Quotes from eye-witness stories

Joshua – “We cupped our hands as if offering water and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Shuffling sideways on the crowded street corner I looked again into the next officer’s eyes: ‘Peace be with you.’ ‘Peace be with you.’ ‘Peace be with you.’ ‘Peace be’ – Quick. Cold. Rough. Two police seized me by the arms and pulled me off.”

Karen – “I’ve never been afraid to go to a public demonstration…But now all that has changed.”

“I did not see either officer wearing a badge”

Jean-Nicolas – “A police officer with a bicycle placed in front of me, shouted ‘Get back!’ and struck me a violent blow in the belly with the handlebars!…That's when I asked the officer, very politely : ‘Sir, may I have your name and your badge, please.' He responded by shouting ‘Catch him!’…The officer who hit me with his bicycle then addressed to me, looked into my eyes and said a sentence I'll never forget : ‘Now, do you still want my name and my badge?’”

Dylan – “It was never explained how sitting was a crime.”

Josh – “Made me feel like a criminal. Took all power of my own life away.”

Becky – “…I quickly checked the tag. Honduras. I thanked them for the sweater, made by impoverished Honduran people, sewing clothes for rich people in exchange for slave wages and horrendous conditions. I suggested that if the police continue protecting the G8/G20, perhaps a few more foreign sweat shops can be set up so that at the next summit, prisoners can have some cheap blankets. I think that one of them got the joke.”

Todd – “…one of, if not the worst example of police brutality and aggression ever witnessed in modern Canadian history!”

Adil – “Clearly they were making charges up.”

Chris – “I have the badge numbers of 2 officers specifically who denied me water, my right to my attorney and bathroom facilities on a number of occasions.”

“We told them why did they do this to us and they told us that it was not our business and it was because of the G20″

“I got up, dazed and stunned by what had happened. I held out my left hand: the ball of my thumb had swollen up twice its size and was a very angry purple. Surprisingly, I was very calm –the assault had been so quick. All four cops had me surrounded against the window of Steve’s.”

“Unsustainable industries that are largely subsidized by the G20 are creating the climate crisis. It was really important for me to make these issues known”

Simon – “when asked why we are not receiving our lawyers, phonecall, or bathroom break they shrugged indicating they were too busy while walking seemingly aimlessly”

Derek – “Boxed in without a place of exit”

“A female cop without asking my permission took off my hijab [head scarf] and sweater leaving me in my tank top … in front of all the detainees in the alley way”

Stephen – “I heard no announcement that what had once been the designated protest zone had been deemed an unlawful assembly area”

“‘I was helping an old man! I was helping an old man!’, I scream. ‘Shut the fuck up, you piece of shit!’, he replies, and hits me with his club or punches me in the forehead”

Nat – “The man pleaded with them saying ‘I can’t run faster, I have a disability’ over and over again. One police officer yelled ‘you’re lying’ and beat him several times with a baton.

“The 2 officers asked to search our bags…we had heard that under the public works act they could legally do a search for no reason. “

“Eventually the [police] car stopped outside a small house … and let me off”

“I am a witness to police abuse.”

Alison – “One girl in my cage who began to cry said ‘I just don’t understand how people can treat other people like this’”

“The complete opposite of what everyone else saw”

“I witnessed police confiscating personal property and demanding they search peoples’ belongings”

Stephen – “‘You cocksucker Black Bloc douchebags’, yelled an officer directly into my ear, ‘You think you are so fucking tough? How are you now without your faggot friends?’”

“shut the fuck up you’re all under arrest that’s why you’re here”

“Repeated requests for phone calls and lawyers were denied.”

Siobhan – “they were going to strip search me … this feeling, this experience, is the hardest for me to reconcile and one of the times in my life I have felt the most powerless”

“I don’t know why weapons were used, firing into a crowd of innocent protesters”

Chris – “I was told “Go F*ck yourself” by one cop”

Greg – “…the police continued to close in on us telling us to disperse. We responded saying you have us boxed in we can’t disperse…”

“undercover cops revealed themselves while in court services truck, some of them were yelling and inciting dangerous activity while pretending to be part of protest”

Marek – “They kept pushing us closer and closer together and banging on their shields, people starting panicking and yelling out, ‘Where are we supposed to go?’”

“me and my friend were grabbed by the officers and told to take off our bags and show them our ID”

Police Charge after O Canada

“i was searched about 12 times for no reason”

David – the police “left both cars behind, windows open and unattended”

Sunni – “it still hurts my soul”

“All I could do was watch as a fellow protester (who had done nothing more than stand on the street holding a sign) got tackled, kicked, and dragged by a group of cops.”

Jonah Hundert – “The other fellow in our cage was a diabetic. He was already sick when he joined us, but he was clearly getting worse by the second. We literally watched him fading away in front of us. For four bloody hours we tried to get medical attention for him.”

Diane Marina – “Slowly we lost our civil rights, including the freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the overall freedom to participate. By Sunday afternoon, they were using anything they could to single us out as anarchists.”

“My girlfriend, who was standing next to me and calm, was struck on the head, arm, hips, and kicked in the leg by a police officer, leaving a large bruise. She later vomited and suffered from blurry vision. Medics at the scene diagnosed a concussion”

Julia Croome – “I was there as a monitor for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. . . like many others, I was never given an opportunity to remove myself from the intersection”

Johanna Lewis – “I cannot stress this enough: it was a completely peaceful protest. People were being arrested in a brutal, violent, and seemingly random way.”

Taiva Tegler – “I saw many injured detainees with arms in slings and faces bruised and swollen being led quickly with their ankles chained”

Seamus Wolfe – “Five officers grabbed me, hit me repeatedly with batons and fists, threw me to the concrete, crushed knees into my cheek bone, back and thighs, dragged me on the pavement and put handcuffs on me”.

Maximilian Pacheco – “It is important to note the horrid conditions in the jail. The cells, which were over-glorified dog cages, were often over-crowded.”

“They were going to release us until this one cop came and saw that we had the legal number written on our arms. She then said that we were elegible for arrest.”

Sherry B. Good – “I couldn’t sleep last night. I took the day off work, I’m so upset”

Philip Boyle – “At no time during the detention was anyone in my cage allowed to speak with a lawyer”

Terra Dafoe – “In a matter of seconds, without warning, we were trapped. Our questions were met with blank stares, our panic with more pushing, complaints with arrest”

Natasha Borris – “I have been having nightmares”

“several police officers lining the west side of the street had removed their names and badge numbers”

Trevor Grant – “we were staging a peaceful protest when riot police surrounded us on all sides and would not let us leave”

Robert Bertuzzi – “police said they had the right to conduct these searches”

“they were detaining me until I told them where I was staying in Toronto”

“They demanded identification and searches of bags and persons, without cause, and under the threat of physical violence, detention and legal action”

Marc Gleeson – “I was held for 21 hours for peacefully protesting.”

Bethany Horne – “blood poured out of his head, down his face and on to my friends jacket, dripping on my pants”

“I was beat roughly 20 times with batons”

Adrian Naylor – “Without provocation, they attacked our peaceful protest”