Oh, for the love of crumb cake. I wish the lot of you would quit being melodramatic.

Black Bloc members set police cars on fire, and allegedly beat at least one person trying to stop them from causing damage. What they did had the potential to cause a safety threat to everyone around them – including the rubberneckers – as well as massive property damage. The car that was burned next to Steve's Music Store, for example, could have caused massive structural damage. So yes, I'm defending pre-emptive detention; if the police sense an imminent threat, they have – and always have had – the authority to act.

I'm not sure how or why it cost $1B for the lot of them to do their jobs, so I'm with you there…but don't pretend that a group of anarchists will rest content just breaking windows.

Yeah, so, like, WHY DIDN'T THEY ARREST THEM WHEN THEY WERE SETTING CARS ON FIRE?

Last I checked, they did have food and water and toilets in the detention facility. It wasn't pretty, lord knows, those facilities never are, but with (some) exception, most of the arrestees didn't lack for necessities.

It does, but if a Black Bloc member jumps into your group, changes his shirt and starts walking with you, and you don't disassociate yourself from him, you are tacitly agreeing to a criminal associating with your group. Which, in my mind, justifies the detention, though perhaps not the arrests.

When these guys went around to protesting organizations prior to the G20 and offered "to speak for them", most (if not all) the organizations told the Black Bloc to take a hike. The same thing should have been done on the street.

If a criminal jumps into my car, I jump out.

If a criminal jumps into my group of friends as we walk down the street, we scatter.

In the context of the G20, I also flag down one of the thousand police officers who are in the immediate area and point them to the jerk who disturbed my afternoon constitutional.

Style – how did you get Red -99 – I would like that better than light green 63p rubbish I have now.

I hear you on that on. One concerted effort here on Mac on a MS thread was a brutal experince. But 500? What did you say to p**s them off?

Holy cow. In addition to the 500+ on th main post, you took multipl negative hits above 20-30 each tim you engaged. Ouch. Her's a couple of ups in compensation

I've been to lots of big events before. Including the Friday protests. And, provided you have a means of communicating with your friends, scattering from a threat usually is better than sticking around to find out how bad it gets. But my credentials to give my opinion notwithstanding, it's not about whether police believe what you tell them or take action based on your report. It's about you making a good faith attempt to be a good, responsible citizen.

If you're cattle driven into an enclosed area and not given an opportunity to disperse, even if you wanted to, if you're never told what's going on, or given reason for your detention and arrest, that's a different case entirely.

For the most part, though, the arrests were conducted among protesters marching outside the designated protest area, who did not disperse when instructed and given the opportunity to do so.

There were tons of people downtown, who, as I had done on Friday, went to the protests/riots on Saturday because they were curious and wanted to see what was going down. They claim to have been detained "just for standing around taking pictures."

Frankly, if you've been warned to stay away – and we all were – from what could turn into a violent protest, and you decide to go hang out anyway for the benefit of your facebook "friends", you don't get to complain later that you didn't have a good time. The people who live in the area and got caught up in the crossfire – and there were some, from what I can see – they have a case. I feel for them, because they did nothing to deserve having their mobility restricted by a bunch of lunatics in balaclavas (or cops riot gear, for that matter).

But the rest? The rest I have little sympathy for.

So, if you were warned to stay away lest the protests turn violent, it's therefore fine for the police to arrest you even if the protest doesn't turn violent. Or, even if you're nowhere near the protests? Again, non violent protesters were arrested, en masse, in the area designated as the official area for non-violent protests. People sitting around on the grass in Queen's Park, nowhere near a protest, were arrested. People walking down the street on their way to work nowhere near a protest were arrested. There were literally HUNDREDS of the people, people of the type you claim to have sympathy for, arrested and detained. I think we need to thoroughly investigate how that was allowed to happen.

So the cops who studiously ignored the barbequed police cars in the intersection are going to rush to act on your instructions when you point the finger?

You're being naive, Lynn. A decision was made – well above street-level – that the Black Bloc should be given free reign for a couple of hours. It wasn't an accident, it wasn't a question of limited resources, it wasn't anything but a deliberate choice by those in command.

So it's ridiculous that you think the average citizens in the vicinity had a responsibility to handle the situation, when the actual Police Forces – with their riot gear & their tear gas & their handcuffs & their overwhelming physical force – when all those official authorities were clearly not willing to get involved. At least not until the next day when they had some nice soft targets to bully and smack around.

This seems to be the main point of disagreement – if you protest, why should you expect to be detained at all? The fact that others might use your presence as cover for vandalism doesn't seem like a persuasive reason…And there are now enough stories and pictures of police misbehaviour to make me question the good faith of the officers – my favourite is the photo in the Star of an officer deliberately concealing his identity while booting a protester in the face, but I also enjoyed the police officer bullying people by claiming a right to search or disperse that simply never existed, not even under the misinterpreted 5-m law. .

I estimate that there weren't enough briefings for frontline officers encountering pedestrians and cyclists just outside the fence zone, where the interpretation of the regulations and public works law was correctly relayed or understood. It doesn't excuse, but it does contextualize.

All this being said, publications at the Star (and the Globe, too, I believe) made it quite clear that people who wanted to mill about the no-traffic zone could be asked to consent to a search or asked to move on. Similarly, if they didn't have a reason for being there – such as living or working – they could be asked to vamanos from the area. This same restriction is applied at airports every single day, I don't know how or why it somehow blow'd up over G20 weekend.

You keep insisting that the onus is on the public to justify themselves, to defend their motives for being there. This is 100% backwards in a free society. It is the police and the government that must justify their arbitrary and unjust actions to us, the people.

You are arguing for a police state, abdicating the police of their responsibility to safeguard our rights regardless of the actions of others. The police have all the power, all the equipment, all the cameras and manpower and weapons. They don't have less responsibility because of the protesters, they have MORE responsibility because of their greater knowledge of the situation, because of their training, because of their professionalism.

To argue, as you do, that we all ought to just hide in our homes because their might be trouble is to give the police and the thugs all the power to grant us our rights, if it pleases them, or to deny us our rights at their discretion.

It's a very worrying attitude, IMO.

Many of the people (hundreds and hundreds of them) were arrested more than 2.5 kilometers away from the outer security perimeter of the Summit. That's about a 25 minute walk, just to reach the edge of the 5 meter zone around the fence. They were in NO WAY WHATSOEVER threatening the security of the Summit. Unless there's now a suggestion that someone at Queen's Park was attempting to erect some sort of missile technology, the argument that this was about the security of the government leaders and the Summit site is completely moot in many of the cases of arrests and detention.

Yup, agreed. I think that the federal bodies – the RCMP and Commons – should certainly investigate what went on during the G20. It was, after all, their show, and if we ever do something like this again (lord, I hope not!) I want them to be able to say that they've learned from their past experiences and will do better in x, y, or z ways.

But, as I indicate above, running concurrent investigations won't really render a useful final report. You'll just end up with a bunch of people saying "well, we're not done looking into that yet", and then the committee hearings have the usefulness of a blue ribbon panel investigating the worth of the colour yellow.