A-Infos (en) MTL ACTIVISTS JAILED FEB 18: UPDATE

[Bernard Cooper <bernard@infobahnos.com>]

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     A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
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Last Wednesday, three of our comrades were arrested without warrant early
in the morning. These activists, as well as others, are being fingered by
the authorities for having allegedly “assaulted” a city prosecutor on
February 5, at a pre-trial hearing related to Dec 3 -97’s food
expropriation action at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Patrick Borden, Yves
Manseau and Davida (“Dee”) Lecomte are active in the Defense committee for
the anti-hunger activists arrested Dec 3. They are also involved with
Citizens Opposed to Police Brutality (French acronym is COBP), a radical
collective that does copwatch work, and investigates cases of police
brutality or police slayings of civilians. 

Montreal police laid criminal charges against the three mentioned above, as
well as 3 or 4 other activists. 2 (or 3) of them are involved with the
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) or are from Ontario. The last
individual charged is Alexandre Popovic, a well known activist in
Montreal’s anarchist community. Alex was not found at home when the police
came to try and arrest him on Wednesday morning. His roommates and all of
us in the radical movement deplore the police’s repression campaign, and we
are concerned about his whereabouts and his safety. Until Alex resurfaces
from the “underground”, the situation here remains in crisis. 

BACKGROUND:
This latest spat of police zealotry stems from a pre-trial hearing last Feb
5, when some 20 or so activists arrest on Dec 3 were to appear in municipal
court to register their plea of not guilty to the charges. Normally this is
a fairly quick and routine event. The courtroom was filled with a couple of
dozen supporters, and we watched as charges were read and pleas entered.
When Patrick Borden went up, the judge notified him that the authorities
did not have his photo and fingerprints. Borden explained that given that
one of the activists had been manhandled and illegally strip-searched, then
arrested for simply taking down names of officers when he presented himself
to be photoed and fingerprinted, he was reluctant to go to the police
station. Also, the police had this information from previous arrests. The
judge ignored this and ordered that he be immediately taken by police to be
photoed. Borden requested that a civilian witness accompany him, but this
was also ignored. Three hulking pigs started to approach him to drag him
off, when the audience erupted in anger against this ugly display of state
power. Insults were hurled at a now red-faced judge, who then threatened to
have the courtroom evacuated. He declared that for the rest of the day’s
proceedings, all activists except for the one registering her or his plea
would not be allowed in the court room. 

Activists then went out into the hall, and we waited until Borden was
released. Soon we were informed that the day’s hearing had been suspended.
A gray-suited security person came out to the crowd with a scrap of paper
and read out the names of persons who would receive a summons for their
next hearing. We started to ask who was responsible for this decision, and
why is it that some of the persons that had been summoned for Feb 5 were
not even on the court rolls for that day. We also wanted to know why this
decision was taken, and also who was going to pay for the transport and
eating costs incurred by activists that had come in from Toronto. Also, how
were we to know that the next time we appear in court, it won’t again be a
waste of time. 

No answers were forthcoming, so we went to the prosecutors office to ask
him. He wasn’t there, so we waited for his return. When he did arrive, he
arrogantly refused to even address us, preferring instead to take refuge in
his office. This naturally angered the twenty or so activists present (in
court last Friday the police and provincial prosecutors lied and said we
were 40 to 50! This must be a first for cops INFLATING the number of
activists present at an event...) Soon the city prosecutor, Gerrard Lague,
came out of his rat hole and was surrounded by 6 or 7 gray-suited court
security personnel, who had to shove their way through the activists to get
him across the hall and to the stairs. The activists kept asking for
answers, confronting Lague with the fruit of his own repression. Here was
(the semblance of) a man who spent his life behind a desk bringing grief
and difficulty to people, mostly poor, who’s misfortune was to have fallen
into the criminal injustice system. Well on February 5, Lague got (a very
mild) taste of his own medicine. 

Of course the prosecutor got away from the activists without saying
anything to them. He could have easily coopted the situation by telling us
vague, meaningless inanities, like his bosses, the politicians, do. Indeed,
justice is blind, and stubborn too. 

No additional police (there were 2 there already) were called in to deal
with the situation, since it was merely a tempest in a teacup. The riot
squad could have very easily intervened, of course, since the municipal
courthouse is also police HQ in Old Montreal. The prosecutor left the scene
by getting his henchmen to shove us out of his way, and he skulked cowardly
off to lunch. We were left looking for answers, which were neither
forthcoming at City Hall, nor at the Provincial courthouse. 

