From Ferguson and Gaza to the Toronto G-20

Combined Tactical Systems, Inc. (CSI), according to its website, manufactures and markets tactical munitions and crowd control devices to armed forces, law enforcement, corrections and homeland security agencies around the world.

This photo of its Jamestown, Pennsylvania headquarters raised a few eyebrows this week because :

1) as you can see in the photo, CSI was flying an Israeli flag alongside the US one up until January 2012 and, according to a former CSI plant employee in the first comment here, it is flown whenever the Israeli owner/founder is in town, and 

2) CTS tear gas shell cartridges manufactured there were found a week apart in Gaza and Ferguson, Missouri - where protests and excessive police reaction fuelled by the half a billion dollars in military weapons given to local police forces erupted in response to the August 9 shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a local police officer. 

Comparisons of the highly militarized assault on their respective populations, supportive tweets from citizens in Gaza to citizens in Ferguson about dealing with the effects of teargas, and a look at the fact Ferguson and St. Louis County police forces were trained in Israel in recent years followed.

Along with 9,500 other law enforcement officials who have attended Israeli-led LEEP training sessions in the US and Israel. 

The Law Enforcement Exchange Program (LEEP) - created :

"in cooperation with the Israel National Police, the Israel Ministry of Internal Security, and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) to support and strengthen American law enforcement counter terrorism practices"

 - was the brainchild of former FBI Assistant Director and Chief of Counter-Terrorism Steve Pomerantz, in his capacity as Director for Counter-Terrorism Programs for The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). 

JINSA was founded to "advocate on behalf of a strong U.S. military, a robust national security policy, and a strong U.S. security relationship with Israel" to "provide leadership and affect policy on crucial issues of national security and foreign policy." 

Yeah, they pretty much have that part nailed down.

Former JINSA advisory board members include perennial neocon warmongers Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, James Woolsey, and Michael Ledeen.

Meanwhile, according to the U.S.-Israel Strategic Cooperation : Joint Police & Law Enforcement Training page at the Jewish Virtual Library detailing their joint history :

"In early September 2012, the New Police Department (NYPD) opened an Israeli branch at the Sharon District Police Headquarters" in Israel because "the Israeli police is one of the major police forces with which it must maintain close work relations and daily contact."

Really? The NYPD requires daily contact with Israeli police from a location inside Israel?

Naturally, there have also been Canadian security junkets to Israel. In 2005, on his first day as Ontario emergency management commissioner, Julian Fantino, Toronto Police Staff Supt. Bill Blair, and 30 more Ontario police officials left for Israel to "study security and anti-terrorism measures", courtesy of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, airline El Al and the Israeli government.

But back to Combined Tactical Systems (CSI). In addition to making the teargas cannisters used against populations in Gaza, Ferguson, Tahrir Square in Egypt, Bahrain, Occupy Wall Street, and Toronto's G-20 in 2010, they also run their own training sessions "combining product tools with knowledge and techniques."

In February 2010 - four months before the Toronto G20 - this highly respected and decorated officer was a Training Sergeant with the Toronto Police Public Order Unit working on :

• Development & delivery of crowd management training to Toronto Police Service and police agencies across Canada.
• ORT (Obstacle Removal Team) trained - Responsible for training Toronto Police members in extrication and removal of protestors from fixed objectives using various tools and equipment.

when he took the four-day CSI course on chemical munitions (hand-held and fired), distraction devices (flash bangs), and fired munitions, bean bags, wood batons, rubber batons, sting calls :

CHEMICAL MUNITIONS/ LESS LETHAL WEAPONS - INSTRUCTOR  

Combined Tactical Systems, San Bernadino, CA / February 2010

Then read this account of Why there wasn't accountability for the police in Ferguson and see if it doesn't remind you of the same police set up used to defy accountability at G-20, involving the aforementioned Fantino and Blair.

