{ texts for nothing }

I finally managed to get my photos from the February 13th anti-Olympic protest off my cell phone. They aren’t very good pictures, but this one is pretty interesting: These police officers are not displaying names or badge numbers. There’s only one reason why they would do that: to avoid being held accountable for their actions. If you’re a cop, you don’t need to hide your badge number unless you want to be able to use excessive force without facing the consequences. And this was a deliberate strategy: it’s not like these guys just happened to all show up without their badge numbers that day. The officers in this photograph know that as long as they don’t get caught on camera, they can beat up protesters and get away with it; their superiors have made it implicitly clear that they will cover for them.

What we have here is a recipe for tacitly sanctioned police brutality.

As a BCCLA member and a friend and ally of the anti-Olympic protesters, I was extremely disappointed to hear about David Eby’s comments to the media regarding Saturday’s protest:

David Eby, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said he was “sickened” by images of Black Bloc members smashing windows and tossing newspaper boxes into the streets.

Eby, who’s been outspoken against what he considers police intimidation of Olympic dissidents, said protesters were prepared for civil disobedience, such as sit-down demonstration to block an intersection.

Eby said there was a hint that the protest would turn violent when his group was asked by a faction of the protesters not to send legal observers to the march, saying they were worried they’d been infiltrated by police and could have their video documentation used as evidence in court.

This is completely unacceptable for exactly the reasons outlined by Lawrence A. Hildes, a member of the U.S. National Lawyers Guild whom I saw at two separate anti-Olympic protests in the past few days:

I don’t expect Eby or the BCCLA to condone the black bloc’s actions. But as Lawrence Hildes says, it’s not the job of either Eby or the BCCLA to decide which protesters are “good” and which are “bad” — it’s their job to ensure that the civil liberties of all protesters, peaceful or not, are protected. Talk of being “sickened” by a few broken windows protects no one’s rights; on the contrary, it lends legitimacy to the authorities’ ongoing efforts to repress dissent by sowing division among the dissenters. It also raises questions about the ability of the BCCLA to provide adequate and unbiased legal counsel to protesters who face charges over acts of civil disobedience.

This problem is compounded by Eby’s decision to reveal that some protesters asked BCCLA legal observers not to attend Saturday’s protest. Not only could that information be extremely damaging for those who are facing charges related to the protest, but clearly those who sent the email had placed a certain amount of trust in the BCCLA in matters like that. It’s no secret that there was at least some communication between anti-Olympic activists and the BCCLA in the months leading up to the Games, and it was the BCCLA’s phone number that was circulated to protesters so they’d know who to call for legal representation in case of arrest. (It speaks volumes that the Olympic Resistance Network, which did not even organize Saturday’s protest, has begun distributing a different number instead.) I have no idea whether Eby’s statement was a violation of attorney-client privilege or of BC’s Canons of Legal Ethics, but I do know that it was a shameful and profoundly disrespectful breach of trust.

I have a great deal of respect for the work that the BCCLA and David Eby personally have done over the years, Olympic-related and otherwise, and I hate to see their reputations tarnished. Nor do I want to undermine the Olympic-related work that the BCCLA still has ahead of it — like holding the RCMP accountable for the fact that many riot cops did not display their badge numbers on Saturday. But so far at least thirteen people in this province have faced charges over their opposition to the Olympics, in a climate of intense official and popular hostility to their views. They — and all of us who confront the threat of repression when we choose to dissent — deserve better.

The BC government has passed the Assistance to Shelter Act, which gives the cops the power to kidnap people off the street — by force, if necessary — and put them in shelters against their will during “extreme weather conditions.” The law is targeted at homeless people, although there’s nothing in the text of the act that says so.

Naturally it’s just a coincidence that the law has been passed three months before the Winter Olympics come to British Columbia. The law has nothing at all to do with the consistent pattern of Olympic host cities clearing their streets of undesirables in the lead-up to the Games:

South Korea’s military dictatorship cleared out 720,000 people for the 1988 Seoul Games. Private security forces roamed the streets at night, using rape, beatings and arson to break community resistance.

But it doesn’t take a one-party state to bring out the jackboots when the Olympics come to town. Atlanta gained notoriety among Olympic watchers when it declared the central business district a “sanitized corridor” and had police pre-print arrest citations, with the words “African-American,” “Male,” and “Homeless” already filled in. In the lead-up to the games the city arrested about 9,000 people, a “crime” that has significant implications because people with criminal records are not eligible for public housing. Some of the homeless were given one-way bus tickets out of town.

(Hmm. One-way bus tickets out of town? Now where have I heard that before?)

The people who rule us claim they have the best interests of the homeless at heart. After all, they say, last winter a homeless woman in Vancouver’s West End accidentally killed herself while trying to stay warm. You have to wonder if these people have ever actually talked to a homeless person before. Most of the ones I’ve talked to avoid shelters because they feel unsafe there. For some strange reason, they don’t like sleeping in overcrowded rooms where a majority of the other people in the room have addiction or mental health problems and might hurt them or steal what few possessions they have. (Incidentally, the new law makes no provisions for ensuring that the people kidnapped by the cops will be allowed to take those possessions with them when they’re forced into shelters against their will.) I know it’s hard for some people to believe that homeless people might have good reasons for the choices they make, but there it is.

