by catinthefunnyhat » Thu May 03, 2012 7:23 am
Those Black Bloc jerks smashed up Toronto when the G8/G20 were here a few years ago. Then the police made things vastly worse -- basically, despite their ridiculously vast numbers (they trucked in cops from across the country), they allowed the BB to run amok one day, and then punished/abused peaceful protesters the next. It was horrible. (From a DnD nerd's perspective, and obviously grossly over-simplifying: chaotic evil vs. lawful evil). Those two events together did a lot to break the trust between various groups -- civilians, activists, police, left, right... -- and the city is still healing. Some of those Black Bloc were likely police agents provocateurs (sounds like a tinfoil-hat theory, but this has been proven in other, similar events), but I suspect most were, yeah, just angry people looking to smash things. Many of the hardest-hit businesses were Mom & Pop operations, hardly "big Capital" or the 1%!
Oddly, the Occupy movement, and the police response to it, ended up kind of helping with the healing here. Those protests were peaceful, and the local police actually cooperated with the protestors to a large extent (for example, using the "people's microphone" instead of a bullhorn to communicate with the crowd). In the end, when the police had to remove them from the city park where they'd been encamped for months, the eviction transpired peacefully and relatively quickly, with only one arrest and no charges laid, and no loss or damage to the protestors' property. Everyone was watching pretty closely, as the city was still very much on edge from the riots 2 years prior, and the city kind of breathed a collective sigh of relief at the end.
If you want drama to stop following you everywhere, try letting go of the leash.