Final note from Jewish Virtual Library :

In January 2011, Canada and Israel signed an umbrella pact for defense and military cooperation and bolstered that agreement in November 2011 amid the turmoil that had been set upon the Middle East and around the Arab World during the Arab Spring. Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak settled a number of memoranda of understanding to facilitate information and intelligence sharing as well as cooperative arrangements for the development and sale of military technologies.

From Ferguson and the occupation of Gaza to the Toronto G-20, war is a racket that always comes home .

Edited for clarity and typos.
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Ontario Ombudsman and former SIU Director on Sammy Yatim investigation

Yesterday on CBC Metro Morning, Ontario Ombudsman and former Director of the Special Investigations Unit Andre Marin spoke about the SIU investigation into the Toronto Police shooting death of 18 year old Sammy Yatim on an empty streetcar and the systemic lack of police co-operation with the SIU.
Excerpted transcript : 

CBC : The Chief of Police has said that he and his officers will cooperate fully with the SIU. Yesterday Mike McCormick the head of the police union said that his offices always cooperate and collaborate with the SIU.  

Marin : The cooperation of the police with an SIU investigation is the exception and not the norm. When you hear the police say we always cooperate, it rings hollow. We've done in-depth investigations, two reports. The director of the SIU has written 82 times to the Chief of Toronto Police, reporting issues of evidence tampering on the scene, failure to notify the SIU of an incident, one police lawyer representing multiple officers, police lawyers writing the notes for the officers - you know the police lawyer wasn't on scene. That's not co-operation and all these 82 letters haven't been answered. Last year - we reported in an annual report we released a few weeks ago - last year the director wrote 19 letters all of which have not been answered. 

CBC : Does the fact that this is an incredibly public investigation, in part because this incident was caught not just on one but on multiple videos, change that? 

Marin : I think there's a greater degree of question. As well the incident depicted raises issues. But you know if I recall correctly during the G20 SIU investigation, Chief Blair was on your show promoting the fiction that the videotape of Adam Nobody had been tampered with until the director of the SIU called his bluff. Now is that co-operation or is that undermining the investigation? And the worst part here is - I don't oversee the Toronto Police Service; I do oversee the SIU, I oversee the provincial government. Provincial government committed to strengthening the role of the SIU to make sure the evidence they get is untampered and it's obtained readily and early because SIU's conclusion will only be as good as the evidence that it's gathered. The province agreed to bring change but then from documents we found changed their mind because of "vehement police opposition". And that's a direct quote from the ministry's correspondence. So you know it's all great to see these commitments of 180 degree change in direction in co-operation with the SIU, but the police have to stop playing cat-and-mouse games and the SIU needs to be able to do its job independently and without distractions.  

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G20 : Caught in the Act

An interview with Andre Marin, Ontario Ombudsman and author of the G20 report "Caught in the Act", sheds a little light on the blackout surrounding who was responsible for ordering kettling at the G20 a year ago.

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, as we have previously heard, had not heard of the term kettling before he saw it taking place before his very eyes on TV at the G20. A whole year later he still claims not to know who ordered it.

Paul Jay reads from Marin's report :

"The former RCMP official who was in charge of ISU security at the time advised us that by June 24, which is, what, two days before, the Toronto Police Services representative on the ISU steering committee had left the ISU building, and that by noon on Saturday, June 26, when all hell's breaking loose, communications between the ISU and the Toronto Police had broken down. By 4 p.m., the Toronto Police Services had completely gone off the ISU radar.

These guys had months to prepare, like, an unlimited budget, like, a billion dollar budget, and it seems like what they told you is that the communication had broken so down that the RCMP had no control over the events that were going on in Toronto."

And where was Blair during all this? At the Intercontinental Hotel meeting President Obama.
Now that's what I call an alibi.

According to Marin, the ISU responsibilities were divided up between: "the RCMP responsible for security within the fence; the Toronto Police responsible for the security outside the fence."

