Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams.
Speaker: On the podcast today, Megan McDermott of the BCCLA joins me to talk about complaints that they and Pivot Legal Society are bringing about police violence and surveillance at protests in support of Palestine.
Speaker: Lawyers with Pivot Legal Society and the BC Civil Liberties Association have filed complaints against the Vancouver Police Department for excessive use of force and for targeting and surveilling pro -Palestinian protesters.
Speaker: The complaints relate to a pro -Palestine protest on May 31st at CN Rails, also the VPD use of drones and cell phone cameras at other protests. Megan McDermott is staff counsel with the BC Civil Liberties Association, and she joins me today to tell us more about the complaints. Hello, Megan.
Speaker: Hi. So let's start with what happened in May on the CN Rail tracks in East Vancouver. What does the complaint relate to about what happened there?
Speaker: What was happening in May was that a diverse group of members of our community here in Vancouver gathered at the CN Rail and held an action, a protest action, to draw attention to the number of children and minors in the Palestinian occupied territory of Gaza.
Speaker: There was a series of clothing put down to draw attention to the thousands of children being killed. That action was trying to keep eyes on what was happening using their free expression rights that we have by virtue of the Constitution of Canada.
Speaker: There were a lot of members of our community, both people with relatives and direct lived experience, but also a bunch of people of conscience doing a community action to highlight what they perceive as being gross violations of both international, domestic, but even just some of our personal morals and norms about what injustice is and what terror is. What did the police do?
Speaker: After the police arrived and they monitored the situation for a while and they gave a dispersal order, which is pretty common, the thing is that it escalated very quickly based on what we've heard and the evidence that we've seen that was captured on video.
Speaker: When police ask for people to leave an area, we would expect that people would have the room to disperse. And so something that a lot of the people allege and that's captured in the video is that as people are trying to move away from the police and follow their instruction and get out of the way,
Speaker: The police escalated their actions very quickly and even to the point where as people are trying to move away and follow the orders that were being made, they were obstructed from doing that. They were caught up in police trying to handle them, touching them, grabbing them, throwing them down in the ground in very violent ways without them even having the opportunity to get away.
Speaker: And then as they were moving in on and throwing a whole number of protesters on the ground, you can also see that they were using military -grade pepper spray, which we think is extremely excessive.
Speaker: They're kicking, punching, grabbing, violently dragging people, very traumatizing to see. And I can't imagine um how traumatizing it was to experience being dragged along the ground. Somebody who was pregnant says that they were punched by a police officer. And this was after the fact that they announced and that the police officer should have been aware that they were pregnant. There was an elderly person that was on the sidewalk that was grabbed. More than one police officer piling onto a person, sometimes even potentially a minor person, standing on the backs of these people who are already cuffed, putting the knees on their necks, which VPE's own policy says that you should not knee anybody on the neck like that. So just a really violent takedown.
Speaker: You're also making a complaint about drone surveillance of demonstrations in support of Palestinian human rights. Is that allowed? You know, I was quite shocked seeing seeing drones and hearing about the use of drones at a lot of these protests. And of course, it's hard to know who's controlling drones. But we have checked in with the police and the police have confirmed to us that, oh, yeah, no, we're using the drones and we're doing it to monitor the protests.
Speaker: and can go to the VPD policy and procedures manual, and it's all set out right there that one of the ways that they cannot use drones, and this is the VPD's internal restrictions on their use, is that you can't use it to make recordings of a protest.
Speaker: We're okay with drones being used where life is at stake. And then the other common use for them is for traffic accidents and reconstruction purposes. But there was never an intention that we know of for these public bodies to be acquiring drones to then use on its own people who are expressing themselves politically. And we think that that's just really off the table. It has such a chilling effect on people to be monitored through video equipment. Talking of a chilling effect, there have also been reports of VPD members filming demonstrators on cell phones, and you witnessed one of these instances yourself at a protest in December last year outside an Indigo bookstore on Robson Street. And you approached the officer. What happened then?
Speaker: Yeah, so I was asking them, well, first of all, I was concerned that it might be a personal cell phone, but I was told that no, they were doing it on behalf of the VPD. So I don't know of any policy about the use of cameras, again, doesn't contemplate that they could use it to record anybody expressing themselves politically in public spaces like this.
Speaker: And so when I asked them about it, and the only thing I could really point to in their existing policy about a clear restriction was it about the drone use. But basically, the response was really disconcerting to me. They told me that we're in public and that anything in public is open to be recorded. And that's just a blatant misunderstanding and disregard for our privacy rights.
Speaker: Now the final instance you talk about in the complaint relates to a press conference about the VPD's response to a protest about Palestinian rights. So they were talking about, not a protest here, but ah a press conference and there was somebody filming with a cell phone camera there.
