities, disrupted cultural ceremonies, killed off bison supplies and controlled access to food and land as they cleared the way for settlers.

Physical violence wasn’t necessary, Ennab says, when NWMP could use tactics such as starvation, ration systems and denial of cultural ceremonies to gain control.

"You don’t always have to draw blood to be bloody."

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As the NWMP and RCMP rose as a force to silence Canada’s Indigenous peoples, Canada’s Black population, too, faced over-policing and surveillance.

"The first criminalization of Black people in public space was this assumption that any Black person moving through public space could be what was called a ‘runaway slave,’ a ‘fugitive slave,’" says Robyn Maynard, activist, scholar and author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.

"This is something that was considered criminal by police and also by broader white society that led to highly public notices describing Black people who were considered criminal for the crime of having stolen themselves."

Canada, long viewed as the gate of freedom for Black people freeing themselves from enslavement in the United States, has its own storied history of slavery.

Enslavement was legal and common throughout Eastern Canada in the 17th century, Maynard explains, and only became less than legal with Britain’s abolition of slavery across all its colonies in 1834.

..final post from the above piece

PART III: Reimagining policing

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Calls for defunding and abolition of police have been accompanied, in recent months, by more moderate calls for reformation — small, structural and policy changes such as officer-worn body cameras and independent investigation units that could punish "bad apples" in the system and create more accountability for officers.

Ennab, who has also provided anti-racist cultural competency training to police and other organizations, doesn’t believe systemic racism can be trained out of the institutions.

"Until the institutions are changed we’re going to continue to see racialized lives missing and murdered, and it’s more than just training or converting few bad apples," he says.

"That’s where we need to go back to the history, look at the dispossession and talk about the history openly, not with myths, to be able to listen to Indigenous communities when they’re mourning, instead of stigmatizing them."

Shenher agrees, noting that the existing structures for accountability haven’t worked for many years, and independent police investigators units, such as Manitoba’s Independent Investigation Unit or Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, are often staffed by former officers still entrenched in old policing mindsets.

Those calling for defunding and abolition have maintained that the structures of policing are not broken, but instead are working exactly as historically intended, and that in order to achieve justice the systems of public safety need a fundamental restructuring.

"Moving into the kind of safety that Black people would need, that Indigenous people would need actually relies on us to think about public safety differently," Maynard says. "Without police."

How absolutely disgusting to read some of those comments. It doesn't surprise me.

Even more understanding and open-hearted people I encounter on a regular basis have so many misconceptions about Indigenous people. They include: all people on reserve live rent free, all Indigenous people live tax free, all Indigenous people get free post-secondary schooling.

Unless there is a commitment to change the culture and calibre of policing, I firmly side with the defund police movement.

..they above is an essential listen in understanding what defunding means. i will post the recorded version rather than try and interpret what is being said.

..my personal understanding..the short version..is defunding = abolition. defunding = taking on capitalism.

SCHOLAR STRIKE CANADA

Scholars across Canadian universities are outraged at the relentless anti-Black police killings of Black people in the U.S. and in Canada. As athletes have done, so, too, must academics.   We will be joining thousands of academics in higher education in a labour action known as Scholar Strike to protest anti-Black, racist and colonial police brutality in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere. Scholar Strike for Black Lives in Canada will take place on Sept 9th & 10th, 2020.  For these two days, we will pause our teaching and all administrative duties.  We will use this time to organize public digital teach-ins on police brutality and violence in our communities from both historical and contemporary perspectives.

We recognize the precarious labour status of many of our colleagues in academia, and we invite university workers to participate in this labour action as much as you are able to engage.  Some will not be able to participate fully, but there are many ways to engage with this protest, from amplifying the message on social media to using the digital public teach-ins during class time.

In the midst of the current pandemic we have seen and read of police shootings, maimings and murders in the U.S.:  Jacob Blake, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade.  In Canada, D’Andre Campbell, Rodney Levi, Ejaz Choudry, Chantel Moore and the lack of transparency and police accountability in the death of Regis Korchinski Paquet.