On CBC's As It Happens last night, Blair made this statement about his relationship to the RCMP-led Integrated Security Unit :

"Quite frankly I was not involved in much of the planning. I was aware of some of the things that were being planned, I was being briefed, but I was not the Operational Commander, I was not on the Unified Command Team or in the steering committee."

Well that's handy, isn't it?
Blair's in charge of the streets but is not inside the ISU command loop.
Then while he's off receiving his thank-you-masked-mans from Obama, someone uses the power vacuum at ISU to suck people at Queen and Spadina up as extras in a police crowd control exercise under martial law.

Blair declined to appear before Marin's investigation and does not support the idea of a public inquiry.
One year later, although the Toronto Police have pledged not to use illegal kettling again, the extraordinary powers of the "Queens breach" and the Public Works Protection Act remain in effect.
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Extra reading : When police stick to phony script : the Miami Model from Catherine Porter in the Star
h/t Nadine Lumley in comments
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Chief Blair had never heard of kettling before he saw it done at G20

Yes, you read that right.

I'm sitting here right now on the anniversary of the G20 listening to Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair tell Carol Off on CBC's As It Happens that he had never even heard of kettling before he saw it being done at the G20 on TV .
He had to look it up the next day, he explained, where he learned it was a police tactic used in the UK - unlike here, he went on, where we don't box people in without giving them an egress.

So where was he, asked Carol Orff, between 5:30 and 8:30 when the order was given at 5:30 to kettle some 300 peaceful people in the rain for hours and then charge them all with conspiracy?
Well he was over at the Intercontinental Hotel - "by invitation" - meeting President Obama, who shook his hand and personally thanked him for the great job he had done on security. When he left the hotel it was raining, he said, and it was after that he saw the kettling on TV and made the call to shut it down, saying it was all over.
Off asked him who gave the kettling order; he said he didn't know.

Unbelievable.
So if Bill Blair was just a figurehead with no idea what commands were given on the ground and still doesn't know, who gave the order?
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[Edited to add the hotel name and times given by Off]
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G20 - Police oversight

Oversight - noun
1) the action of overseeing something
2) an omission, the failure to do something

Dorian Barton was taking a picture of police horses in the park at the G20 summit in downtown Toronto last summer when he was suddenly knocked to ground from behind with a riot shield, beaten with a baton breaking his shoulder, and stomped in the face. He was then dragged off by his broken right arm and detained without medical treatment for the first five of a total of 30 hours in detention, after which he was charged with "obstructing a police officer". The Crown dropped the charges against him at the same time it dropped all the bullshit charges against everyone else.

Ontario's Special Investigations Unit, the civilian agency charged with investigating "police actions resulting in serious injury, sexual assault or death", is reopening for the third time an investigation into allegations the Toronto police officer pictured here was one of seven who took part in the vicious assault on Barton. The photographer who took this pic is willing to testify he saw the officer blindside Barton with his shield and strike him as he lay on the ground before other officers joined in. He has provided seven photos of the assault.

SIU dropped its two previous investigations into the case in January because eleven police witnesses, one of whom was the officer's G20 roommate and two of whom were his supervisors, declined to identify him. SIU director Ian Scott reopened it today after Toronto Police Chief Blair promised to provide the name of the employee who was able to identify the subject officer.

WTF?
I'm pretty sure if me and six of my friends were caught on film beating the crap out of you, the cops would not drop the case because my boss and my roommate declined to cough up my name to go along with my photo.

According to the Ontario Attorney General to whom the SIU reports, the SIU exonerates the officer in 97% of the cases it does pursue :

"The fact that the SIU overwhelmingly clears officers should be seen by the [public] as an endorsement of good policing."

However, in Oversight Unseen, a 2008 report on the SIU, Ontario Ombudsmen André Marin saw it differently :

"[T]he Ministry of the Attorney General has relied on the SIU to soothe police and community sensibilities and to ward off controversy. But in doing so, it has also overstepped the bounds of independent governance. The Director’s performance is subjectively evaluated and rewarded, compromising the SIU’s structural integrity and independence.

