The other side of the protest

Editorial: The Ottawa Citizen

Page D4 (City Section), November 10, 2003

Four years ago, a protest movement was born when rioters tried to shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. One consequence of this global protest phenomenon is a renewed interest in crowd management. Managing crowds, especially angry crowds, is a complex business, and contrary to what one Ottawa activist group argues, police aren't always to blame when demonstrations go bad.

The Ottawa Witness Group, as it styles itself, was established in the aftermath of protests that rocked the capital during the G20 summit in November 2001. Dozens of protesters were arrested that weekend, and many complained that police had been heavy-handed. The group is a self-appointed watchdog. Last week, it issued its "annual report," which calls on police to abandon "regressive" crowd management methods such as making arrests and using pepper spray.

It is true that police brutality will happen on occasion and that those responsible must be held accountable. But the Ottawa Witness Group is not in a position to make those judgments. The group is hardly an objective arbiter. A co-founder is none other than the ubiquitous John Baglow, one of Ottawa's best-known political activists. Ottawa's Deputy Police Chief Larry Hill recently observed that the witnesses "are biased in favour of activists." More accurately, they are activists.

The giveaway is that the annual report has nothing to say about the behaviour of demonstrators, only police. Even if true that most protesters, including those who comprise the Ottawa Witness Group, are non-violent, it's also true that some aren't. At the G20 demonstrations, police confronted bandanna-wearing anarchists, who smashed storefront windows along Sparks Street. Other marchers wore buttons bearing glorified photographs of Arab terrorists with machine guns, faces covered with a kafiya.

It's dishonest to pretend that every demonstrator is a harmless raging granny in Birkenstocks, who is set upon by police without provocation.

The report lacks credibility because it refuses to acknowledge how difficult crowd management can be. In the bat of an eye, a crowd can transform into a mob. Indeed, the function of anarchists and other troublemakers is to ensure that it does become a mob. The challenge for police is to weed out the violent ones, to protect bystanders and property, and to ensure the security of the "target." (The target being the object of the protest -- the U.S. Embassy, for example, in the case of recent protests against the Iraq war.) And police must do all of this while simultaneously respecting civil liberties.

To their credit, Ottawa Police have managed to keep order while protecting the democratic right to dissent. We disagree with the report's demand that officers stop carrying pepper spray or stun guns, at least not when "protesters" show up with gas masks and crow bars. Or worse. Readers will recall the Citizen photograph last summer of a young man brandishing a foot-long hunting knife at a protest against homelessness. Organizers insisted he was not officially connected to the demonstration, but that doesn't help police who are responsible for public safety.

It is not police who threaten our right to dissent, but the stick-swinging or knife-wielding thug who tries to hijack a legitimate protest. It's that guy the Ottawa Witness Group should be watching.

For a slightly different perspective, see the Citizen's editorial of December 6, 2001 in which they say the police do need watching