Scholar Strike originated in the U.S from a tweet by Dr. Anthea Butler who, inspired by the striking WNBA and NBA players, put out a call for a similar labour action from academics.   The Canadian action is aligned with the one in the U.S., in its call for racial justice, an end to anti-Black police violence and it adds a specific focus on anti-Indigenous, colonial violence.  

Scholar Strike is a labour action/teach-in/social justice advocacy happening on September 9-10, 2020. September 9 & 10 were chosen as the dates of the Scholar Strike in Canada because, for many of us, the academic year begins on these dates. These days were also chosen because of their proximity to Labour Day.....

Abolitionism against pandemic policing in the Philippines

The COVID-19 pandemic has truly brought out the worst in the Philippine government. Instead of treating the pandemic as a public health crisis, the state is treating it as a security issue and has responded by deploying its extremely violent security apparatus.

Demands for mass testing remain unfulfilled, while more and more police and soldiers flood the streets, arresting thousands of people and subjecting them to arbitrary punishments. The police killed several people, including an unarmed veteran suffering from PTSD, an unidentified man at a checkpoint and even four soldiers. Did these people need to die in order to stem the tide of the pandemic? Did the incarceration of thousands of people make our communities more resilient to disease? No, it did not. COVID-19 testing kits remain scarce, yet bullets are in full supply.

And how effective is it to treat the pandemic as a security, rather than a public health issue? The quarantine in the Philippines is the longest and harshest in Asia, yet the Philippine government has categorically failed to contain the pandemic; the country currently counts over 226,000 infections with nearly 4,000 deaths and no sign of the curve being flattened.

The Philippine government refuses to implement mass testing and competent contact tracing, two policies that have proven to be effective in other countries. Instead, the government prioritized increasing policing powers, surveillance and warrantless arrests with an “anti-terror” law that critics quickly labeled the “Terror Law.” The militarized nature of the quarantine in the Philippines is already a martial law in fact, which has only been further entrenched with the passing of the Terror Law.

Against the state treating the pandemic as a security issue, the popular demands thunder:

Ayuda, hindi bala! — Aid, not bullets!

Tulong, hindi kulong — Help, not incarceration!

Medikal solusyon, hindi militar! — Medical solutions, not military intervention!

It is in response to the militarization and securitization of the quarantine that the demands for abolishing the police and prisons are being voiced. Now, more than ever, we need medical solutions rather than more militarized police violence and incarceration....

"Ottawa police officer Const. Nemin Mesic threatened to kill his former tenant, sell the man's child to pay his rent and 'spill blood.' As a result Mesic will be demoted from a first-class constable to a second-class constable for a period of 12 months."

https://twitter.com/davidpugliese/status/1303478586418933760

Defund now.

John Clarke

Rather predictably, we are seeing a great number of articles on how to change the nature of the police by adjusting the ways in which they are trained. What is lost in these liberal solutions is that the fundamental issue is the function police carry out and not how they are taught their trade. Let's try and make that proposition concrete with some examples. In each case consider how much difference it is going to make if the police have taken sensitivity training and studied social work textbooks.

1. The agent of a rich speculator, who has bought up a home and left it empty, discovers that a couple of homeless people have taken shelter from the winter weather in it. He calls the police to enforce the law.

2. A family has had it's income slashed by the pandemic lockdown and they are behind in their rent. The landlord gets an eviction order and those enforcing it call for police backup to enforce the law.

3. A group of low wage precarious workers have gone on strike against their abusive employer who has hired scabs to break their effort to obtain a decent contract. The workers try to stop the employer from getting away with this and the police are called to enforce the law.

4. A police station sits in a poor and racialized neighbourhood that is in the process of being gentrified. The upscale homeowners and business interests have the ear of the politicians and media and are demanding their quality of life and property values be enhanced by cracking down on the poor residents and reducing their visibility. The police are called upon to deal with 'unlawful' and 'anti-social' behaviour.

5. A worker is robbed by her boss who refuses to pay her for several weeks of work. She walks into a police station and asks them to enforce the law but wage theft is not a criminal matter and the new social justice lens of the differently trained cop at the front desk is worthless.

