MONTREAL
(CUP) – An anti-police brutality protest on Mar. 15 turned ugly when
demonstrators and police clashed in the streets of downtown Montreal. Around
2,000 protesters turned out for the demonstration, gathering at the Berri-UQAM
metro station at 5pm before marching through the downtown area.
Some
demonstrators wore red squares around their right eye in solidarity with CEGEP
student Francis Grenier, whose right eye was injured last week when he was
reportedly hit with a flash grenade thrown by a police officer.
The
anti-police brutality demonstration, organized by the Collectif Opposé a la
Brutalité Policière (COBP), was marred by small groups of protestors who took
part in acts of sporadic violence. Projectiles were hurled at store windows and
police vehicles along St-Catherine St. after riot police stopped the march in
front of McGill’s Strathcona Music building and demonstrators diverted to
St-Catherine.
The
violence was widely condemned by other demonstrators, however, who responded to
most instances of vandalism by booing. After a masked man unsuccessfully tried
to force open an ATM machine with a garbage can, he was surrounded by the
crowd.
Shortly
after 7pm, roughly 200 demonstrators, most them masked, flooded down the
McTavish steps on to McGill’s lower campus. The crowd made its way past the
Redpath Museum, while one demonstrator stood atop its steps and led a chant in
French of, “Whose streets? Our streets!”
Police
used pepper spray on demonstrators on at least two different occasions in the
square to move the crowd away from police lines.
William
Karshaw, a participant in the protest, witnessed a friend of his get detained: “We
were just standing just like everyone else just watching. I guess he didn’t get
a chance to get out of the way fast enough, and he was thrown to the ground and
arrested,” Karshaw says. “We weren’t doing anything wrong … we were moving out
of the way.”
Eventually,
after about two hours of marching and clashing with police, the remaining
protesters were rounded up and arrested by the police. Each demonstrator was
accompanied by two officers to be frisked and have their bags searched before
being loaded onto STM buses to go to a detention centre.
The
officer said that there was no resistance from demonstrators. One demonstrator
was lead out of the group to an ambulance by two officers. In total, the
Service de police de la Ville de Montréal reported that over 150 people were
arrested, and seven officers injured.
With
files from Eric Andrew-Gee.
//Laurent Bastien Corbell and Erin Hudson, The McGill Daily (McGill University)
//Laurent Bastien Corbell and Erin Hudson, The McGill Daily (McGill University)
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