Speaker: Yes, which in our experience at the BCCLA, that's unprecedented. The press conference that was being held was right outside of the police station. And it's fine. I mean, of course, the police are welcome to come out and watch what's happening. Everything's being recorded already by media cameras. So to have members of the police department recording the members of the public that were speaking to the media to try to draw attention to this is really disconcerting because I mean it cannot be interpreted as anything other than trying to intimidate the people that were speaking out that day either an intimidation tactic and or there is spying happening. That was another concern about our surveillance complaint is that
Speaker: The Vancouver Police Department is surreptitiously coordinating this kind of surveillance with other bodies such as the RCMP and potentially even CSIS, the Canadian security establishment. Once we start getting into this more spying type allegations and concerns, it can get really nefarious because it's really difficult to decipher what on earth the police are doing.
Speaker: So one of the things that we've asked about is a proper accounting for what they are doing with these recordings. If they've been asked to capture this kind of information for CSIS or the RCMP and then are they sharing it with them or even it could be even larger than that. It could even be a foreign state entity.
Speaker: that's receiving these files from the vpd it's only through media reports that we learned that there's been an RCMP unit called the critical response unit that has been showing up at a lot of these protests and in the lower mainland now we don't know if they're showing up always in an obvious way, or if they might be undercover as well. But even the fact that we found that out through the media, and that it wasn't through the VPD being upfront with us, or the RCMP for that matter, like we have reason to believe, or to suspect, and that is why we are asking for a public accounting of how the drone recordings, if they are recordings, and also the personal cell phone recordings
Speaker: or any of the recordings being made by by the VPD, why they're being made. We would like an assurance, actually, that they're destroyed. They should be destroyed without delay because they shouldn't have been recorded to begin with. I mean, there are contacts in which you can record, but it should always be around having reasonable belief that offenses are being made. And generally, that's like in an investigatory context. But as we say,
Speaker: It's clear these are just people, members of our community exercising the rights, and these are the rights that prevail under the Canadian Constitution. So it's really disconcerting and difficult to understand why our local police department would be treating us as if we are criminals because we're having a press conference in front of their headquarters to let the public know and to empower people to let them know that we're filing these complaints because we want to hold them accountable. so Now, the complaints say that the kind of violence and the kind of surveillance that the police are using appears to be systemic and particularly related to the fact that the protests are in support of Palestine. Why do you say that it's systemic?
Speaker: Well, one is just the frequency and from what we've heard either through our bearing witness ourselves or through the eyes of the community that it is chronic and persistent for these folks. And we're seeing it again in levels that we have not seen with respect to other kind of people's movements.
Speaker: Even ah a few years ago when there were a whole bunch of protests about Black Lives Matter, and those protests were geared around police actions in particular, and allegations of systemic violence from the police towards members of the community. And and there we didn't see any kind of surveillance like this.
Speaker: And we're also, of course, in touch with other civil liberties and human rights orgs and police accountability advocates across Canada and anti -racism advocates who have been highlighting these same concerns that are happening in other major urban areas. Listeners may be aware of just how much political interference has been involved in other cities as well, where the biases of the political leaders including in the case of Toronto, even lawyers from the the Ministry of the Attorney General have intervened in the charges that result from these pro -Palestinian protests. I can clearly say in my lifetime, I've never seen an environment like this in Canada where there's so much scrutiny on a people's movement and so much heavy -handed policing, including that surveillance. And of course now, in the digital age with how easy it is to capture and concerns that we have about like facial recognition technology being used on top of just the basic core software that any of us have to capture audio and video. These were recording devices also capture audio. So they're capturing private conversations. And I mean, the basic rule that we promote is that the police should never be able to do that short of having an arrest warrant.
Speaker: Where are these complaints going to? Who's going to hear the complaints that you and Pivot Legal Society are bringing forward? Well, we've decided to use the existing mechanism that we have from our government under the Police Act is to go to the Vancouver Police Board. And this is supposed to be a civilian oversight body. Now, by default, it is always chaired by the mayor of the city.
Speaker: So we have Mayor Ken Sim, that is the chair of the Vancouver Police Board, and the other folks on the board, they're non police, they're citizens, they've been appointed through a political process, and they should be setting the policy parameters for how the VPD operates. They can't really interfere with the operations of the VPD, but they're really intended to be there as a high level policy and accountability, civilian oversight body. So they're the first stop on our accountability journey. They could just close the complaint, although we don't expect that they'll do that. We're really, really hoping and what we put in our complaints themselves is that we really think they should allow a third party with expertise, particularly expertise in anti -Palestinian racism,
Speaker: that can do an in -depth investigation into all of our allegations and to report back to the board rather than have the board ask the chief constable or any of their staff to look into it and report back. The common thing to do is to just allow the police department to look into it and report back to them.
Speaker: they're quite deferential to them. So this is why we've gone out of our way this time and said, please do not just ask them to investigate themselves. This seems to just be such a systemic issue internally to the VPD that to strengthen that trust that's needed to police a city, it's really imperative that they delegate it out to a third party who is credible and can look into these complaints that we've made, do it without bias and with impartiality. Well, we'll be following up on it. Thank you so much for talking with me today, Megan.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you so much for covering these important issues. I've been speaking with Megan McDermott, Staff Counsel with the BC Civil Liberties Association, and you can find out more about this issue at vccla dot .org. You can also check at pivotlegal .org.
Speaker: The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio dot .org slash redeye.
