On March 30, during a peaceful mass mobilization for Land Day, Palestine solidarity protesters in Toronto were barricaded and beaten by police on horseback.
“This was not policing. This was premeditated, pre-planned police brutality against our fellow Canadians,” said Gur Tsabar of the Jews Say No to Genocide Coalition, in a speech following March 30.
Tsabar claims that militarized police on horseback moved in to stop an entirely peaceful demonstration, which they then surrounded. “And it’s not just a single line of police officers,” he said. “We were greeted by multiple lines of police officers and mounted police on horses fitted with visors who not only closed off the street in front of us, but also the sidewalks in front of us, so we could not move forward.”
Tsabar says that police then brutally arrest a passerby, who was “racially profiled by the police as a Palestinian.”
“He is cuffed and shaking and as he’s forced to the ground, and already being handled, an officer can be seen brutally pushing him to the ground as more officers then pile onto him,” Tsabar describes.
Soon after, following a second arrest, mayhem breaks loose and “officers approach the line from every which direction,” Tsabar says.
Videos taken from the March show a protester beaten and bloody as he is arrested on the ground by police, as well as protesters shoved against metal poles and thrown to the ground by police.
“They are pushing and pulling and yanking protestors and slamming them onto the ground over rows of bikes, they are grabbing people every which possible way, including by the neck, people were bloodied and hurt, people had to be sent to the hospital. And then as if on cue—the mounted police on gigantic horses come straight down side by side on Parliament trampling people left and right.”
Four protesters had to be sent to the hospital, with several others monitoring themselves for possible concussions, according to a statement from the Palestinian Youth Movement, Toronto chapter.
“The Toronto Police Service has been consistent in their attempts to intimidate and suppress pro-Palestinian protests, using violence and arrests to scare people into silence. They have attempted to criminalize people protesting against this genocide,” said Dalia Awwad, a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement, Toronto chapter. “The TPS has violently raided peoples’ homes at dawn, and are now not only publicly brutalizing protesters but also passersby whom they have racially profiled as Palestinians.”
Toronto Police respond
The Toronto Police Service has responded to these claims by accusing protesters of aggression against police, including flinging horse manure at officers and using a flagpole “to spear at an officer.”
A truck driver was charged at the protest under the Highway Safety Act, for allegedly operating a truck with occupants in the bed of the moving vehicle. Protesters call this selective enforcement.
“After five solid months of chanting week after week from the beds of very-slow-moving trucks and their attached trailers, Toronto police suddenly became ‘very concerned’ for our road safety,” said Tsabar. “Truly—kudos to the Toronto Police for following orders so diligently and digging up an obscure Highway Traffic Act in a last-ditch effort to shut down our Charter-protected right to protest.”
“When protesters choose to commit criminal acts, they will be arrested either immediately or later. When protesters block roads and infrastructure, that impacts our ability to respond to emergency calls,” said the Toronto Police Association, the police union that represents TPS officers, in a statement.
Awwad of the Palestinian Youth Movement responded to these accusations when asked by CP24 reporter Beatrice Vaisman during a press conference if she “condemned” those actions. “I do not trust the accounts of the Toronto police, I trust the accounts of my community members who have come out and said the Toronto police arrested them for ‘assaulting officers’, when in reality, [the police] came back and said no victim could be found,” Awwad responded.
“The Toronto police cannot be trusted, they have shown us time and time again that they cannot be trusted and that they lie to advance their own interests, and their interests are increasing their budget and having more police on the streets, our interest is to put those funds towards public education, towards transit, towards housing that’s affordable, towards healthcare, towards the things that we need.”
On March 22, several days before the protest, Toronto police released what organizers called a “promotional video,” regarding their police tactics since October 7. “This is an unprecedented time. We’ve faced over 500 planned and unplanned demonstrations, we have many a day, sometimes up to a dozen a day, that we are managing,” laments TPS Chief Myron Demkiw in the video. Organizers labeled the video as TPS “bragging about their policing of protests.”
“We will not be deterred and we will continue to rely on ourselves to keep us and our communities safe,” said Tsabar.
