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Ferguson: Lessons for Canada from a police debacle

Ferguson: Lessons for Canada from a police debacle

Things appear to be calming down in Ferguson, Mo., the suburb of St. Louis after two weeks of unrest following the police shooting of an unarmed black teen.

The crisis is far from over, as residents and civil rights advocates continue to demand answers in the Aug. 9 killing of Michael Brown. But Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has called off the national guard, deployed earlier this week, and police report the streets have been pretty quiet the last couple of days.

"This is truly the community of Ferguson," Capt. Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol, the black officer Nixon put in command after local police botch their initial response to protests about Brown's death, said according to Reuters. "We are headed toward a sense of peace for our community."

Brown's funeral is scheduled for Monday, though a local church planned a memorial service Friday evening, Reuters reported.

The post-mortem on how police dealt with the situation is likely to go on for months. Ferguson will join a long list of names associated with police mishandling of public disturbances: from the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010, Seattle's anti-WTO march and blockade in 1999, all the way back to the police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the race riots that burned American cities in the 1960s.

But whether the lessons of Ferguson will be heeded is open to question. The fact is those lessons were taught before, at some cost. They're well known but it hasn't prevented breakdowns that have led to destruction, injury and sometimes death.

The Ferguson riots came almost exactly 49 years after the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Watts erupted following the arrest of a black motorist. Six days of violence razed much of Watts' commercial district and took the lives of 34 people before 14,000 national guard troops came in to restore order.

[ Related: National Guard to withdraw from a quieter Ferguson ]

Inquiries launched after Watts and other riots in places like Newark, N.J., Detroit, San Francisco, Cleveland, and dozens of other places.

"What’s ironic is that they all came to the same conclusion: The riots were about far more than just the police," public health scholar Merlin Chowkwanyun wrote this week in the Washington Post.

"Yet politicians ignored the important diagnoses and recommendations. If history is any guide, the Ferguson riots will teach us nothing. In urban affairs, it turns out, past is often just prologue."

Ferguson, like those earlier clashes, seems rooted in the abiding racial and cultural divisions in American society. Canada hasn't been immune, with tensions between police and black communities in Toronto and Montreal, and First Nations across the country.

But a common element in protests that get out of control, whether race-based or not, is how the police responded.

Criminologist Rick Parent, a 30-year police veteran, says control evaporates when police are disconnected from the community, then chose the wrong tactics once trouble starts.

“That’s probably the most important part, having good solid relationships with the community prior to that happening. That’s a whole dynamic in itself," Parent, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University's School of Criminology, told Yahoo Canada News.

"Secondly, there’s the actual event when it occurs and how it is being handled by the police agencies; the different tactics they use, the way they work with the community or against the community, I guess you could argue in some cases.”

It doesn't have to be a community in a traditional sense, Parent noted. Protest groups, like those at the G20, constitute a community of sorts. Reaching out to them before the event can lower the odds of confrontation and give police a feel of the potential for violence.

[ Related: Militarization in North America – do we have a problem? ]

The problem for police in any potential disturbance is distinguishing between legitimate protesters and troublemakers seeded within the crowd.

“The majority of people just want to be heard," Parent said. "A lot of these people are marginalized.

“Those people have a legitimate right to say what they want to say or do what they want to do as long as they don’t cause damage or hurt other individuals. So what if they block traffic or whatever.

"To a degree the politicians should be a little more supportive of the protesters and the police should ensure they’re safe and those individuals can protest.”

But protests frequently attract individuals looking for a confrontation, such as anarchist-oriented Black Bloc vandals who surfaced at the Seattle WTO protest in 1999 and have turned up at every anti-globalization event since. Others simply hate the police, said Parent.

"They don’t care what the issues is, a lot of them don’t even know what the issue is," he said.

The police reaction depends a lot on what intelligence they've gathered before the event and how they react to fresh developments.

For instance, Parent pointed out, Vancouver police were criticized for not doing enough to quell the drunken mob that rampaged through the city as the Canucks blew Game 7 of the Stanley Cup series against the Boston Bruins. This despite the fact they faced the same situation in 1994, the last time the Canucks lost a Cup final.

“They literally stood and watched people destroy property and cars were burned," he said. "They didn’t do anything and they were criticized for that.”

They should have been aware, Parent said, that liquored-up troublemakers, some with weapons, were taking rapid transit from the suburbs into downtown.

“They should have been stopped before getting into Vancouver," he said.

At the G20, Toronto police let vandals run amok but corralled peaceful protesters for hours.

But the opposite is also true. Often when unruly crowds gather, the police reflex is a show of strength, hoping to over-awe them. Also wrong most times, said Parent. The evidence is it just antagonizes people.

“When these events are occurring, police need to be more creative and they have to be more strategic in how they reduce the violence from occurring," he said.

A lot has been said since Ferguson about the growing use of military-style hardware by U.S. police forces, much of it surplus gear gifted by the U.S. government. From fatigue-style uniforms to blast-proof armoured vehicles and assault rifles, police looked more ready to confront an armed insurrection than angry protesters.

Canadian police departments have to some extend been part of this trend, Postmedia News has reported. A few have acquired ex-Canadian Forces armoured cars while others have ordered purpose-built vehicles for use in tactically dangerous situations.

What's different, though, is Canadian police tend to reserve the use of military-style equipment and heavily armed SWAT units for the most serious threats, while many U.S. departments deploy them for even routine search warrants, according to a recent study by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"We don’t need to use weapons in the same way because we don’t have the same degree of violence," said Parent.

But Canadian police tend to admire their American counterparts, so they need to resist the urge to let U.S.-style policing creep into practice north of the border, said Parent.

"You’ve really got to pick and choose what you’re going to use in America and what you’re going to apply to Canada," he said.

"You can’t just take everything wholesale from American police, take those tactics and weapons and bring them into Canada, because our country is different. Sometimes Canadians forget that.”