Police & Prisons

Balancesheet on the November 25 Counterdemonstration

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Dec 032017

The joint La Meute/Storm Alliance demonstration of November 25, 2017 promised to be the largest far-right mobilization in Québec since the 1930s. The organizers anticipated a thousand people turning out to denounce the Commission publique contre le racisme systémique, which, ironically, the Liberal government cancelled on October 18.[1] At the end of the day, even the two groups and their allies from the nationalist groupuscules, the Three Percenters, the Northern Guard, and the boneheads from the Soldiers of Odin and Atalante only collectively reached half that number (300 to 400 max). Nonetheless, this mobilization could still mark a qualitative and symbolic watershed for the fascist drift in the province—a drift that police forces are more openly supporting, and in which many “mainstream” political actors are complicit.

While, in Montréal this year, we got used to the SPVM acting as a security force for La Meute and the other identitarian groupuscules, never was the collusion between the police and the far-right organizations as flagrant as it was in Quebec City on November 25. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Service de police de la Ville de Québec (SPVQ) brutally repressed antifascists, beating us with batons and shields, pepper spraying us, and making “preventive” arrests, with the clear goal of permitting the identitarians and fascists (some of whom were openly carrying batons and mace) to spread their hatred and racism unopposed in the province’s capital city. Additionally, the multiple approaches used by the media to demonize antifascist counterdemonstrators, both before and after the demonstration, contributed to normalizing the identitarian groups’ toxic discourse.

That said, we have to face the fact that we in the antifascist and antiracist movement have an enormous amount of work to do to make clear the urgent danger posed by the increasing shift to the far right. The various militant groups involved were only able to mobilize around 250 people to face off with the fascists at the Assemblée nationale.

An Underwhelming Antifascist Mobilization

To begin with, the Rassemblement populaire contre la manif de La Meute et Storm Alliance à Québec!, which the Quebec City ad hoc antiracist collective “CO25” put a lot of energy and thought into organizing, only drew a few hundred people, including those who made the trip from Montréal, who made up almost half of the assembled group, which was also augmented by small groups of comrades from Saguenay, Estrie, and elsewhere in the province.

Although a variety of objective factors undermined the mobilization (the time of year, the cold shitty weather, the early morning bus departure from Montréal, etc.), we also need to consider a certain number of complementary factors.

It was no coincidence that the major media published a series of articles demonizing the “far left” in the days leading up to the demonstration. The negative presentation of antifascists, treated as interchangeable with the far left, is an established approach that has only gotten worse since last August 20 in Quebec City. The negative image of antifascists that has been publicly fostered rests in no small part on a biased perception of violence and a dishonest portrayal of the far left and the far right as equivalent.

There’s simply no denying that the events of last August 20, some incidents in particular, seriously undermined the credibility of the antifascist movement, even in some circles that are would normally be sympathetic to us. Not everything, however, can be explained away by the media coverage. It’s pretty obvious that we are collectively having an enormous problem breaking through the hegemony of a particular legalist, pacifist, and pronouncedly nonviolent discourse, which could be described as “extreme centrism.” This sort of ideological monopoly, characterized by a rigid pseudo-ethic wrapped around a woolly ideological core, primarily serves the interest of the far right, which in its quest for legitimacy is making sure to cooperate with the police and to project a law and order image that belies the much greater and much worse violence at the heart of its programme.

To put it another way, given that the state, the far right, the media, and even certain progressive personalities have banded together to demonize the antiracist and antifascist movements, our movements face an uphill battle of popular education and the deconstruction of centrist myths.

We also have to recognize that racism is greeted with a high degree of tolerance in Québec, particularly outside of Montréal. Recall that the famous Commission publique contre le racisme systémique—which certainly didn’t pose a radical threat of any sort—was harshly criticized by the two main opposition parties, before being cancelled by the Liberal Party, which for abject electoral reasons replaced it with the a meaningless “Forum sur la valorisation de la diversité et la lutte contre la discrimination.” That very same week the Liberal Party passed the Islamophobic Bill 62, which is now facing constitutional court challenges. Without fail, surveys conducted in Québec confirm a strong popular sympathy for anti-immigrant and Islamophobic ideas, particularly in communities with few (or no) Muslims or immigrants, but which are inundated by trash media and the fear it whips up against the “other.” It’s a context where hostility toward antifascists is fed by both anti-left conservatism and a xenophobia that rejects and disdains anything that is not “de souche.”

On the other hand, the very structure of the social media that we are overly dependent on in our organizing favours echo chambers where users inevitably end up interacting almost exclusively with people who share their ideas and values. This plays no small part in the isolation of the far left and its views. The identitarian echo chamber actually seems to be a lot bigger and substantially more influential than the antiracist echo chamber, reaching more people every day. It’s obvious we have to find new ways to organize, and to do so we HAVE TO get off of the social media platforms and go into communities, or we risk radical antifascism being permanently marginalized. That means organizing and acting in the cities, neighbourhoods, and communities where the far right are intent upon recruiting.

An Exemplary Antiracist Gathering

On a much more positive note, we must note the excellent work done by our CO25 comrades. The popular gathering, even if it only brought out a small crowd, was a clear organizational success. Everyone appreciated the meal collectively prepared by members of the IWW, the Collectif de minuit, and Food Against Fascism, the speeches were clear and on topic, security was well organized, and the piñata was a nice way to end it. Overall, better communication vastly improved coordination between the cities. But it’s still clear that things are far from ideal . . . it was fine for a pleasant picnic to denounce racism, but it wasn’t enough when the pepper spray came! So, while the popular gathering was a success, the same can’t be said for the subsequent events.

The Most Unequal Faceoff to Date . . . A Brief Account of the Events

The parameters established by the “popular” gathering were clear; people planning to physically block the far-right march were to wait until after noon to move into position.

Following improvised leadership, a small group of about 200 demonstrators easily skirted a handful of disorganized cops to take to the street and move in the direction of René-Lévesque. The SPVQ riot squad got their shit together just enough to throw up a haphazard cordon at the intersection of René-Lévesque and Honoré-Mercier. Showing little taste for the fight (perhaps a prudent assessment of the objective conditions . . .), the antifascist forces didn’t try to break through the police line, instead choosing to occupy the intersection for a long as possible. At this point, the La Meute and Storm Alliance march was 150 meters away, in front of the Centre des congrès.

It wasn’t long before the cops received the order to put on their gas masks, a sure sign that chemical irritants would soon be coming into play. After about ten minutes the riot squad moved against the antiracists, more and more violently pushing them in the direction of the Fontaine de Tourny, generously dousing the front row in pepper spray, and they quite literally did this to clear the way so the racists could march on the Assemblée nationale as planned. The cops’ commitment to defending the racists’ right to demonstrate was almost touching.

