The Toronto/Huntsville G20/G8 summits are well behind us now, hopefully never to be repeated. I've been waiting a bit to see how this all settles out, but I certainly have opinions of my own and they're not particularly surprising.
I have already addressed the strategic mistakes made in holding these things in a major city ("If You Build It, Will They Come?", AotF 21 June 2010), so I'll move to the tactical execution of the $1B in security for it. In short, the ball was fumbled, dropped, then kicked out of bounds in that order.
The PR battle was in danger from the get-go due to cost, and not helped at all by the "5 metre" rule. It is not unreasonable to expect people approaching or entering a secure area to submit to being searched as a condition to proceed, and that is a standard warning on any military establishment in Canada already. Somehow this turned into a tempest in a civil-rights teapot, another failure of leadership and communications.
The "drop" came on the Saturday when the vandals went to town and the only police presence was the burning police cars. Not only did this this start with no useful police presence, it continued that way. If there was ever a time to send in the riot squad and crack some heads, that was the time, place and the proper recipients. "Epic fail" by the police; I also like the French word for this sort of muddle: echec!
Phase Three, "kick it out of bounds" was on Sunday when the police overcompensated for their passivity the day before and penned people like cattle in various blocks near the event. The final roundup was the real problem, as even 4-5 hours after all of the summit attendees had left the police held milling groups of protesters, passers-by and local residents in a compressing ring in a couple of blocks (can't remember exactly where) and wouldn't let anyone through. So, if you lived there or were just walking through minding your own business you were swept up and held there for no good reason that even I could see, and I was watching it live.
I saw a lot of bad behaviour by the cops, and have read reports of a lot more. This again is a failure of leadership. Leadership is not "covering your ass", it's accomplishing the mission and looking after your people. In this case, if you're organizing security for this, "your people" include the public and business owners.
Acting like a bully has nothing to do with protecting the event or property; it's depressingly close to the fuckers who like to go out and smash stuff up. You're using the event to get your kicks and/or you're being carried away by the group/mob mentality. The job of the police is to separate the chaff from the wheat, not to throw it all in the silo. That bad metaphor aside, I just hope that the right lessons from this are learned in the law enforcement community
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