Police officers in riot gear walk in front of a burning police car during a protest against the G20 Summit in downtown Toronto, June 26, 2010.
Photograph by: Mark Blinch, Reuters
TORONTO — Toronto Police and their partner police forces during the G20 Summit were caught flat-footed by the "scope and intensity" of the "sustained, serious and widespread criminality and public disorder" they faced, an internal force after-action review admits.
Postmedia News obtained an advance copy of the 70-page document, posted late Thursday on the police website.
The report, written by unidentified senior Toronto officers and civilians who reviewed extensive video footage and police files, paints a terrifying, almost minute-by-minute portrait of a modern mob in full throttle.
"I lived through it," Chief Bill Blair told Postmedia News in an exclusive telephone interview Thursday evening, adding he still found reading the report and its startling chronology sobering. It brought back his worst moments, when after the Saturday rioting he watched "images of people smashing my town and burning police cars."
In a brief foreword to the report, Blair acknowledges that, "Many things we did very well. Some things we did not."
The review identifies critical weak spots, among them a lack of mobility of well-trained public order units (POUs), which couldn't get to the fast-changing multiple locations where protesters were using "Black Bloc" tactics; the reliance upon less-trained officers who may have inflamed the crowd temperature by their approach and long delays in the processing of protesters arrested after a crowd was "kettled", or contained, on the summit's final night and who were given no chance to leave the scene before being arrested.
Blair told Postmedia News the "kettling" tactic wasn't effective because "the threat was contained in that crowd."
If the report is not the mea culpa police critics would demand, it is at the least a frank and sobering assessment of a shocking weekend in Canadian police history.
In some instances, a collision of bureaucratic values — the Toronto Police way of doing business versus that of the provincial court services in charge of processing prisoners, for example — seems to have exacerbated problems.
The detention centre in the city's east end was "bottlenecked something awful," with some people waiting 36 hours before seeing a justice of the peace.
"Mistakes were made there," Blair said. "That has to be done better."
In other places, the report hints at clashes among the multiple police jurisdictions involved: the RCMP, which led the Integrated Security Unit, the Ontario Provincial Police, Peel Regional Police and 22 other police forces.
It is the Toronto force, which had on the Saturday and Sunday more than 4,050 of its 5,740 officers working the G20, which was left to carry the can — or, as the report more delicately put it, "left to address some of the controversial issues . . . that were in fact the collective responsibility of a number of police agencies."
But the greatest challenge faced by the police, the review says, "was the virtually unprecedented situation of having to consider the physical safety of large numbers of non-POU officers who possessed neither the full range of less-lethal use of force options nor the specialized protective equipment required to safely challenge riotous demonstrators."
As a result, groups of vulnerable officers on bicycles and horses were regularly ordered out of various downtown areas when protesters were seen arming themselves or when hostile crowds were physically threatening to overpower police.
No fewer than eight times on the Friday and Saturday — the latter the day violence and vandalism reached a peak — officers made "assist police" calls on their radios, the traditional cry for help from a cop in serious trouble.
Another three times, they called for POU backup, one an "urgent" plea for help from officers who were surrounded.
Public order officers arrived to their embattled Queen Street West location within minutes, but it took almost another hour for the trapped group to be safely extracted.
Such incidents were exceptionally difficult for his men and women, Blair said, because "with every fibre of their being" they want to rush to the aid of police or civilians in danger.
What is most unsettling about the report is the frantic pace of events and the sophistication of non-peaceful protesters.
The G20 weekend exactly a year ago was preceded by a week of well-organized demonstrations, most of them peaceful.
What distinguished them from regular protests, however, was "the considerable degree of planning and co-ordination linking the many disparate events together." Organizers even had spotters, just as the police did, on a downtown rooftop, directing crowd movements.
They arrived in the hundreds on buses, most from Montreal. Starting at 4:51 p.m. on that kickoff Friday and ending at 7:51 p.m. on the following Saturday, a total of six Toronto Police cars were burned — and by the final torching, firefighters were asking for a police escort before going in.
The weekday events, the report says, acted "as a launching pad for the more militant protests of the G20 weekend itself," just as the smaller groups of violent protesters, the so-called Black Bloc, used the crowds as protective cover. But the Black Bloc, usually described as comprising a tiny slice of the protesters, didn't number merely in the dozens. The review is replete with descriptions of significant-sized groups — ranging from 30 to 300 — at specific spots downtown.
"They learned how to spread us out," Blair said, and could move faster than the heavily protected POUs. "They go to school on everything we do."
He was reluctant to go into detail how the force is implementing the report's recommendations but said a key focus will be to make the POUs more mobile.
The city was profoundly affected by the long, large protests spread out in the narrow core. At one point for instance, there were as many as 10,000 people at Queen's Park and another group of 1,000 just down the street outside the U.S. Consulate.
Over the weekend, protesters attacked the underground PATH walkway system, threatened a soldier's repatriation ceremony directly behind police headquarters, blocked major intersections and delayed dialysis patients scheduled for treatment. Where host cities of previous G20 summits had two years to prepare, Toronto had just six months.