Its credibility as an independent investigative agency is further undermined by the predominant presence and continuing police links of former police officials within the SIU. It is so steeped in police culture that it has, at times, even tolerated the blatant display of police insignia and police affiliation."

[T]he SIU often ... adopts an impotent stance in the face of police challenge. Delays in police providing notice of incidents, in disclosing notes, and in submitting to interviews are endemic. Rather than vigorously inquiring into and documenting delays and other evidence of police resistance, the SIU deals with issues of police non-co-operation as isolated incidents.

Police interviews are rarely held within the regulatory time frames, and are all too often postponed – for weeks, sometimes even months. The SIU will not inconvenience officers or police forces by interviewing officers off duty. When it encounters overt resistance from police officials, the SIU pursues a low-key diplomatic approach that flies under the public radar. If disagreement cannot be resolved, the SIU more often than not simply accepts defeat."

"The SIU more often than not simply admits defeat." Good lord.

The current SIU director Ian Scott was appointed just before that report came out.
In February the Toronto Star ran a series based on 300 letters Scott sent to police forces over a 14-month period beginning in January 2009. They detail "his mounting frustration at not being able to hold officers accountable", including the burning of evidence before he got to see it, and being generally ignored by the Ontario police forces.
Presumably this is why he is giving interviews about this case to the press, despite the fact SIU Regulation 13 forbids it.

Rally in Toronto on Saturday for a public inquiry into G20 police riots

Meanwhile, out here in BC, the local media was pleased to bits last week to report that in response to Justice Braidwood  recommendations following from the police killing of Robert Dziekanski in 2007, we will be getting our own civilian police-oversight agency modelled on the SIU. And just like the SIU, the Independent Investigations Office will also report to BC's Attorney General, not the Ombudsman as Braidwood had wisely suggested.

Greg Klein at TheStraight :

[I]t was the AG’s Crown attorneys who exonerated the four Mounties involved in Dziekanski’s death. That was what led to Braidwood’s inquiry in the first place.

It gets worse. The government added that incidents or complaints involving IIO staff will be investigated by B.C.’s Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner. Almost all senior positions at the OPCC are staffed by former police officers.

An exception is police complaint commissioner Stan Lowe. But Lowe is a former Crown attorney and member of the criminal justice branch executive management that unanimously decided to exonerate the four RCMP officers involved in Robert Dziekanski’s Taser-related death. It was Lowe who made the infamous December 2008 announcement that the five Taser shocks inflicted on Dziekanski were “reasonable and necessary".

And so it goes ...
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G20 : Breach of the Peace

In his testimony to the Public Safety Committee on Nov 3 about G20 police abuses, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair claimed that detained members of the public complained of sexual assault and being threatened with sexual violence by police but then withdrew those complaints when they learned the extent of police video surveillance in the detention centres. Here's Blair at the 16:25 mark :

"One of the allegations made to the public and the media was allegations of sexual assault. When it became more public knowledge that there were video cameras there, those allegations were withdrawn."

Guess not, Chief Blair, because here they are again at the Breach of the Peace public hearings co-hosted by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the National Union of Public and General Employees. The two days of proceedings are tweeted live at Rabble and they resume tomorrow for one more day in Montreal. Likely this is the closest we will get to a public inquiry.

Many people automatically discount allegations of sexual threats from the police. I don't.
Here's my own wee story, insignificant though it is beside those of the G20 detainees.

Many years ago when I was a young teen growing up in West Vancouver I was crossing Marine Drive on a crosswalk one afternoon when out of a group of people crossing towards me an old man began to stumble and fall. I managed to catch him on his way down; he thanked me, righted himself, seemed ok, and off we went in our opposite directions. A block later a West Van Police car with two officers in it pulls up and motions me over. The officer on the passenger side begins to question me about the old guy. I think they are concerned about him. Then they ask me if I just bought drugs from him. I don't know the guy, I answer, and I don't do drugs. They are obviously not convinced. I ask them if they would like to search my bag. (I know, I know, but I was just a kid.)
"Maybe you keep your drugs in your underpants," says the passenger side cop. "Do you keep your drugs in your underpants?" I ran.