The police are shaped by their function of enforcing class based exploitation and a legal framework that is designed to further this. They must be abolished and the system they serve and protect must be overthrown.

Continue to Say Her Name: Breonna Taylor’s Family Wants Cops Arrested After Historic $12M Settlement

The city of Louisville, Kentucky, will pay a historic $12 million settlement to the family of Breonna Taylor, more than six months after police shot and killed the 26-year-old Black emergency room technician in her own apartment and Taylor became a household name as part of the nationwide uprising in defense of Black lives. It is one of the largest payouts ever for a police killing of a Black person in the U.S. The city will also institute major reforms to the police department responsible for Taylor’s death. Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer announced the settlement at a press conference, where he was joined by members of Taylor’s family. We air excerpts from the remarkable press conference....

Who didn't see this coming?

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A community group in Winnipeg is calling on school divisions to remove police officers from public schools in the city. 

Police-Free Schools, which says it's made up of a dozen community members, students, parents, educators and teachers, recently launched a campaign calling on people to submit their stories and experiences with police officers in schools, known as school resource officers (SROs). 

"We believe that police in schools are actively criminalizing marginalized students and are part of the school to prison pipeline that grows the carceral system," said one of the organizers, Cam Scott. 

The group believes that having police officers in schools escalates incidents into the criminal justice system that would otherwise be classified as youthful misbehaviour.

Edmonton police showcase new armoured vehicle and mobile action centre

Aside from high-tech drones, night-vision goggles and specially designed weapons, Edmonton’s newest armoured rescue vehicle — also called ARV2 — was on full display Wednesday.

The Edmonton Police Service currently has two armoured vehicles in operation: the ballistic armoured tactical transport vehicle and the grizzly armoured personal carrier.

Sgt. Rick Abbott said the grizzly will eventually be decommissioned after the new ARV2 is road ready.

“The safety that this vehicle will bring over its lifetime, for the cost of it — I don’t want to say it’s cheap but it certainly brings a lot of value to the citizens of Edmonton over that time — we can’t put a price on life,” Abbott said.

EPS was criticized last month for not publicly disclosing the purchase of the ARV2 and its roughly $500,000 price tag. This time, EPS has put it all on display, including its new mobile action centre, which acts as a mobile police station and was purchased for roughly $370,000.

With regards to these big-ticket purchases, Supt. Dean Hilton said this was EPS working within its current operating budget.

“The reality is we’ve bought armoured vehicles before in the same fashion, and we would hope that the public would support us in the fact that these specific types of equipment will help us maintain the safety of our citizens,” Hilton said.

epaulo13 wrote:

..from an email

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I’d like to personally thank you for attending Policing Black and Indigenous Communities in Canada: A Digital Teach-In on September 2, 2020! We hold so much gratitude and respect, as I’m sure you do too, for Dr. Pam Palmater, El Jones, Reakash Walters, Meenakshi Mannoe, and BCCLA’s Latoya Farrell for sharing their time and knowledge on how to transform and abolish the systemic harms of policing. If you want to watch the teach-in again, or share it with your friends and family, you can find it here.

Here in BC, we’re gearing up in our fight against the policing practice of street checks. Ending police street checks is only one of the many actions needed to end the foundational injustices of policing and all state violence, but it is necessary one.

Today, the Vancouver Police Board is meeting to discuss the call to end this racist and illegal practice. The Union of BC Indian Chiefs, Black Lives Matter - Vancouver, Hogan’s Alley Society, WISH Drop-In Centre Society, and the BCCLA will be presenting as a delegation at the meeting to drive home that the Board must immediately ban police street checks in Vancouver.

We need your help to pressure the Vancouver Police Board and the Province of BC to take immediate action to end street checks. Our petition calling for an end to street checks has over 8,200 signatories. Having 10,000 people backing us would show that public opinion is clear – street checks must go!

We’re only 1,800 signatures away. Will you join us by adding your name?

Street checks are racist, specifically anti-Indigenous and anti-Black, harmful for low-income people, and fundamentally illegal. There is no law that authorizes street checks for any police force in BC. You can read more on the illegality of street checks in our latest FAQ here.