Blair spoke to Vancouver Chief Jim Chu the morning after the Stanley Cup riots there.
"I know what you're going through," he told him. In little more than a year, they had become two of the loneliest men in the country.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
Postmedia News obtained an advance copy of the 70-page document, posted late Thursday on the police website.
The report, written by unidentified senior Toronto officers and civilians who reviewed extensive video footage and police files, paints a terrifying, almost minute-by-minute portrait of a modern mob in full throttle.
"I lived through it," Chief Bill Blair told Postmedia News in an exclusive telephone interview Thursday evening, adding he still found reading the report and its startling chronology sobering. It brought back his worst moments, when after the Saturday rioting he watched "images of people smashing my town and burning police cars."
In a brief foreword to the report, Blair acknowledges that, "Many things we did very well. Some things we did not."
The review identifies critical weak spots, among them a lack of mobility of well-trained public order units (POUs), which couldn't get to the fast-changing multiple locations where protesters were using "Black Bloc" tactics; the reliance upon less-trained officers who may have inflamed the crowd temperature by their approach and long delays in the processing of protesters arrested after a crowd was "kettled", or contained, on the summit's final night and who were given no chance to leave the scene before being arrested.
Blair told Postmedia News the "kettling" tactic wasn't effective because "the threat was contained in that crowd."
If the report is not the mea culpa police critics would demand, it is at the least a frank and sobering assessment of a shocking weekend in Canadian police history.
In some instances, a collision of bureaucratic values — the Toronto Police way of doing business versus that of the provincial court services in charge of processing prisoners, for example — seems to have exacerbated problems.
The detention centre in the city's east end was "bottlenecked something awful," with some people waiting 36 hours before seeing a justice of the peace.
"Mistakes were made there," Blair said. "That has to be done better."
In other places, the report hints at clashes among the multiple police jurisdictions involved: the RCMP, which led the Integrated Security Unit, the Ontario Provincial Police, Peel Regional Police and 22 other police forces.
It is the Toronto force, which had on the Saturday and Sunday more than 4,050 of its 5,740 officers working the G20, which was left to carry the can — or, as the report more delicately put it, "left to address some of the controversial issues . . . that were in fact the collective responsibility of a number of police agencies."
But the greatest challenge faced by the police, the review says, "was the virtually unprecedented situation of having to consider the physical safety of large numbers of non-POU officers who possessed neither the full range of less-lethal use of force options nor the specialized protective equipment required to safely challenge riotous demonstrators."
As a result, groups of vulnerable officers on bicycles and horses were regularly ordered out of various downtown areas when protesters were seen arming themselves or when hostile crowds were physically threatening to overpower police.
No fewer than eight times on the Friday and Saturday — the latter the day violence and vandalism reached a peak — officers made "assist police" calls on their radios, the traditional cry for help from a cop in serious trouble.
Another three times, they called for POU backup, one an "urgent" plea for help from officers who were surrounded.
Public order officers arrived to their embattled Queen Street West location within minutes, but it took almost another hour for the trapped group to be safely extracted.
Such incidents were exceptionally difficult for his men and women, Blair said, because "with every fibre of their being" they want to rush to the aid of police or civilians in danger.
What is most unsettling about the report is the frantic pace of events and the sophistication of non-peaceful protesters.
The G20 weekend exactly a year ago was preceded by a week of well-organized demonstrations, most of them peaceful.
What distinguished them from regular protests, however, was "the considerable degree of planning and co-ordination linking the many disparate events together." Organizers even had spotters, just as the police did, on a downtown rooftop, directing crowd movements.
They arrived in the hundreds on buses, most from Montreal. Starting at 4:51 p.m. on that kickoff Friday and ending at 7:51 p.m. on the following Saturday, a total of six Toronto Police cars were burned — and by the final torching, firefighters were asking for a police escort before going in.
The weekday events, the report says, acted "as a launching pad for the more militant protests of the G20 weekend itself," just as the smaller groups of violent protesters, the so-called Black Bloc, used the crowds as protective cover. But the Black Bloc, usually described as comprising a tiny slice of the protesters, didn't number merely in the dozens. The review is replete with descriptions of significant-sized groups — ranging from 30 to 300 — at specific spots downtown.
"They learned how to spread us out," Blair said, and could move faster than the heavily protected POUs. "They go to school on everything we do."
He was reluctant to go into detail how the force is implementing the report's recommendations but said a key focus will be to make the POUs more mobile.
The city was profoundly affected by the long, large protests spread out in the narrow core. At one point for instance, there were as many as 10,000 people at Queen's Park and another group of 1,000 just down the street outside the U.S. Consulate.
Over the weekend, protesters attacked the underground PATH walkway system, threatened a soldier's repatriation ceremony directly behind police headquarters, blocked major intersections and delayed dialysis patients scheduled for treatment. Where host cities of previous G20 summits had two years to prepare, Toronto had just six months.
Blair spoke to Vancouver Chief Jim Chu the morning after the Stanley Cup riots there.
"I know what you're going through," he told him. In little more than a year, they had become two of the loneliest men in the country.
cblatchford@postmedia.com
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