Comrades resisted courageously for as long as they could, but eventually they were pushed back to the fountain. Metal barricades were dragged into the street to block the cops and snowballs rained down on the cops and the identitarians. However, by this point the resistance was pointless; most of the counterdemonstrators were dispersing, as rumours of an imminent kettle created confusion in our ranks. We withdrew to the Plains of Abraham, where there was an impromptu caucus, after which a hard core took off in the opposite direction, hoping to skirt the police and confront La Meute and Storm Alliance further on. A commendable effort, but unfortunately unsuccessful. At about the same time, the police arrested twenty-three comrades.

In the end, the far-right march was able to return to its starting point unopposed, yet still under a heavy police escort.

The police later reported an additional twenty-one “preventive” arrests shortly after noon in the area of the demonstration. The arrestees in these cases were charged with conspiracy to illegally assemble and being disguised with the intention of committing a crime. The police themselves admit that no crimes were committed by any of these people. Minority Report much? There are also some comrades who face additional charges.

La Meute, Storm Alliance, Atalante: The Same Struggle!—and the Police Working for the Fascists!

From our point of view, what was historic about the November 25 mobilization was the open unabashed coming together of almost all of Québec’s far-right forces. Until now, concerns about how they are perceived have caused La Meute, and to a lesser degree Storm Alliance, to keep openly fascist and white supremacist groups like Atalante and the la Fédération des Québécois de souche at arm’s length. This time they did not hesitate to cheerfully invite them to join their little party in the province’s capital. And in the aftermath of the demonstration Atalante Québec’s Facebook page included comments replete with praise from dozens of members of La Meute, Storm Alliance, the Soldiers of Odin, etc.[2] Which says it all.

Let’s be perfectly clear: Atalante members are white supremacists and unequivocal neo-fascists. There’s no room for doubt. The group was founded in 2016 by boneheads from the “Quebec Stompers” scene, part of the milieu surrounding Légitime Violence, a band with edifying lyrics such as: “Ces petits gauchistes efféminés qui se permettent de nous critiquer n’oseront jamais nous affronter. On va tous les poignarder” [The little leftist sissies who dare to criticize us would never risk confronting us. We will knife them one and all]. And perhaps even more to the point: “Déroulons les barbelés, préparons le Zyklon B!” [Roll out the barbed wire, Get the Zyklon B!], referring to the gas used in the Nazi concentration camps. Atalante has close ties to the fascist “Rock Against Communism” music scene, with the Italian neo-fascist group CasaPound, and here in Québec with the Fédération des Québécois de souche and the traditionalist Catholic Society of St-Pius X.

We also noted the presence of the Three Percenters (III%), a pseudo-militia whose members arrived at the demonstration decked out with reinforced security gloves and carrying telescopic batons, what appeared to be pepper spray, and other concealed weapons. This group, which has only recently established itself in Québec, includes conspiracy theorists and survivalists bound together by anti-Muslim and “anti-globalist” paranoia. The organization is primarily based in the U.S., but it has some chapters in English Canada as well. A few days after announcing themselves on November 25 in Quebec City, a number of “threepers” were part of the hodgepodge of dickheads who announced a pro-gun rally at the Polytechnique at the Université de Montréal, on December 2, 2017, four days before the annual commemoration of the 1989 shooting of fourteen women there by the anti-feminist Marc Lépine.

We are within our rights to ask why the Threepers weren’t arrested in Quebec City (or, at a minimum, why their weapons weren’t confiscated), while the police arrested twenty-one antifascists purely preventatively, pointing out in the media that weapons were found in the possession of some arrested militants. . . . And why were the Atalante and Soldiers of Odin boneheads permitted a lengthy gathering on the esplanade ramparts, from where they could fly their colours without the slightest interference from the police . . . while a few meters away the riot squad was mercilessly assaulting the antifascists.

The way the police were deployed in the contested space goes a long way toward suggesting complicity and a comfortable symbiosis with our adversaries. The police were in front of the far-right march with their backs to the identitarian protestors, focusing their attention on the antiracist militants. The SPVQ played a similar role on August 20, providing La Meute organizers with privileged information about the Montréal militants, extracted in a questionable way from a bus driver, thereby helping them to go ahead with their demonstration. But, frankly, this time not the slightest effort was put into hiding the complicity!

No big surprise that the identitarians applauded the police at the end of their demonstration . . .

Media Complicity

As expected, media coverage once again left a lot to be desired, typically portraying the antifascists as shit disturbers, when in reality we were on the receiving end of all of the violence! Most of the media repeated the SPVQ press statements without asking a single question, focusing primarily on the seizure of arms and throwing around the word “conspiracy.” We noticed a substantial difference between the coverage in the anglophone press and that in the francophone press. Significantly, the former doesn’t shy away from referring to La Meute and Storm Alliance as far-right, while the francophone press defaults to euphemisms and beating around the bush . . . when they don’t completely confuse the various groups and their respective positions (one TVA journalist went as far as to claim that Atalante were the antifa who had come to demonstrate against La Meute!). Xavier Camus has produced an excellent piece on the bizarre media coverage of the November 25 events.

Only the CBC thought it worth mentioning that the police had done the far right’s dirty work. To the best of our knowledge, in his piece appropriately entitled À bas le fascisme!, Houssein Ben-Ameur was the only columnist to set the record straight without feeling he had to tar the racists and the antiracists with the same brush.

Once again, it is the independent media that provided a perspective closer to what the antiracist and antifascist militants there that day actually experienced. The MADOC video is a great example.

A Negative Balance Sheet

In the final analysis, it’s hard to see this as a success for antifascists and antiracists. Obviously a modest mobilization was better than no mobilization at all, and we were frustrated by all of the adversity we faced trying to clearly express our opposition to these racist groups gathering in Quebec City. Even if November 25 wasn’t a victory for us, it would have been worse still had there been no opposition. It is also a fact that without the help of the police, even our modest mobilization would clearly have disrupted our adversaries’ plans in no small way. But that just isn’t good enough. To halt the fascist advance, we need to pick up our game, both at the level of mobilization and in terms of information and education. Furthermore, we need to find new ways to intervene, new approaches to mobilizing that allow us to break out of the ranks of the established left-wing scene and begin to meet and discuss with new comrades.

The best thing to come out of this mobilization was the improved ties between antiracist and antifascist militants in Montréal and Quebec City, as well as elsewhere in the province. Obviously we have our work cut out for us if we are to use this beginning to build ever stronger and more effective networks.

