As Monday’s march for Sammy Yatim waded along Dundas, it was reflected across the entirety of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s tremendous glass visor. And yet it flowed beyond in both directions, a determined river moving through traffic, too large to be captured in a single image.
I don’t know how big the procession was. I’m no good at estimating crowds. But it occupied the width of Dundas for several blocks, a surge of people joined simultaneously in anger and cathartic release.
There had been yet another seemingly incomprehensible shooting death of a young man at the hands of police. But this time it was being acknowledged as the public tragedy it was.
The last time I experienced anything comparable was the day following the G20. That crowd was larger and even more emotional, the very act a defiant affirmation of the rights we had earlier been denied. But a similar outrage smouldered at the core: how could the very systems ostensibly set up to protect us so suddenly become our worst enemy?
The post-Yatim despair is of course narrower and more focused than that after the G20, and unlike three years ago is not necessarily a reaction to a large-scale breakdown of public institutions.
But not representing a large-scale breakdown of public institutions is a fairly low bar as far as injustices go.
This was a march in solidarity with an individual and with his family and his friends, and with an ideal that says that everyone – even those with mental illness or addictions or weapons or anything – is deserving of security and compassion.
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It is interesting to consider that, in the best-case scenario, Yatim would be alive, unharmed and possibly charged with sexual assault. At the beginning of the series of events that cascaded toward his death, he had allegedly exposed himself on a streetcar heading west on Dundas before midnight Saturday.
Specifically, as fellow passenger Jeremy Ing told me at the scene that night, Yatim “had stood up from his seat with his dick in his hand and also holding a knife.”
Ing had noticed this because the music on his headphones was “interrupted by the shrill screams of young girls from the back of the car.” (It’s unclear whether Yatim’s alleged display of his penis was directed at particular occupants of the vehicle.)
There are, as the maxim says, no perfect victims. And Yatim does not appear to have been an exception to the rule.
Perhaps because of the limited supporting evidence (or even a larger tendency to downplay sexual violence), this element of the story has not come up so much. But I like to think that people are aware of it, choose to weigh it against the nine bullets and a taser fired at Yatim, and are mature enough to grasp that the police response still appears to have been so excessive and disproportionate as to be outrageous.
The province’s Special Investigations Unit is looking into it. On Monday, police chief Bill Blair held a press conference to express his condolences to Yatim’s family and to assure the public that we have a “right to demand that the Toronto Police Service examine the conduct of its officers.” And the constable believed to have fired all nine bullets has been suspended with pay.
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There are also no perfect protests. Stupid chants like “Kill the killer cops” occasionally bubbled up in small pockets at the march. “COPS PIGS MURDERERS” was written in chalk on the side of 14 Division on Dovercourt, where the protest eventually wended its way. Two windows of a Dodge Grand Caravan belonging to a Global News crew were smashed.
But the most prominent chant was “Justice! For Sammy!” Also written in chalk on 14 Division was the relatively restrained “R.I.P. Sammy Yatim. F.T.P.” And the individual who broke the windows was apparently chased and hounded by others demanding to know why he had done so.
The anger sometimes boiled over. Early along the protest route, some marchers broke off and charged the doors of 52 Division. The police defended the building, and organizers encouraged people to return to the street and continue on. They did.
At 14 Division, a protester said she was about to be taken inside by the cops, told she was under arrest for mischief. Others chanted “Let her go!” and, to their surprise, it actually worked.
An hour later, only two or three dozen protesters remained outside, resolutely planted in the middle of the road. Some were veterans of the Idle No More and Occupy movements. They ordered pizza from Pizza Pizza (two party size, both vegetarian), and the driver had no difficulty delivering it to activists sitting down outside a police station on a closed-off street.
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Nor are there perfect police, which is obviously evident from the incident from which this is all sprung. But the fallibility also finds expression in subtler ways.
Throughout the march, there were anecdotal reports of officers inappropriately smirking. On the roof of 14 Division, members of the police’s video services unit intimidatingly recorded the crowd.
When the woman who was arrested only to be let go shared her story with media, an officer standing behind her openly scoffed.
For the most part, however, police were thoroughly polite. Which is really the minimum expectation but was still appreciated. They did what they had to do and they did it professionally and sometimes with a measure of kindness.
It may have helped that there was so much media present. But even toward the end, when I was the only journalist around (and with nothing identifying me as such), things were cool.
As the last people were departing, a senior officer thanked one of the key activists for helping make it all go so smoothly.
It’s our responsibility as citizens to rage against the abuses, both individual and systemic, that plague our society. Anger is a vital force for creating change. But it is not the only one. And over the course of a walk along Dundas from Yonge to Dovercourt, that anger transformed and evolved.
Just past midnight, after all had wrapped up, Shameless magazine’s Sheila Sampath tweeted, “Toronto. I love you for knowing the difference between right and wrong; for showing up.”
Original Article
Source: NOW
Author: Jonathan Goldsbie
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