| Some Calgarians planning to protest June’s G8 Summit in Kananaskis say they don’t believe conciliatory messages from police and have no interest in talking with them about their plans.
Police have been meeting regularly with protesters and protest groups in the months leading up to the G8 in an effort to discuss issues and, in the words of police, diffuse the potential for violence during the summit.
RCMP Sgt. Mike O’Rielly and Calgary Police Service Inspector John Middleton-Hope, from the G8 Police Community Relations Group, held a public meeting at the University of Calgary last week. They say the goal of such meetings, and the dozens of others with individual community and protest groups, is to open lines of communication and come up with ways of dealing with conflicts that may arise during the G8 Summit.
However, some protesters say the police conducted similar acts prior to past global meetings, such as the Summit of the Americas in Quebec and G20 meetings in Ottawa, only to abandon them in favour of tear gas and billy clubs on the front lines of the demonstrations.
"We are not interested in negotiating with police until they apologize for, frankly, the lies… that have gone on in the past," says Grant Neufeld, a local anti-G8 activist. "We have consistently and repeatedly seen (negotiations)…. and when we come to the event, police action shows everything done up to then was lip service.
"We simply do not trust (police) because of actions taken by police services in the past."
Joe Nelson, another Calgarian planning to protest the G8, says he doesn’t believe that police are genuinely interested in what protesters have to say.
"(Police) are going to crack down. This is just a PR exercise to make it look like, and to let the media see, that they are listening," Nelson says.
"They have to have some good PR for when they crack heads, which they invariably will do."
But other activists at the meeting praised the police for reaching out to the community and urged them to do anything they can to combat violent protests and make sure there is an opportunity for legal, peaceful dissent.
O’Rielly rejected the notion that police are simply paying lip service to protest groups. Although he acknowledged mistakes had been made by police in the past, he says the G8 is an opportunity to create a new relationship between police and dissenters for their mutual benefit.
"No one is blameless, no one is innocent, when violence occurs," O’Rielly says. "We can throw barbs at each other all day… but what did we accomplish in the end?"
He adds that meetings with any community organization concerned about the G8 or related protests will continue in the hopes that some of the violence seen at other meetings can be avoided.
"I recognize the mistrust… but are we going to overcome it? We have to come up with a way to deal with this," he says. |