Some general observations:

Police complicity with the far right isn’t a problem that’s likely to go away. The fact that the new La Meute head of security is a former career police officer (from the Quebec City region) shouldn’t come as a great shock. It is getting more difficult to ignore the fact that the identitarian groups most certainly include members of the police force, and even possibly of the justice system. We need to look into this.
While the convergence of far-right forces on November 25 might seem disturbing, there are ways in which it helps us. The façade is crumbling, and claims made by La Meute leaders no longer seem credible. Their ties to racists are getting harder to hide. We need to draw attention to these links and ties.
We need to better prepare for tactical deployment. Some decisions that were made in the heat of the moment in Quebec City are clearly open to debate. For example, before announcing an imminent kettle, you need to be absolutely certain you’re right. That kind of warning has an immediate demobilizing effect, and it’s obviously a big problem if our demonstration scatters because of a faulty assessment. In the same vein, we need better communication, and we need experienced militants to begin sharing their skills with newer arrivals. There are, of course, security concerns with all of this that require some serious thought.

[1] There was also the fig leaf of support for “Seb,” a Québécois man whose wife (a “potentially legitimate immigrant”) is having trouble immigrating to Canada.

[2] It’s worth noting that Dave Tregget, the leader of Storm Alliance, was himself the president of the Soldiers of Odin about a year ago and did not hide the fact that he was on good terms with Stompers and Atalante. Tregget has spent the recent months denying that he is a racist at every opportunity, but how can you doubt his racism when he and his buddies jump into bed with Atalante at the first opportunity? Tregget lies and manipulates, and it’s time the media recognized that.

Anti-racist, anti-police

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Nov 112017

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

On November 7th, early in the morning, we broke the store window of PSP Corp, a manufacturer and distributor of police and security equipment that supplies police forces in the Montreal area. We then sprayed blue paint all over their merchandise with the help of a fire extinguisher. This action was at once anti-racist, against the police, and against the private security companies that are complicit in police infrastructure in our neighborhoods. The police and their supporters are on the front lines of the violent maintenance of the white supremacist social order and the colonial authority of the state and of capitalism. Following the rise of the far right in Quebec, the police has defended racists and allowed them to spread their hate. The far right supports and encourages the maintenance and expansion of the police state and the surveillance measures that systematically target racialized and working-class people. Smashing PSP Corp.’s window and destroying their merchandise is a way of fighting back against surveillance and police infrastructure in our neighborhoods.

This action was carried out in the lead-up to the large demonstration against racism and hate of November 12th. Racism exists in Quebec. Security and surveillance technologies and the industries that grow around them belong to a state and a society built on exploitation, white supremacy, and patriarchy, and all of it on stolen land.

Solidarity with the Anti-Fascist Activists Arrested in Québec City!

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Sep 182017

From Montreal-Antifasciste

We would like to extend our unconditional solidarity to individuals in Quebec City who were recently arrested, in relation to allegations surrounding the antifascist mobilization on August 20th. We do not know any details beyond what we have seen in the media, but it is clear to us that these arrests are intended by the police and Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume to intimidate antifascists and stifle our resistance to the far right. To those arrested, and all others who may be targeted, we say: stand strong and let us know what we can do to help.

And more generally, for everyone else reading this: The threat posed by the far right is multilayered, and so is our antifascist response. As such, at times antifascist activists will be targeted for criminalization and repression. If you or someone you know has been arrested or is facing charges due to your opposition to the far right, we encourage you to contact us at alerta-mtl@antifa.zone. We can recommend lawyers, and will do whatever else we can to help.

Very important: do not email us any information that could be used to incriminate you in any way. We are not lawyers and your email to us is not legally protected from police spies. Contact us and let us know you need help, and we will get back in touch with you, but don’t provide details beyond what you are being charged with. (I.e. don’t say “I did it!”)

Justice and Jean-Pierre Lizotte, the Poet of Bordeaux Prison

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Sep 062017

On September 5, 1999, eighteen years ago, Jean-Pierre Lizotte died as a result of injuries sustained from the blows of a Montreal police officer. I’m re-sharing today an article that I wrote in 2008 (published, in a slightly different form, in the Montreal Gazette) about the “Poet of Bordeaux Prison”. RIP Jean-Pierre Lizotte!

The Gazette’s opinion pages recently provided space to the lawyer for Montreal police officer Giovanni Stante who was charged in the death of Jean-PierreLizotte in 1999. The lawyer takes offense to a Gazette report, subsequent to the police killing of Freddy Villaneuva in Montreal-Nord in August this year. He feels that the report gives the “false impression that Lizotte was a victim of police brutality.”

Stante’s lawyer reiterates that Officer Stante was acquitted by a jury in 2002, and cleared by the Police Ethics Tribunal for inappropriate use of force just this past August 2008. Those are cold, hard facts.

However, there is one eyewitness to the events on the early morning of September 5, 1999 outside the Shed Café on St-Laurent Boulevard who will never get to tell his side, and that’s Jean-Pierre Lizotte himself. Lizotte died subsequent to the substantial injuries he suffered.

Yet, while vigilantly defending Officer Stante almost a decade after the incident in question, Stante’s lawyer goes on to cite Jean-Pierre Lizotte’s extensive criminal record. Dead men tell no tales, as the saying goes.

Fortunately, in the case of Jean-Pierre Lizotte, despite two decades in-and-out of prison, this particular dead man had a lot to say, and he said it, poignantly and insightfully. He deserves his voice too, in these pages, as much as Officer Stante has his voice through his lawyer’s skillful advocacy.

Thanks to a remarkable radio program called Souverains anonymes, which encouraged the creative side of prisoners at Bordeaux, we still have a record of many of Jean-Pierre Lizotte’s words.

After learning of his death, the producers of Souverains Anonymes recalled something Lizotte wrote to Abla Farhoud — a Quebec playwright, writer and actress, originally from Lebanon — who had participated in one show at the Bordeaux prison. Lizotte was responding to the words of the main character of Farhoud’s novel, Le bonheur a la queue glissante, who observed, “My country is that place where my children are happy”.

As an immigrant rights activist, deeply immersed in migrant justice struggles, and indelibly touched by my mother’s own immigrant experience, Lizotte’s response to Farhoud is moving, as he seeks common ground while reflecting on his own life; it’s worth citing in full:

“Hello Abla, my name is JP Lizotte. For the 21 years that I’ve been returning inside, prison has become my country. When I leave it, I become an immigrant! I experience all that an immigrant might experience when they miss their country of origin. When I’m inside, I want to leave. And when I’m outside, I miss the inside. Sometimes I say to myself, “If I had a grandmother or a grandfather, things would have been different for me.” But how can you have a grandmother when you’ve hardly had either a mother or father. The memories that I have make me cry, so I won’t tell them to you. But, a grandmother, like the one in your novel, is not given to everyone. So, I say to everyone who has a grandmother or grandfather, take advantage of it. Thanks.”