SURPISE "ARRESTS" LAST WEDNESDAY
Everyone assumed the whole thing had blown over until last Wednesday, when
late in the day we learned that some of our comrades had been picked up at
their homes by the police. It was now nearly two weeks since the February 5
events, and it was not clear to us as to why our friends had been arrested.
At first, it was not even clear whether these were “arrests” in the normal
sense, or whether some sort of anti-gang laws had been invoked to deal with
the growing movement of radical dissent. Is “dealing” in radical ideas on
par with dealing in coke and heroin? (Actually, the state realizes that
radical ideas are more dangerous, even if less violent). 

When they came for Dee Lecomte, they did not have an arrest warrant,
claiming that she was not under arrest, but that she was simply being
brought to the police station to sign a promise to appear in court. She and
her house mate told the cops to get a warrant. The police threatened to
break the door down if they didn’t open up. She came out and went to the
station, only to call home some seven hours later. The police wanted her to
sign bail conditions that would have restricted her from doing her
activism, and when she refused, they then announced she was under arrest! 

Patrick Borden, we later found out, was awakened at 8 a.m. Wednesday only
to open his door to 5 police officers. He was held in isolation for some 28
hours, having been unable to reach his lawyer or notify anyone else. Until
the arraignment on the following day, no one seemed to know if he’d been
released or where he was. He was too tired to ask if the police had an
arrest warrant. 

ARRAIGNED IN COURT THURSDAY AFTERNOON
At the arraignment, we learned that our three comrades, Patrick, Dee and
Yves, were charged with the following gamut of charges: Dee and Patrick:
mischief, assault and unlawful assembly; Yves: unlawful assembly,
intimidation, mischief, and breach of bail condition. They were again
presented with the same bail conditions, and they refused. One bail
condition the prosecutor wanted was that Borden abstain from possessing any
weapons!! Were the police paranoid, or were they trying to demonize us??
Perhaps both. Next time, we’ll ask that the bail condition be more
specific: We should abstain from stockpiling nuclear devices, biological
weapons, or semtex.  

The bail conditions were refused because we had won a legal victory only
weeks earlier when judge Greenberg in Quebec Superior court deemed that it
was unconstitutional to impose bail conditions that prohibited a person
from demonstrating, or that could be opportune for the police. This was
further reinforced when judge Boillard, in another bail review hearing,
wondered if the police were simply trying to frustrate Yves Manseau’s
activism when they asked that he not be allowed to communicate with the
co-accused. 

DAY-LONG BAIL REVIEW ON FRIDAY ENDS WITH RELEASE
The bail review hearing was set for the next day, Friday. Security at the
courthouse during they two days was a spectacular display of  misplaced
concern: As Denis Arcand reported it in Saturday’s mass-circulation daily,
La Presse:

“Yesterday at the courthouse, the police deployed  security measures worthy
of something one would see at the trial of Carlos the Jackal. Riot police
were present, as well as armed constables equipped with walkie-talkies and
a video camera that constantly filmed the hallway. MUC (Montreal Urban
Community) police were also taking photos.”

The police should be more concerned with biker gangs that ram Camaros
through the courthouse doors when their members get arrested. 

On Friday morning, 11am, the bail hearing began. The prosecution had as its
witness Sgt. Detective Alain Richard, the man with a mission who
incidentally was not even present to witness the events of February 5th.
The specially assigned provincial prosecutor, Pierre Garon is another
joyless crown zealot; more testy and aggressive than the cold-fished Richard. 

Over the next six hours, with an hour or so’s break for lunch, the
prosecution spun us a tale about a frail city prosecutor, Lague, who had
been savaged and assaulted to such a point that he was psychologically
devastated and was on sick leave. We heard how the man who had lead and
“orchestrated” the whole thing was Yves Manseau, that he had in a “very
curt” manner intimidated a secretary into giving him the telephone number
of the city prosecutor’s boss, and that because she feared him, she gave
him the number. Apparently in doing so she violated some rule... 

As for Lague, the man feared for his security and barricaded himself in his
office. He frantically called the police when he thought the activists were
trying to break into his office. Because of some fuck-up, or because the
police just don’t like to rough-up crusty leftists, they did not respond to
his urgent appeals. Lague finally did come out of his office. We learned
that a security agent was struck over the head by Dee Lecomte, and that she
caused his knees to buckle! In all of this Manseau was dolling out
instructions, and the mob awaited his every word. Through out all this,
Borden was pushing Lague; his back, his sides, all around actually. What a
swift and darting rogue he must have been to get between the half-dozen or
so guards and Lague! Every sort of fabulous hearsay was permitted, seeing
that this was not the trial, but rather a bail hearing.