Embarrassed that anyone would talk to me in such a manner, I was too ashamed to tell anyone, let alone my parents. Much later I wished I had the wit and courage at the time to think beyond myself, as that kind of sexual bullying may well have been a regular feature of his day in the neighbourhood.

Anyway I got over it and stopped being on alert for police cars, and hopefully so will the young men and women who are making much more serious complaints of sexual threats and abuse at the G20. But it changes how you think of the police and that is not a good thing for law enforcement in this country.

Blair should welcome the opportunity to air these charges in a public inquiry. Sadly he does not and so they fester on unanswered, consigning suspicion to an entire police force - their alleged bad apples and their bubble of unaccountability undermining both the force and the public goodwill on which they depend.
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Inside the Public Safety Committee : G20 preventative arrests

At the Public Safety Committee yesterday, Toronto Chief Bill Blair lobbed the following statement about "preventive detention" into the proceedings [just before the 4 minute mark]:

"I think you are all familiar with images of members of that group who were smashing windows, burning cars, looting stores, and generally causing a great deal of mayhem through vandalism and violence in the city of Toronto. We began to take the steps necessary to contain that threat and over the course of that weekend, the criminal conspiracy to commit criminal acts did not end on Saturday afternoon and it did not end when they left Yonge St. It continued. We were gathering intelligence and information from within the crowd and we had other sources of information that made it very clear to us that the criminal intent of the people involved in those criminal acts continued throughout the weekend. Our ability to continue to police lawful peaceful protest was quite frankly compromised by the actions of those who instead undertook the actions of a mob and engaged in criminal acts, and it was necessary, and decisions were made by our operational commanders and by our major [inaudible] commanders that it was necessary to disperse those crowds, and if the crowds refused to disperse, in order to prevent a breach of the peace, to take persons into preventive detention and that did take place over the course of the weekend."

Testimony on one such preventative detention was given by biochemistry student Kevin Gagnon, arrested with around 70 others at gunpoint off the floor of the U0fT gymnasium floor at 4am and held for over 60 hours before being released without charge on the stipulation he leave Toronto within 24 hours.

Don Davies, NDP : "70 out of 70 people had their charges dropped. ....Who made the decision to burst into that gymnasium and arrest 70 sleeping students?"

Blair : "The investigators who were investigating that case and I must tell you it's a very complicated case involving a great deal of evidence which I'm not going to be able to disclose and discuss with you here today."

Davies : "Can we have the names of the investigators who made that decision?"
Blair : "I don't have them here with me today."
Davies : "Could you undertake to provide that to the committee?
Blair : Yes.

Side note : Davies asked about police officers covering up or removing their name badges and Blair responded that it was against his rules so the "approximately 90 officers" who were identified as going badgeless will probably face disciplinary action in the form of loss of one day's pay.

Ok, back to 'preventive detention'.

Roger Gaudet, Bloc : "I saw the pictures. How come you didn't arrest these people who were masked? You entered into a university gym and you arrested people who were sleeping at 4am. This wasn't Halloween; this was June and yet they were masked. How come you didn't arrest them? They were all together - it would have been easy to surround them and then you'd be finished for the whole weekend. Instead you let them be and you arrested poor students in the university in a gym. Show me the logic in that."

Blair : "This was a crowd of several thousand and for the police to penetrate that crowd in an effort to apprehend those individuals ...First of all they had not yet begun to riot tumultuously as they did the following day and so unfortunately there needs to be ..."

Gaudet : "But those people were masked. This wasn't a masquerade. You know what you had to do. You should have arrested them right away but no, the police went into a school the next morning in a university. This is a farce."