There are clear underlying and understandable reasons why Lizotte was in-and-out of prison for more than two decades, beyond the list of criminal offenses that Officer Stante’s lawyer provides, without any context.

His fellow prisoners dubbed Lizotte the “Poet of Bordeaux”, and he wrote prolifically. His poems were in a rhyming and often humorous style that address deeply personal themes: his difficult childhood, his lack of a caring mother, his father’s alcoholism, depression, his HIV-positive status, his drug problems, along with subjects like music, prison and revolt. He even wrote an unpublished memoir about his itinerant life called, Voler par amour, pleurer en silence.

Jean-Pierre Lizotte came from a harsh-lived reality, right from his childhood, as he shared in his poems and writings with simple honesty.

On the late night of September 5, 1999, on a trendy and expensive part of St-Laurent Boulevard, Jean-Pierre Lizotte’s reality came up against the contrasting reality of restaurant patrons, bouncers, and police officers. Lizotte was allegedly causing some sort of disturbance, and he had to be restrained in a full-nelson hold and punched at least two times by Officer Stante’s own testimony (some witnesses claim that Lizotte was punched “repeatedly” and excessively). According to eyewitnesses, there was a pool of blood left at the scene. One eyewitness refers to Lizotte being thrown into a police van “like a sack of potatoes”.

Officer Stante was duly acquitted by a jury in 2002; so were the officers in the infamous Rodney King beating, or more recently the New York City officers who shot and killed the unarmed Sean Bell on the day of his wedding. Police officers are routinely acquitted – if ever charged — within a criminal justice system that appropriately demands proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” before conviction.

Officer Stante might stand acquitted, but it’s still completely valid, and necessary, to question the actions of the Montreal police, despite the police procedures that apparently allow for the punching of an unarmed man held by another officer for the purposes of restraining a suspect. One simple fact that readers should consider: the police did not reveal Jean-Pierre Lizotte’s death in 1999 to the public until 53 days later.

But, what if there was a video of what happened outside the Shed Café in 1999 instead of the imperfect and contradictory memories of eyewitnesses at 2:30 in the morning? What if Jean-Pierre Lizotte was present in the courtroom, in a wheelchair and paralyzed, in front of the jury’s own eyes?

At Stante’s trial, and again in your pages, Officer Stante’s lawyer puts a dead man who can’t defend himself on trial. Lizotte transparently acknowledged who he was. What’s cheap is to still deny Jean-Pierre Lizotte – the homeless “criminal” — his full humanity and dignity, because he possessed it in such abundance.

– Jaggi Singh (September 2008), member of Justice for Victims of Police Killings and Solidarity Across Borders (Cité sans frontières / Solidarity City / Ciudad Solidaria (Montréal))

Statement from Freddy Stoneypoint

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Aug 172017

STATEMENT FROM FREDDY STONEYPOINT as RELEASED TO HIS LAWYERS ME RIAHI AND ME DESVIGNES.

“As a representative of Bawating water protectors, my only wish is to activate my ceremonial being in defense of land and waters through peaceful means. I am not an activist, I am an Anishinaabe man working to protect the land for future generations. I thank all of my supporters working towards same future for all on Turtle Island. Tomorrow at 10h30 AM, I will receive a decision on my bail hearing.”

Urgent: Legal fund and solidarity demonstrations for Freddy Stoneypoint, Indigenous Land Defender

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Aug 162017

Legal defense funds are urgently needed for Freddy Stoneypoint, an Anishinaabe man who was arrested Monday night in a police raid of the anti-fracking blockade on Mi’gmaq territory in so-called “Québec”.

People had erected barricades and blockaded the site for over a week before a Sûreté Québec (SQ) tactical unit assaulted the camp. Protectors of the land and water are always confronted by the machinery of the police, in service of the oil companies. Solidarity and support for the defenders will be necessary for the struggle to be able to stop the destruction of territories.

Freddy currently faces charges of breaking and entering, mischief over $5000, and theft over $5000, and is being detained at least until a Thursday hearing on his release. He is being held at the New Carlisle provincial prison.

Freddy has consistently demonstrated an inspiring fortitude, determination, and strength of conviction in standing for Indigenous sovereignty and defending the land, air and water on which all people, animal species, and future generations, depend.

It’s now time for all of us who see ourselves in this struggle to help defend Freddy against the onslaught of the colonial “Canadian” justice system. We refuse any separation between “good” and “bad” water and land protectors. Rather, the fault line is between those who are safeguarding the land, and the partisans of the ravages of the extractivist economy.

Join us Thursday, August 17, at 1:00pm in front of the Palais de “Justice” of Percé for a demonstration in support of Freddy Stoneypoint in his legitimate struggle. Facebook here.

If you’re in Montreal, join a solidarity demonstration meeting on the north side of Parc des Faubourgs (close to metro Papineau) at 1 pm! Facebook here.

Funds are urgently needed to pay Freddy’s legal fees and his legal team’s travel costs. Please contribute according to your means. Youcaring link here.

Infiltrated! How to prevent political police from undermining grassroots solidarity

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Jul 142017

From Stones and Sticks and Words

Editorial note: We republish this text because these lessons remain very relevant, especially given that the Canadian State will likely attempt to infiltrate radical communities in the lead up to the G7 in Charlevoix, QC next summer. For more resources on combating infiltration, check out Stop Hunting Sheep: A Guide to Creating Safer Networks and Stay Calm: Some tips for keeping safe in times of state repression.

On June 25, 2010, activists in Ottawa discovered that the man they knew as François Leclerc was in fact an undercover Ontario Provincial Police officer named Denis Leduc.

Leduc’s identity was revealed during the bail hearings of two people alleged to have firebombed a branch of the Royal Bank of Canada on May 18, 2010.

“The first time I met ‘François Leclerc’ … he gave the story he was there from the north,” says Jeff, a member of EXILE Infoshop, an anarchist hub for anti-capitalist organizing in Ottawa. “He was interested in Indigenous issues. He took out a book, Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide, and he wanted to sign up for [the protest against] CANSEC,” an annual arms trade show held in Ottawa.

“He did most of the talking in our relationship […] He told very elaborate stories of whale hunting and seal hunting,” notes Jeff.