Let’s be clear: street checks are a form of arbitrary detention.

We’ve been told that street checks are voluntary. But because of the power imbalance between police and the public, for many – especially Black, Indigenous, and homeless people – this interaction is far from voluntary. In fact, the Supreme Court of Canada found in one case that when people were street checked, they were under arbitrary psychological detention.

The civilian Vancouver Police Board has the power to immediately ban street checks in the city and end this practice once and for all.

Thank you for being part of the fight.

In solidarity,

Harsha Walia
Executive Director

The only valid and legal reason an officer should stop anyone on the street is if the officer has good reason to suspect that this person is a threat to public safety or is aware of one. Why are they randomly stopping people on the street? If crime is that pressing an issue, I would think that they had better and more important things to do.

..assholes.

Vancouver Police Board Pushes Review of Street Checks to Next Year

Vancouver’s police board has punted a decision on whether to review the practice of street checks down the road, irking advocates who say the checks are illegal and discriminatory.

“In our delegation speech, we talked about no more reviews, no more delays, no more engaging conversation about this discriminatory and illegal practice,” said Latoya Farrell, a lawyer with the BC Civil Liberties Association. “No more reviews and statistics will justify this illegal practice.”

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That data spurred the BC Civil Liberties Association and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs to launch a formal complaint against the Vancouver Police Department and the B.C. government put in place new policing standards stating that street checks must be a “voluntary interaction.”

..the city of vancouver has no control over the police board, the province does. the board also rejected the city's proposal for a financial cut..even though it was modest. 

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In July, Vancouver's city council voted unanimously to end street checks. But the police board has voted to delay a review of the controversial practice to next year.

..also

Harsha Walia

Why did @kennedystewart recuse himself from Vancouver Police Board mtg? He sits on Board precisely coz he is Mayor & earlier Council motion is consistent, not conflict, with his role on Board. So much for earlier promise about using his "power & privilege." WEAK

BC Civil Liberties Association

BCCLA's Staff Counsel, Latoya Farrell, appearing on behalf of the delegation @UBCIC / @bccla / @hogans_alley / @BLM_Van / @WISHvancouver

 "Street checks are fundamentally illegal. There is no applicable statute or regulation authorizing street checks for any police force in BC."

..also from farrell

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Latoya Farrell: "According to the Supreme Court of Canada, a reasonable person belonging to a racialized group would perceive a street check as coercive. This is particularly true given the current climate of heightened awareness of systemic racism in policing."

Federal Agents Tapped Cellphones of Portland Protesters

The Nation magazine is reporting federal officials with the Justice Department and Homeland Security have intercepted the phone communications of protesters in Portland. The Nation reports the surveillance involved cellphone cloning, where the government steals a phone’s unique identifiers and copies them to another device in order to intercept the communications received by the original device. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley has called for a full investigation. He wrote on Twitter, “The Trump admin has treated the people of Portland like enemy combatants. These tactics—like cell phone cloning to spy on protestors—are unacceptable in America.”

...

For-Profit ICE Jail Will No Longer Send Women to Doctor Accused of Forced Sterilizations

In immigration news, women imprisoned at Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia are no longer being sent to the physician accused of administering hysterectomies and other gynecological procedures without consent. An attorney working on the investigation said Tuesday Dr. Mahendra Amin saw at least 60 women imprisoned at Irwin, which is privately run. Whistleblower Dawn Wooten, a former nurse at Irwin, labeled Amin “the uterus collector.”

The little-known Ontario tribunal standing in the way of defunding the police

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The institutional framework of policing in Ontario

Due to the nature of its federalist system, Canada has what is called a tripartite policing framework. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) operates at the federal level for issues under federal jurisdiction. All other policing is left, according to the Constitution, to the provinces.

Some provinces–Ontario among them—have a provincial police force. Most provinces, however, devolve the responsibility, if not the control, for policing to municipalities. Ontario does this as well, allowing for the creation of municipal police forces. The question of defunding the police at the federal and provincial level is fairly simple: the federal and provincial governments set the police budget as part of their broader budgets, and it is the legislature which has the power to approve or reject budgets. Yet, for municipal police, at least in Ontario, the question is a good deal more complicated.

