One man yelled 'We are people! We pay your salary through taxes!" the officer yelled "You don't paying any fucking taxes, look at you!", the university educated, employed man in awe asked "What the hell do you mean?" He walks away laughing.Disgusting. I thought you were better than this Canada.
Hey, if Mayor David Miller was encouraging people to get out do things in the city, why not? [...]The free speech zone was shut down, so I guess there was nowhere else to go.[...]There are journalists in here, a couple comes out of The Keg and tries to leave, they are told, "It's too late." Too late for what they ask, and are told nothing. We ask again (Kate has become quite distraught and upset) if we can please leave and are told, "You should have left when we told you." Wait, what? When? Everyone is saying the same thing. They the phone number for legal aid starts making the rounds, people write it on their arms and hands (I already had it on a post-it note). They guy from the Keg can't believe it. They guy in the wheelchair on his way home is stunned. The confused guy with cerebral palsy is freaking out and scared.I read the whole thing and it is nightmarish; a litany of petty injustices that would particularly rankle a middle class, law-abiding citizen who has never been arrested before: being handcuffed for 23 hours, being held without charges, having to beg for water, being stuffed in an over-crowded freezing cell with nowhere to sit but the floor. I can only imagine how heartbreaking it would be to discover that the system doesn't protect your rights as well as you once imagined.
As the van began moving and the door to the van closed, the two thugs in the back seat pulled me around so that I was laying face up with my head almost in between the passenger and driver seat. As they were doing so, Thug A was punching me in the stomach, just hard enough to shock someone who is delicate but not hard enough to harm me. As they punched me and turned me over, they said statements such as “stop struggling,” and “stop punching.” (Again, my hands were cuffed.) I immediately realized that they may be making such completely erroneous statements because we were being recorded, and I loudly stated “I’m not struggling. I am not resisting arrest.”posted by Pope Guilty at 1:07 PM on July 1, 2010 [6 favorites]
Thug A sat on top of me over my pelvic area. My handcuffs were digging into my wrists. My only goal was to live through the experience without losing my humanity, my spirit, or my presence of mind, to find out where I was being taken, and to find out as much as I could about these thugs, whether they were officers or some sort of private contractors, i.e. paramilitary groups.
Thug B then squeezed my throat with his right hand, digging his thumb deeply into my carotid artery area, on the right side of my throat. He held this for perhaps ten seconds, as Thug A stepped on me, re-adjusting himself overtop of me. I almost passed out at that point as the carotid artery is the chief artery that supplies blood to the brain. At some point during or before this strangulation, I wet myself. Urine seeped into and through my clothing. Darkness almost overtook me, but I held on and I did not lose consciousness.
During this whole time the thugs were calling me names such as: “cunt,” “bitch,” “whore,” and “street trash.” A constant barrage of their statements were phrases such as “Look at this street whore.” In addition, Thug A was making statements such as, “So you think you can smash up Toronto? Think again, you dirty bitch.”
When I did not lose consciousness from choking, Thug B punched the right side of my head with his left fist. This was done at least once, and may have been repeated. I did not lose consciousness, but I began telling them, “I am a good person. I don’t know why you are doing this to me. I did not harm anything or anyone.”
As I was saying this, Thug A, who had been sitting on top of me, began patting around my skirt. “Why is she wet?” he yelled. Thug B replied that I had “pissed” on myself. Thug A then expressed disgust and began calling me horrible names, and deriding me for “pissing on him.” He stopped sitting on my pelvic area and moved further down my legs.
All of my attackers were likely abused in some way as children, and had likely made choices born of fear. I, on the other hand, am making choices born of love to protect and serve future generations by giving voice to those who question the G20, its polices, and its dominant malevolent philosophies. It is my good choices which brought me here, protesting the G20 even at the expense of my personal safety, because protesting oppression is the right thing to do.Really?
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posted by Pope Guilty at 2:18 AM on July 1, 2010 [49 favorites]