I met Leduc for the first time in 2009, when he participated as a street medic in the protest against CANSEC. He was introduced to me by two friends and members of the Indigenous Peoples’ Solidarity Movement of Ottawa (IPSMO). A short, stocky man with shoulder-length red hair, a trim beard, and an eyebrow ring, he had a thick francophone accent and dressed casually.

He was soon invited to an IPSMO organizing meeting. At the time, IPSMO was comprised of student and community activists, and it was most involved in supporting the Algonquins of Barriere Lake (ABL), who were fighting Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada to stop interfering in their governance. Leduc organized with IPSMO for over a year: he regularly attended meetings, took minutes, transported people and equipment in his van, administered the email list, helped set up and take down events, and provided legal support – mostly mundane, routine tasks.

Leduc began to befriend local activists, attend parties, and have drinks after organizing meetings. He told activists that he was married to an Inuit woman and that he was attending university. He said he had family in Montreal; he also mentioned working as a tree planter, and he frequently left Ottawa for weeks or a month at a time, supposedly to visit family or for work.

Organizing, solidarity, and the G20 summit

The ABL have been in conflict with the Quebec and federal governments for the past 25 years. Since 1991, the First Nation has demanded that both levels of government implement the Trilateral Agreement, which establishes revenue sharing and co-management of the territory. Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC), the Sûreté du Québec, and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) have all attempted to undermine the ABL’s self-determination, including in 2008, when INAC exploited a division in the ABL by imposing an election that brought to power a small faction of the community, bypassing the traditional leadership that had earned majority support. The IPSMO had supported the community, including by participating in two ABL-led blockades of Highway 117, the only highway in the area and a major artery.

IPSMO also supported Indigenous activists in opposition to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and the G20 summit in Toronto. IPSMO was, and remains, a small grassroots collective of activists who combine Indigenous solidarity organizing with anti-capitalist and anti-oppressive politics.

In 2010, the G20 Joint Intelligence Group listed IPSMO, along with 21 other organizations, such as Defenders of the Land and the Council of Canadians, as “domestic groups of concern.” As part of the G20 Integrated Security Unit (a coalition of municipal, regional, and provincial police forces, RCMP, and Canadian Forces), police infiltrated Greenpeace, No One Is Illegal chapters, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, and the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance, among others.

In that charged political time, Leduc and another undercover officer were also core members of the Collectif du Chat Noir, the anti-authoritarian collective mobilized around the Toronto G20 summit.

Undermine and overreact

From the time he joined IPSMO until the May 18 arson, Leduc avoided encouraging violence or provoking conflict within the group.

“I don’t remember him ever suggesting, like, anything really, like any sort of violent action,” says Krishna Bera, a former IPSMO and EXILE Infoshop member.

But in retrospect, IPSMO activists recalled three incidents where he had undermined the group’s organizing.

The first was when the Olympic torch passed through Ottawa on its way to Vancouver. IPSMO activists had planned to drop a 30-foot-by-50-foot banner that read, “NO OLYMPICS ON STOLEN NATIVE LAND” off a nearby bridge. Activists had made the banner in the parking garage of Leduc’s apartment building, though Leduc himself wasn’t otherwise involved in making it, claiming that day that he had a cold. However, he did drive the activists to the bridge where they dropped the banner.

“I was doing the lookout for cops, and I spotted these two undercovers that were right at the spot that we were at. In my mind, looking back, they … had been tipped off,” says former IPSMO member Louisa Worrell. It appears that Leduc had forewarned the police, who placed undercover officers at the drop site to quickly remove the banner; they didn’t, however, arrest anyone.

In the other two instances of undermining IPSMO solidarity, Leduc had at the last minute cancelled his offers to drive people to do court support in Maniwaki and to drive to Akwesasne to meet Mohawk activists. This impeded efforts to support Indigenous and settler activists arrested during the blockade of Highway 117, and to develop relationships between IPSMO activists and the Mohawk activists in Akwesasne.

Leduc’s strategies revealed the nature of undermining solidarity work: over a longer period, he was careful to preserve his cover while he tried to exercise control over what IPSMO activists did, and he sabotaged efforts to build trust between IPSMO and the Indigenous communities of ABL and Akwesasne.

After the firebombing of the RBC, Leduc’s rhetoric escalated.

“My radar went up immediately […] He mentioned something to me to the effect of, ‘[the firebombing] was just small potatoes and you know these companies deserve a much bigger response than this. That struck me as an odd thing to say, especially to somebody that you’d just met,” says Dave Bleakney, a Canadian Union of Postal Workers activist who met Leduc once, soon after the arson.

Political policing

Since its formation in 1984, CSIS has been responsible for political policing, but all large police forces in Canada, especially the RCMP, engage in it. Indigenous people, and to a lesser extent Indigenous solidarity activists, continue to be among the top targets of this practice in Canada.

In their essay “Surveillance: Fiction or Higher Policing?” Jean-Paul Brodeur and Stéphane Leman-Langlois explain that high policing – the surveillance of political involvement – is “entirely devoted to the preservation of the political regime” as opposed to the supposed “protection of society.”

The purpose of political policing is to identify, surveil, disrupt, and control real or perceived threats to political and economic elites. Political policing is fundamentally different from “law and order” policing, which focuses on arrest and incarceration. It emphasizes intelligence gathering using both technological surveillance and infiltration. The intelligence is intended to be used only when necessary in efforts to control people and organizations considered to be a threat.

The activists I interviewed had all been surprised that Leduc was an undercover officer, either because they didn’t expect to be surveilled in the first place or because Leduc’s behaviour did not fit their expectations of an infiltrator.

This surprise likely stems from the misconception that all infiltrators act as agents provocateurs who try to manipulate activists into taking illegal, violent, unpopular, and ineffective actions. But as Gary T. Marx points out in his theory of social movement infiltration, social movements are damaged by “opposing organizational, tactical, and resource mobilization tasks.” In other words, infiltrators suppress social movements by fomenting divisions and internal conflicts, diverting energies toward defending the movement rather than pursuing broader social goals, sowing misinformation or damaging reputations, obstructing the supply of resources (money, transport, meeting spaces), or sabotaging planned actions. Many infiltrators are thus better described as agents suppressants, who are there to gather intelligence and channel groups away from militant action.

David Gilbert describes in Love and Struggle the agents suppressants in the Weather Underground Organization “who tried to put a damper on evolving movement militancy.”

“Provocateurs,” he says, “are more dramatic and damaging, but much of the Left has an anti-militant bias in not discussing the problem of suppressants at all. There is no simple litmus test to differentiate sincere militancy from provocation or honest caution from suppression.”