In Ontario, municipal councils have virtually no control over municipal police forces. The arms-length relationship between the police and the municipalities they purport to serve has its origins in the institutional arrangements which existed pre-Confederation. Attempting to shape the police into a modern state institution, rather than one dominated by patronage appointments, the government of Upper Canada created the first Board of Commissioners of Police in 1858. These boards were responsible for the administration of urban policing and were supposed to be free from direct political interference of municipal officials. After Confederation, when policing powers were granted to the provinces, this arrangement was maintained. Today in Ontario, these bodies are known as police services boards, and are justified under the common law principle of police independence.

The composition of police services boards is set out in the Police Services Act, 1990. Depending on the size of the municipality in question, police services boards are to be composed of three, five, or seven members. Generally speaking, the head of a municipal council (the mayor) sits on the police services board, alongside other delegates from the municipal council, appointees from the Lieutenant Governor, and sometimes citizens who are neither councilors nor city employees. Police services boards are responsible for the administration of police forces, but are explicitly prohibited from intervening in the day-to-day operations of police forces. It is the police services boards which are responsible, in consultation with chiefs of police, for proposing the police budget.

While municipalities do not control police forces, they are still obligated to pay for them. Municipal councils have the power to approve or reject police budgets. However, if a municipality rejects a proposed police budget, the police services board has the ability, under Section 39 of the Police Services Act, to appeal to the Ontario Civilian Police Commission (OCPC). The OCPC then becomes the ultimate arbiter of the police budget, with both the city and the police services board presenting their respective cases before a tribunal.

What is the Ontario Civilian Police Commission?

The OCPC “is an independent, quasi-judicial agency” with a broad and somewhat strange mandate. It is one of Ontario’s three civilian police oversight bodies, the other two being the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), and the Office of the Independent Police Review Director. The OCPC is composed of both an Adjudicative Division and an Investigative Division. OCPC tribunals hear a wide range of issues including appeals of police disciplinary penalties; requests to abolish, create, reduce, or amalgamate police services; the associational status of police service members; issues relating to the adequacy and effectiveness of policing services; and disputes between municipalities and police services boards over budgets. The OCPC also has the power to investigate police chiefs, police services, and police services boards if they are believed to have engaged in improper conduct.

The origins of the OCPC can be traced back to 1962 when the Ontario Police Commission was created as a “general watch-dog role over law observance and enforcement in Ontario.” Shortly after, it was given the power to review municipal budgets. The demand for civilian oversight of policing was closely related to the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, especially around civil rights and racial equality. In 1977, the Ontario Civilian Commission on Police Services was given the task of receiving public complaints about the police. In 1990 the SIU was created in response to increased backlash over police killings, and the SIU’s investigate powers were stripped from the Police Commission. The Police Services Act renamed the Commission to the Ontario Civilian Commission on Police Services and further stripped its ability to hear public complaints, which became the responsibility of a Police Complaints Commissioner.

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The mode of practice of the OCPC

It is not just the social composition of the OCPC membership which limits the possibility of defunding or abolishing the police through official channels. Rather, the established modes of practice of the OCPC also prevent any meaningful reform.

Company with Canadian roots manufactures riot-control vehicles used against Belarus protesters

They have become a familiar sight during Alexander Lukashenko’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Belarus: giant dark-blue armour-clad vehicles, mounted with powerful water cannons that riot police have used to blast Mr. Lukashenko’s opponents off the streets.

Less well known, however, is the Canadian connection behind these crowd-control machines.

On Wednesday, the vehicles could be seen driving through the streets of Minsk, firing heavy streams of water at crowds that came out to protest Mr. Lukashenko’s surprise move to swear himself in for a sixth term as President. The protesters believe Mr. Lukashenko was in fact defeated in an Aug. 9 election by challenger Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

The vehicles have been identified by Belarussian journalists as Predator riot-control vehicles, manufactured by Streit Group, a company first established in Ontario in the 1990s by Guerman Goutorov, a Canadian citizen who lives in the United Arab Emirates. Streit still has a manufacturing facility in Midland, Ont.