Ah, but by being concerned about their own safety, homeless people are putting their own safety at risk, and we can’t allow that! Back in September, a columnist for the Globe and Mail argued that the state has a duty to protect these people from themselves, even if it means violating their rights. Indeed, the secondary headline on that article reads, “Sometimes ensuring citizens are safe means leaving aside their constitutional freedoms.” This is the reasoning behind laws like the Assistance to Shelter Act. But didn’t we just spend the past eight years proving how terribly misguided and dangerous the false dichotomy between safety and security really is? It’s incredible how easy it is these days for Serious People to justify Doing Whatever’s Necessary to Keep People Safe — without the least concern for the rights they violate in the process.

Seriously, do we really need to have the cops pull people off the street and incarcerate them for the crime of being homeless in the middle of winter? Why don’t we just provide decent permanent housing instead?

There’s nothing unattainable about that solution, by the way. BC deals with homelessness through a combination of emergency rooms, cops and judges, and temporary emergency shelters — an unplanned patchwork of half-assed tactics that leaves many homeless people without the support they need (the province’s homeless population has shot up in the past few years). Not only is this approach both ineffective and immoral, it’s also more expensive than the alternative. Last year, researchers at Simon Fraser University found that it would actually be cheaper to provide our homeless population with both housing and support services, in the form of treatment for addiction and mental illness, than it is to continue doing what we’re doing now.

So why does BC’s government want to spend even more money on an approach (I hesitate to call it a “strategy”) that doesn’t work, when an approach that does work would actually be cheaper? And why do they want to compound their sins by giving the cops a mandate to force our most vulnerable citizens into unsafe spaces against their will?

The BC Civil Liberties Association is helping two anti-Olympic activists to sue the City of Vancouver over a bylaw that would restrict free speech during the 2010 Games.

“The bylaw is an affront to free speech.  Its purpose and effect is to limit citizens’ rights to express dissenting views and to hear dissenting views on public property,” says David Eby, Executive Director of the BCCLA. Eby cited concerns about the bylaw restricting signs that aren’t “celebratory” and listing public facilities and even a city park as places where free expression is limited as particularly offensive. [...]

“Vancouver’s Olympic bylaw is an infringement on my Charter rights and those of all people who wish to express themselves and to listen,” said Dr. Shaw [Chris Shaw, one of the activists who filed the lawsuit]. “If the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is to be a guarantee of anything, if it is to be more than words on paper, this bylaw cannot be allowed to stand.”

This makes me happy.

Back in July, the City of Vancouver passed a bunch of bylaws to suppress free speech before, during, and after the Olympic games. Last week, we learned how the people in charge will be enforcing those bylaws:

Organizers of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics will send roving teams of observers with the power to confiscate material that infringes on the Olympic brand outside the venues, CBC News has learned….

The Vancouver Organizing Committee’s 20 observer teams are intended to enforce its agreement with the International Olympic Committee that the local organizers must ensure the venues are “clean” of commercial, political or religious publicity.

That’s right: political speech has been deemed to “infringe on the Olympic brand” and is therefore forbidden.* Never mind that this policy directly violates your rights as expressed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Larry Campbell took away those rights back in 2005 when he signed Vancouver’s agreement with the International Olympic Committee, which actually requires host cities to suppress their citizens’ civil liberties in this manner for the duration of the Games. (Campbell was Mayor of Vancouver then; now he’s a Senator, proving once again that it pays to watch out for elite interests.)

Of course, if you plan to ignore Vancouver’s illegal bylaws and exercise your rights of free speech and free assembly during the Olympics, VANOC’s Special Higher Police roving teams of observers are among the least of your concerns. The cops have been busy these past few months harrassing anyone who voices opposition to the Olympics — not just activists, who have been subjected to surveillance, interrogation of themselves and their friends and neighbors, and intimidation by the cops, but ordinary people like the 73-year-old man who wrote a letter to VANOC and got a visit from the authorities by way of response. There is also some legitimate concern that the cops are planning to infiltrate protest groups and use agents provocateurs to discredit anti-Olympic activists, just like they tried to do in Montebello in 2007. And then there are the “free speech zones” designed to keep protesters out of sight during the Olympics — in the proud tradition of such bastions of liberty as the People’s Republic of China, which set up its own protest cages during the Beijing Games in 2008.

In response to all this nonsense, the folks at the BC Civil Liberties Association and Pivot Legal Society are training volunteers to act as legal observers during the Olympics:

Like many of you, Pivot and the BCCLA are concerned that when the more than 7,000 police officers, 5,000 private security guards and 4,500 members of the Canadian armed forces arrive in Vancouver this February, their presence may get in the way of citizens’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Bylaws recently passed by the City of Vancouver suggest that we have good reason to be worried.

We plan to be ready, with dozens of people prepared to act as eyes and ears on the streets. Legal observers will be trained to watch for violations and to document and report them.

The first BCCLA/Pivot training session was this past Sunday. More sessions will be offered once a month for the next three months. If you’re concerned about your rights being violated, I’d recommend checking them out.

Or you could, you know, hook up with the anti-Olympic movement, since crackdowns on civil liberties are one of the reasons they’re opposed to the Olympics in the first place.