Incidents of provocation can be high-profile and sensational, such as undercover police posing as members of the black bloc at Montebello. This can lead activists to paint all militant action as the work of agents provocateurs, even if there is no evidence that this is true. Conversely, because of the low-profile of most agents suppressants, activists are often unaware of their role and impact in pacifying and controlling social movements.

A chilling effect

Seven years after the OPP revealed that Leduc was an infiltrator, there appear to be fewer groups and events organized around openly anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist politics.

However, IPSMO continues to organize in support of the ABL. It took a lead role in organizing the Indigenous Solidarity Assembly at the 2014 Peoples’ Social Forum, and has supported efforts to protect the sacred Chaudière Falls and its islands from the Windmill Development Group and Dream Unlimited Corp.’s colonial and gentrifying plans to build condominiums on stolen Algonquin land.

But the fallout of the infiltration was significant. The five Ottawa activists I interviewed all said that they are now less likely to trust other activists. They described feeling paranoid, suspicious, and demoralized, but also afraid and violated, knowing that private social moments had been surveilled.

“There’s definitely a sense of invasion, especially knowing that he’d been at my house,” says one member of IPSMO.

The IPSMO activists also emphasized that distrust and paranoia are a bigger problem than infiltration. The longer-term consequences – the sense of destruction and harmed relationships with communities that we are in solidarity with – are much more difficult to bounce back from than the direct effects of the infiltration. Indeed, it seems likely that the choice to out the infiltrator was an intentional effort by the police to create a chilling effect on activism in Ottawa.

“It did sort of dampen enthusiasm in a way. People immediately started to question anybody … who’s not almost mainstream in their activism,” said Bera.

Know your enemy

The infiltration of anarchist, Indigenous solidarity, and anti-Summit organizing from 2009–2010 was part of a long-term effort by the political police to undermine anti-capitalist, Indigenous, and Indigenous solidarity organizing, with specific interest in anti-Olympic and anti-Summit organizing.

Nuanced, strategic organizing should not be hampered by these accounts. Activists can reduce the damage done by infiltrators by being principled in their actions, respectful and accountable in how they organize with others, and by keeping in mind that distrust is usually more harmful than infiltration.

Some of Leduc’s behaviour that was suspicious included his regular absences from Ottawa, his access to a vehicle, his silence about politics, and his sudden militancy after the arson. Marx, in his essay “Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant,” writes that other indications of infiltrators include “difficulty in reaching the person directly by phone, reluctance to discuss one’s personal past, discrepancies in biographical information, [and] extensive knowledge of weapons and self-defense.”

Police and spy agencies continue to gather intelligence and control activist groups across Canada, and officers and paid informants continue to infiltrate activist groups. They drive activists to events, take minutes, and listen attentively to plans, ideas, dreams, and conflicts. Groups that have been infiltrated have noted that there is no uniform or tidy response to the threat. Activists should understand that the political police closely monitor and even moderate political activities with the intention of gathering intelligence on so-called “subversives.” To stay safe, activists must stay informed of police literature and legislation that upholds the conditions for infiltration, and cultivate knowledge of broad organizing methods to limit the harm caused by surveillance. It’s also vital to keep in mind that one of the purposes of surveillance is to promote distrust, and that paranoia is more corrosive to organizing than infiltration. Strategies are neither neat nor foolproof, and political policing tactics are ever changing. Activists should retain their commitment to nurturing relationships with one another and between oppressed communities, but the hard truth is that they must be savvy about their collective safety.

Policing isn’t broken; it’s working for capitalist and colonial interests

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Jul 142017

From Stones and Sticks and Words

On July 24, 2016, Somalian refugee Abdirahman Abdi was brutally beaten to death by two Ottawa police officers.

His death caused outrage, and drew attention to the issue of police brutality towards Black people in Ottawa. Anti-Black racism, and police violence towards Black people has been one of the central political issues of the past two years. This is a short essay that analyzes policing, and some thoughts about what to do to end the violence of policing.

First, I want to acknowledge and affirm that Ottawa, and the entire Ottawa river watershed, is the stolen land of the Algonquin nation. The colonization of Ottawa, and Canada, is the backdrop of the present day fight against the violence of policing. Two hundred years ago, the Algonquin controlled the area, there was no modern police force, and everyone lived according to Algonquin law. It’s the theft of Algonquin land and the genocide of Algonquin people that makes the existence of the City of Ottawa, and the Ottawa Police Service (OPS), possible.

Settler activists in Ottawa have to ask themselves what it means to work for police accountability and transparency, as well as ending all of the violence connected to policing and prisons, when the OPS is a settler police force that enforces the settler laws of a nation and city that exist on stolen Algonquin land. More broadly, activists working to end the violence of policing have to take this colonial context into account in their organizing no matter where in Canada they are.

Law and Order Policing

Law and order policing is what most people tend to think of as “the police”. Law and order policing in principle focuses on enforcing Canadian law, although, in fact, most police officer’s time is not spent enforcing the law, preventing crime or catching criminals.

Police don’t impartially enforce Canadian law, and Canadian law is not impartial: Canadian police officers, police forces and Canadian law privilege certain groups, and oppress others. Groups that are targeted (criminalized) experience higher levels of violence, arrest and incarceration. Many different groups are targeted, including Black people, people of colour and Indigenous people, migrants, poor and working-class people, especially homeless people, street-based sex workers and drug users, people with mental health problems, as well as queer and trans people. Individuals who are members of more than one of these groups are more likely to be attacked, or arrested, or both, by the police.

There have been more than 15 reports written about anti-Black racism in Canadian police forces since the 1970s. In brief, these studies concluded that systemic anti-Black racism exists within Canadian police forces. The reports have also made many suggestions about what could be done to eliminate or mitigate the effects of anti-Black racism in Canadian police forces, but for the most part police forces have refused to implement these suggestions.

As few of the recommendations are implemented, it is only a matter of time before there is another incident of police racism and brutality, such as the murder of Abdirahman Abdi by Const. Daniel Montsion and Const. Dave Weir of the OPS.

There’s a reason that the recommendations from the reports on anti-Black racism in the criminal injustice system haven’t been implemented. Many reasons, really, but at the end of the day it’s because policing isn’t broken; it’s working for capitalist and colonial interests. The police, and the governments they work for, have been reluctant to implement reforms because police doing violence to oppressed people is, sadly, part of what the job is really about.

Political Policing

Political policing focuses on people and organizations that the Canadian state and the political police consider to be subversive and harmful to so-called national security.