The Globe and Mail has not been able to independently verify the origins of the vehicles used in Belarus, but an examination of photographs and video from Belarus show the riot-control machines bear similarities to models on Streit’s website, including the angular, sloping design and the side vents.

The Streit brand is becoming a common sight in conflict zones around the world, from South Sudan to Libya, as The Globe has previously reported.

But the company appears to be outside the ambit of the Canadian government’s arms-control rules by manufacturing products in the United Arab Emirates. Streit has already been cited by United Nations-appointed panels for violating arms embargoes and selling armoured vehicles to war-torn countries such as South Sudan and Libya.....

Cop helper later shot with rubber bullet

Family of Black Man Shot Dead by Police While Handcuffed in Car Reaches $20 Million Settlement

In Maryland, the family of a Black man killed in January by police while handcuffed in a police car reached a $20 million settlement Monday. The settlement is believed to be one of the largest ever for a police killing. Forty-three-year-old William Green was shot six times. Police said there was a struggle, but investigators found no evidence to substantiate the claim. Michael Owen Jr., the Black police officer who shot Green, has been charged with second-degree murder. Green’s daughter said at a Monday news conference some of the money would go toward combating police brutality. Green’s cousin said of the settlement, “This doesn’t bring justice. This doesn’t bring peace.”

GTA students, faculty to strike against systemic racism

A collective of Black, Indigenous, racialized and allied post-secondary students from across the GTA are planning a province-wide university strike against anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism on September 30. 

The event, called All Out September 30 (AOS30), has been changed to a virtual strike due to COVID-19. Organizers say the protest is inspired by the growing global movement against anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, and is intended to hold administrations and the provincial government accountable for their complicity in racism on campus and generally. 

The strike also commemorates Orange Shirt Day, a day to bring awareness to Canada’s residential school system, which harmed thousands of Indigenous families and communities.

Azinwi Kien is one of the organizers and president of the York Federation of Students. She says many of the organizers have been having conversations about racism on campus with administration for years, and they are tired of the lack of action.

“What we’re asking for is accountability. When we talk about working in an anti-oppressive lens, most of the time that work falls on marginalized students, Indigenous students, Black students to do that work,” she says. “But it is time for our administrators, our universities, our governments to start working in an anti-oppressive lens. The onus needs to stop being on racialized bodies to advocate as to why we should not be oppressed.”....

On Contact: The Origins of White Surpremacy

https://youtu.be/oMjZ9AWlMRM

"Chris Hedges discusses the origins of white supremacy with historian Gerald Horne..."

How a Police State Starts (and vid)

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/10/how-a-police-state-starts/

"On Saturday - a small, socially-distanced vigil of 18 people for Julian Assange at Picadilly Circus was broken up by twice that number of police and one elderly man was arrested and taken into custody. The little group of activists have been holding the vigil every week. I had just arrived to thank them and was astonished to see 8 police vans and at this utterly unnecessary police action. There could not be a clearer example of 'COVID legislation' being used to crack down on unrelated, entirely peaceful political dissent. The busting of the Assange vigil is of a piece with the extraordinary blanking of the hearing by corporate media and the suppression of its reporting on social media. These are dangerous times..."

Solidarity is essential in such cases. Stop being repeatedly misled by msm propaganda campaigns designed to alienate your support from critical and important causes.

Covid cops in Quebec schools:

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Police officers across Quebec have been asked to increase their presence around high schools in the province, the education minister says.

Jean-François Roberge said he believes it's a good idea to involve police officers in COVID-19 awareness campaigns in schools. He said he asked Public Security Minister Geneviève Guilbault to request that police departments redouble their efforts.

"We want police officers to be around high schools, to be present, and to participate in this important operation to keep everybody safe," he said.

Starting Thursday, all high school students and staff will have to wear masks on school grounds at all times in the province's red zones, areas where the spread of COVID-19 is at a critical level — the Montreal area, Quebec City area, Chaudière-Appalaches region and three towns in the Gaspé.