Police should prevent summit violence by staying home

Re: Ottawa police brace for G8, May 16.

Police Chief Vince Bevan's comments are biased and inflammatory to potential protesters.

The police should take a day off during the G8 summit. Take a couple of days off. This would save taxpayers a lot of money. It would also prevent violence in the streets.

It is police provocation that causes violence every time. From Toronto, Queen's Park, in June, 2000 to Quebec City, April, 2001 to Ottawa, November, 2001, it was the police who randomly attacked innocent protesters allegedly because of isolated incidents of vandalism which may or may not have been caused by protesters.

Most protesters take their causes very seriously as well as their tactics. Bystanders sometimes join in with no sense of rules or consequences.

The police are making big wages for being out there intimidating youths and other citizens who care enough to go out on the streets to exercise their democratic right of dissent. Many decent people, especially older people, are now afraid to attend protests.

The media are accomplices in the unjust behaviour by police; not every journalist by any means, but certainly the owners and the editorial boards of the mainstream media such as the CanWest/Southam chain. These media do not reveal the brutality of the police toward women, youths and even the elderly at protests.

The source of the problem lies within the police forces and the contempt that many police officers have for protesters whom they do not know as people or understand in any depth.

Maybe if the police started to look at protesters as people, they might begin to have a different attitude. But considering those big fat paycheques, it is doubtful this will happen any time soon.

Jennifer Tsun,  McDonalds Corners