Political policing prioritizes intelligence gathering, rather than arrests and incarceration, and the goal of the intelligence gathering is to be able to undermine, disrupt and control the people and organizations they target.

Political policing exists to protect political and economic elites and it attacks people, groups and organizations that these elites consider a threat. For much of Canada’s history this has meant Communists, but more recently the political police have targeted Black nationalists, migrants, and Quebec sovereigntists. Today, Muslim, Indigenous and environmental activists are particularly targeted, while the political police still continue to attack socialists, communists and anarchists.

A recent example of political policing is the RCMP’s Project SITKA. Project SITKA aims to identify members of the leadership of Indigenous resistance movements, especially those who are willing to use “tactics…outside the spectrum of peaceful and lawful demonstration”. The purpose of identifying them is, of course, to neutralize them and reduce or end their effectiveness as activists and leaders. While Project SITKA only identifies 89 individuals, hundreds, maybe thousands, of (primarily Indigenous) people were investigated.

As stated above, political policing emphasizes intelligence gathering in order to control targeted groups. An excellent example of this comes from the Project SITKA report, where the RCMP says, ““In order to be intelligence-led, the National Intelligence Coordination Centre strives to collect all available intelligence and information related to known or anticipated threats. This information is to be acquired through a wide variety of sources, including open source information, a review of police occurrence reports, and other investigative techniques.”

Organizing to End the Violence of Policing

To be effective, organizing for police accountability and an end to police brutality has to make sure not to inadvertently increase the strength of the police. For example, in the US, the police and the Prison-Industrial Complex have been greatly strengthened by liberal reforms that were in principle implemented to reduce police misconduct. More regulation and oversight of the police, rather than reducing police violence, has, in fact, aggravated the problems that liberals said it was intended to resolve.

Activists interested in ending the violence of policing have to pursue reforms that reduce and limit police power while working for strong, healthy and safe communities. They must also refuse to work with the political police in their efforts to gather intelligence on, undermine and control our communities and movements.

Ending the violence of policing is a part of broader struggles: struggles for racial and gender equity in the workplace, for accessible, quality and relevant education for all, for decent, and affordable housing for all, higher welfare rates, a living wage, good quality and culturally appropriate support for people with mental health problems, and much more.

For more information:

The Justice For Abdirahman Abdi Coalition

Naomi Murakawa & #BlackLivesMatter: Liberals, Guns and the Roots of the U.S. Prison Explosion

Gary T. Marx, Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant

Jean-Paul Brodeur, High Policing and Low Policing: Remarks about the Policing of Political Activities

Jean-Paul Brodeur and Stephane Leman-Langois, Surveillance-Fiction or Higher Policing?

Jean-Paul Brodeu, The Policing Web

Steve Hewitt, Spying 101

Steve Hewitt, Snitch

Gary Kinsman (Author), Dieter K. Buse (Editor), Mercedes Steedman (Editor), Whose National Security?

Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers

Tim Groves, Living among us: Activists speak out on police infiltration

Anti-Black Racism in Ottawa

POLICE OVERSIGHT REVIEW: REFORM RECOMMENDATIONS

SUBMISSION TO THE ANTI-RACISM DIRECTORATE

The RCMP’s Project SITKA

This just in: people still not loving police

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Jun 222017

From Instagram

During the morning of June 21, a police car was attacked with bricks in the neighbourhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles. The circumstances of the attack are unknown, as it hasn’t been reported by the SPVM or the media. This begs the question of how often similar acts occur without anyone hearing about them, because they are invisibilized by the institutions that control the flow of information.

It’s impossible to say what inspired such an action yesterday morning and we want to avoid the trap of imposing a political narrative where there isn’t necessarily one. Nonetheless, hearing of this trashed police car brought us feelings of elation and inspiration. We publish this photo because, no matter the circumstances, it’s encouraging to see people fighting back against such an age-old enemy.

Pointe-Saint-Charles is rapidly undergoing gentrification, which has led to an increased police presence in order to facilitate the social cleansing that gentrification requires. Last year, anarchists put a police car in Pointe-Saint-Charles out of service in broad daylight, with similar tactics to what was seen yesterday.

We hope to see resistance multiply to the daily violence of police. We want fear to change sides.

March 15 in Montreal: police attacked, kettle broken

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Mar 172017

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

A couple hundred people gathered yesterday evening at Place Valois in Hochelaga for the 20th annual edition of the Demonstration Against Police Brutality, organized by the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality (COBP). It was the day after the largest snowstorm of the year in Montreal, and the mounds of snow lining the streets meant obstacles for both demonstrators and the cops. Refusing the protest framework demanding less brutal police, we carried with us the memory of March fifteenths past and their legacy of anti-police revolt. Also, rocks.

The words of a report-back from the last March 15 in Hochelaga seven years ago still ring true:

“We went to that demonstration intending to attack the police. Apart from all the weapons we brought, we carried with us a desire to no longer see a single cop walk the streets the next day; at least without a limp, a headache and a feeling of fear that no overtime pay could reconcile. We went out into the streets to hit them as if we could actually smack them the fuck out of our lives, with no guilt, remorse or shame about it. While acknowledging that we have yet to realize the depth of our desires (cops aren’t yet running for their lives), we can still move our lives and projects in that direction.”
– Measuring the Meaning of a March, in March, in Montreal

REPORT-BACK

After a speech by the COBP, the crowd set off west down Ontario Street, about a third of which was masked. A dozen black flags and a couple reinforced banners could be seen near the front of the demo, in addition to a leading COBP banner. There were no police marching alongside the demo, as they kept out of projectile range from all directions, and were likely also dissuaded by snow conditions. While some police followed along parallel streets, apparently at least some of the riot squad had to take the metro, possibly due to the storm disrupting their original transport plans. Some rocks were distributed and additional projectiles sought along Ontario, though without much success, as everything was covered in snow. We rapidly and uneventfully crossed Centre-Sud and reached the eastern edge of the downtown core, a firework set off above us to announce our arrival in comfortable and well-known terrain. Individuals in the bloc asked the front banner to slow down several times; it felt like the demo was running after itself, with no good reason to be. This made it very difficult for people running late to join, or the demo to stay tight. We would like to see future demos slow down, or even stop, when there isn’t an immediate threat from police – allowing more smashing, graffing, wheatpasting, barricading, dancing!

Approaching the area around the Montreal police (SPVM) headquarters on Saint-Urbain Street, police in cruisers and on bikes ahead of the demo were attacked with mortar fireworks. As the crowd amassed around the intersection of Ontario and Saint-Urbain, more fireworks were shot at the police mobilizing to defend their headquarters, then at half a dozen police on horseback approaching from the east. “Get those animals off those horses” almost came true as the horses bucked in fear, causing the horse squad to call it quits for the night.