Blair : The decision was made not to try to penetrate this crowd because it would have created a more dangerous situation, and in fact an operational decision was made by investigators that a safer place to apprehend people who they believed were involved in criminal activity was in the school gymnasium away from this crowd. That that was a safer thing to do. Our responsibility is to maintain the rule of law and protect the public but also to do our job in such a way which does not compromise public safety and a decision was made not to try to penetrate this crowd to remove this group but to rather do it in a more safe environment, which is why the arrests were made in a school gymnasium in the very early hours of the morning as opposed to out on the street where a riot might have ensued."

Insert joke here about the drunk looking for his car keys under the streetlight because there's more light there.

Maria Mourani, Bloc : "You stated that you made a choice to conduct the arrests in the gymnasium so you're starting from the premise ... they presumed that there were Black Blocs in the gymnasium?"

Blair : "The police had reason to believe that the people they were arresting were involved in criminal activity and there was a number of different investigations .. evidence had been gathered ..."

Mourani : "You had evidence. You say you had evidence. So why is it that the people in the gymnasium all had their charges dropped? Maybe one or two still have charges outstanding because they refuse to plead guilty..."

Blair : I don't have the details ... I can only offer you my understanding of the explanation I have received as to why those charges were dropped and it was because the police did not have the appropriate warrant for the apprehension of those individuals. But that does not negate the fact that they had evidence to make an arrest."

Mourani : "What you're saying is that they had no warrant to have some one hundred people arrested in a gymnasium ... they ended up in a detention centre where their individual rights were violated... there was no warrant for that arrest that was conducted in that gymnasium? That's what I understood just now."

Blair : "The circumstances of that arrest required what is known as a Feeney warrant and the police did not have the appropriate warrant to make those arrests. The Crown also..."

Mourani : "No warrant and they proceeded with those arrests. This is fantastic."

Blair : "The Crown also commented that the officers had reasonable and probable grounds to make that arrest but it was a technical problem with the way in which the arrest was done and that is why the charges were dropped. That's my understanding."

Here's my understanding.
If police knowingly arrest people illegally with the wrong warrant, they are safely assured that those arrests will never make it to court where gross violations of civil liberties like "preventive detention" can be aired and challenged.

And let's not forget the Canadian grand-daddy of legalizing preventive detention, the Combating Terrorism Act, has already passed second reading in the House and is well on the road to never being challenged by this committee.

Public Safety Committee Liberal MPs Andrew Kania and Mark Holland, as already noted by Kady and blogged by Boris, completely avoided any questioning of Blair yesterday as to violations of civil liberties. Not word one. Kady :

"This, by the way, is what happens when the Liberals are terrified to be targeted by Conservative Party InfoAlerteBots accusing them of being insufficiently supportive of police: not a single question about civil liberties or the treatment of the summit detainees, but long, meandering lines of questioning on logistical decisions and, if they can manage it, fake lakes.".

Yeah, well the Libs voted for the Combating Terrorism Act last month too.

Update : Also see Pogge : Preventative detention.
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Update #2 : Chief Blair explained more about preventative detention towards the end of the meeting when Kania asked why so many arrests at G20, none at G8:

"People were apprehended and detained under that [breach of the peace] legislation [of the criminal code] without intention of bringing them up on criminal charges because there is no charge under breach of the peace. It is simply a preventative detention to maintain the public peace."

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G20 - Who gave the orders?

Oddly, Media Co-op has an opinion piece up, criticizing Paul Jay for doing opinion pieces like this one above.

Meanwhile, in an alternate universe :

After an emotional morning-long debate, city council voted 36-0 to "commend the outstanding work" of Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, his officers and other police forces working during the G20 summit in Toronto.

Then they all signed another one of those "Please, sir, can I have another?" greeting cards everyone is sending to Steve lately and fired it off to him, just in case he missed their public endorsement of Lockdown Toronto on the news.

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