Without really being able to address the “facts” as they were presented by
the crown prosecutor, the accused activists did their best to either defend
themselves or have their lawyers cross examine the prosecution. Repeatedly,
the prosecution painted an image of the city prosecutor as a traumatized
man who is unable to work any longer because of his horrific confrontation
with anarchists, communists and persons with “political ideologies”. As
top-cop Alain Richard said when asked by one of the activists’ lawyers if
the objective of all this is to keep them from demonstrating, “no, its so
that Montrealers can freely walk about and lead a normal life...” No doubt,
normal and free of “political ideologies”, except for the normal ones like
neo-liberalism, capitalism, parliamentary statism, and if necessary, fascism. 

Yves Manseau’s self defense managed to place the surprise arrests in a
broader context of police repression and intolerance of any criticism of
how the police functions. Manseau’s work on investigating civilian deaths
at the hands of Montreal police, and specifically the COBP’s recently
granted permission to present a brief at a Commission that is looking at
the provincial police’s internal investigation process (Poitras
Commission), was mentioned. Were there possibly “opportune” reasons for the
police to be vigorously wanting to nail members of COBP? (Since the Dec 3
action, seven of the COBP collective’s activists have been jailed pending
bail hearings; have been illegally strip-searched (that is to say, searched
prior to being arrested); illegally arrested (that is to say, (i) after
being searched, and for reasons having nothing to do with the issue at hand
at the time of the search and arrest; and (ii) illegally arrested because
their was no accusation at the time of the arrest, nor was there any record
made of the “arrest”); assaulted in a police station; and verbally
threatened and intimidated. In all, these activists have spent about 28
“person-days” behind bars in the last ten weeks alone --will this be taken
into account if any of them are ever convicted?) 

Late in the day, the abyss was reached during the prosecutor’s questioning
of Dee Lecomte: -are you a leader or a follower?- neither, she responded.
-Is Manseau the leader of the COBP?- -we are a collective, he’s just a
spokesman. Prosecutor: -who orchestrated the Feb 5 action?-  Dee, pausing,
-injustice. Prosecutor: -in virtue of what authority do you tell the truth?
you don’t believe in god!- (the courtroom bursts into laughter) At this
point, the judge, no doubt a liberally-minded woman, intervened to rebuke
the prosecutor. 

The judge rendered her decision soon after. It is a decision that may put a
bit of a damper on police zealotry. She considered that the crimes the
activists are accused of are not serious, with a maximum of 6 months jail
and/or 2000$ fine. The Superior court judgment was also taken into account.
Judge Celine Lamontagne finally noted that the delay between the alleged
events (Feb 5) and the surprise arrests (Feb 18) undermines the
prosecutor’s claim that the accused pose a danger to society. In those 13
days there was ample time for recidivism. This was an important point,
especially for Yves Manseau, who faced remaining in jail until his trial
for breach of bail conditions. 

The judge offered new conditions to the activists. Along with notifying the
court of their residential addresses, of residing in Montreal (as opposed
to not leaving Montreal), and of staying away from the courts unless
directly involved, there was to be no contact between the accused and
Lague, the prosecutor, as well as the secretary that Manseau allegedly
“intimidated”, and the security guard who was bopped on the head so hard
that his knees buckled. This was more reasonable than the more punitive
original condition of having no contact among the accused. As well, there
was to be no demonstrating on private property without the prior consent of
the landlord, and to only be in demos that are peaceful and legal, and to
immediately leave them if they turn illegal. 

The accused accepted these conditions, and were liberated late Friday
evening from Riviere des Prairies jail. 

There still remains many questions unanswered, and they will likely not be
addressed before the trial, if it ever goes to trial. For instance, what
were the early morning “arrests” if there were no warrants, and the judge
deemed that the delay in arresting shows that there was no immanent danger
to society that could justify an arrest without warrant? Were these once
again “illegal” arrests? And when will we stop calling them so and start
calling them kidnappings? But then, the state’s henchmen don’t ever kidnap,
nor do they occasionally commit manslaughter or murder when civilians die
by their bullets or beatings. 

***************
Citizens Opposed to Police Brutality remembers Anthony  Griffin, who in
1987 was shot in the head by MUC police. He was 19 yrs old when he died. We
remember Richard Barnabe, a depressed cab driver, who in 1993 was beaten to
death in a police station. We also remember Martin Suazo, 23 yrs old, who
was shot in the head by MUC police officer Michel Garneau in 1995. They are
three of the 20 known police killings in Montreal since 1987. 



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