Rather than congregate at the police headquarters and allow the cops to move in, we continued west on Maisonneuve. A few blocks later, more fireworks were shot at cops ahead of us. A photographer tracking and filming a member of the bloc from a close distance had his camera knocked from his hand, prompting a more general confrontation with media at the front of the march. Rocks and snowballs were thrown at a mainstream media cameraperson, who was then charged with a reinforced banner and knocked to the ground, while his hired goon was beaten with flagpoles from behind the banner.

A lone police cruiser was spotted to our left, parked on Union Street. A crowd quickly swarmed and thoroughly smashed it. On the same block, heading south now, display windows of the Bay department store (one of the oldest colonial businesses of Canada) were smashed and tagged with graffiti. After about fifteen minutes of a determined energy translating into conflictual action amongst the hundred-and-fifty-strong crowd, the cops executed an effective dispersal and kettling maneuver. Riot police lines ran up both sides of the demo, while bike cops chased and closed off exits from behind. Many dispersed on side streets ahead of the cops, but a few dozen people were fed east on Sainte-Catherine into a trap at Place-des-Arts, as more riot cops emerged from Saint-Urbain and blocked off the only remaining exit route.

This never should have been allowed to happen; our strength is on small streets that give police less mobility, so of course they funneled us towards the most open space downtown. Turning west on St. Catherine against traffic, and offensively attacking the vulnerable bike police who succeeded in intimidating us towards Place-des-Arts, would have at least allowed for a better dispersal.

Instead, hearts sank as the cops quickly tightened the kettle of thirty people against a side of a Place-des-arts building. But with shouts of “On fonce!” (“Let’s push!”) and an inspiring confidence and swiftness, before secondary cop lines could form, those kettled pushed against the riot cops blocking the sidewalk from the east and broke free. More riot police tried to block off the new exit routes, but there weren’t enough of them, as people raced through snow banks and snow-covered parking lots, for the most part getting away. Unfortunately, around ten people reportedly ended up in a new kettle that formed in the parking lot outside the SPVM headquarters. They had backpacks seized and were presumably photographed, but were let go without any tickets or charges. The demo ended with no arrests.

TACTICAL CREATIVITY

For combatting the police’s inevitable dispersal strategy, with some planning ahead, a reinforced banner crew could have moved to one of the sidewalks to block or at least delay flanking police lines from getting in position (perhaps accompanied by fire-extinguishers that could be discharged to slow their advance). Throwing projectiles at the flanking cop lines has proven ineffective, as most of the crowd is moving too quickly to fight in cohesive units, making it difficult to throw enough rocks to have an impact on police movements. Let’s also bring the lesson into the future that mortar fireworks were somewhat successful in keeping police at a distance, especially in a terrain where more conventional projectiles were hard to scavenge.

In recent years, the prospect that the black bloc could take time and space away from the police on March 15th has felt remote, so yesterday was definitely inspiring. On one of the two days of the year (the other being May Day) that police prepare for year-round, we were still able to significantly evade police controls, and get conflictual with confidence. This speaks to how we should prepare for demos throughout the year with more confidence in what could be possible. It’s clear that we can bring conflict to the streets in a way that doesn’t signal the end of the demo, as we’ve come to expect, but rather the start of something.

We’re also left with some strategic questions in relation to demos that we’d appreciate a conversation around. When the police are intentionally and constantly keeping their distance from the demo, when and how should attempts be made to seek out confrontation with them? What other goals do we have in such situations? How can we use the space and time we have in these moments to better prepare for the eventual police attack?

LET’S NOT GIVE THE POLICE EVIDENCE!

A note to the independent journalists of the city: it can be hard to distinguish you from mass-media, who generate incriminating evidence that they readily hand over to police (and who we are going to attack at every chance we get). Distinguish yourself by your behaviour – only film from a distance, and don’t film the attackers themselves, only the attackers’ targets. Despite whatever good intentions you likely have, if you film people doing crime, it can and will be used to solidify evidence against them (even when wearing a mask, other clothing items or facial features are regularly used by police to identify suspects). You don’t wanna be that guy that actively endangers demonstrators by exposing them to police violence, so please take this seriously.

Two more things: never film at the starting point or in the first fifteen minutes of a demo, to allow everyone who plans to wear a mask to have an opportunity to put it on safely. And before publishing videos, always blur the bodies of people who are masked. Check out this tutorial if you’re not sure how.

We’re encouraged that Document Everything’s coverage of the demonstration uses all of these techniques; individuals in the bloc are blurred, and the targets of actions are filmed rather than the people attacking them. During the swarming of the police car, the screen cuts to black and we only hear the sounds of destruction. 99% Media’s coverage also blurred individuals smashing the cruiser, but we’d like to critique that they released High-Definition close-up footage of unblurred masked individuals shooting fireworks at cops – no-one’s bloc attire is perfect, and footage like this can put people in a jail cell.

Unfortunately, Document Everything, subMedia, and a few other independent journalists who are clearly on our side were attacked by the bloc – we’d like to see people in the bloc be less indiscriminate towards anyone with a camera. Let’s paint and smash the cameras of any mass media without hesitation, but let’s also take the time to explain to independent media what practices endanger us. Conversely, Maxime Deland (whose incriminating photos were later published by TVA Nouvelles, and who seems to be the mass media’s go-to photographer for confrontational demonstrations) went unnoticed within the bloc because he looked like independent media – here’s his face for next time.

AGAINST POLICE, NOT THEIR BRUTALITY

We’re thrilled that this year the COBP decided to stop using the failed strategy of denouncing the most egregious behavior of the police, and instead called for decentralized direct actions against them, while expressing inspiration by several attacks on police and surveillance over the last year. The COBP explicitly supported the conflict with the police in their communique the day after the demo:

“We applaud all the autonomous groups that mobilized for March 15th, and that get organized all year long to build a balance of power against the SPVM and all police forces…”

“…We witnessed a proactive March 15, with diversified, offensive, and effective actions.”

“We salute the way in which militants fight the police state, and this despite the violence of its response.”

We’d like to see this taken one step further by next year’s demo being called as against police, period. This year the itinerary was chosen based on the locations of past police murders, and a symbolic acknowledgment of the struggle against gentrification in Hochelaga. Walking through the residential streets of Centre-Sud for a half hour to meet this symbolic goal of starting in Hochelaga didn’t feel worthwhile to us. We think for future years it makes more sense to prioritize routes that give us fighting advantages, because revolt is the best form of memory.

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