File Under : Pathétique.
Quebec Police Admit Protesters Were Undercover Agents But Deny Wrongdoing
August 24, 2007
CityNews.ca Staff
After an embarrassing day for the Québec Provincial Police, where they first denied and then confirmed they had undercover officers acting as protesters at the ‘Three Amigos’ summit in Montreal last weekend, many questions still linger.
At a news conference scheduled by the QPP to answer questions regarding their behavior on Friday afternoon, Inspector Marcel Savard defended the three and insisted they were not there to provoke demonstrators. He also says one of the officers was given a rock by protesters but the officer had no intention of using it.
After originally denying it, the force has admitted the trio was involved in the protest after a video clip of the them showed up on the popular website, Youtube.com. But the provincial police are denying they were attempting to provoke protesters into violence and say the three officers were planted in the crowd to locate any protesters who were not peacefully demonstrating.
Blah blah blah…
See also : Campbell Clark, Ingrid Peritz and Ian Bailey, Sûreté du Québec to review practices: Police say undercover officers were not at protest to incite violence; union leader to file charges, Toronto Globe & Mail, August 25, 2007. The union leader who confronted the undercover officers, Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada president David Coles:
…said he believes the police acted on political orders to discredit protesters, and that an inquiry would find that politicians gave the police orders, just as they did at the 1997 APEC protests in Vancouver. “They were sent in to agitate, to try to create trouble,” Mr. Coles said. “I say the politicians are in this up to their eyeballs. They were at APEC and they are in this one.” Martin Courcy, an expert in conflict management who has advised several police forces in Quebec, including the SQ, says the mere fact an officer was holding a rock was an act of provocation. “They could serve as models to others, and in that sense there’s provocation,” he said. Police infiltration is meant to defuse conflicts. “In this case, they didn’t defuse conflict, they provoked conflict.”
Oh, and Stuart Neatby with ‘More on police provocateurs’, The Dominion, August 24, 2007, in which he claims “During a trial against protest organizers of an anti-G20 demonstration in Montreal in 2003, police were forced to admit to having 23 plainclothes officers infiltrating a demonstration of about 1000…”
