Bike Cop Harassment Continues at Critical Mass – Oct.31.2003
By Shadow the Cat … columnist at http://MegacityElection.com and http://CitizensontheWeb.ca
* It’s Halloween and as Toronto’s wicked black cat I want rowdy people to aid my curse of 52 Division and Police Chief Julian Fantino by sending emails and rotten pumpkins … just throw any crap at them. Tell the power-tripping assholes to stop the harassment of anarchists, cyclists, OCAP and public space advocates.
* Police email info at the bottom of this post.
The New Cop Philosophy and Regime according to Shadow
Warm winds gust with a spinning ring of parched leaves, lifting a late fall dream in my head. I’m prowling in the better autumn times of my old horror tales at Fright Library. Then I wake in a light sprinkle of rain over this backyard of junk on Bathurst Street. Climbing to a rooftop deck I can see lights of Halloween, and off in a cat’s eye distance, people in Halloween costumes gathering for the monthly Critical Mass bike ride.
That idiot owner who lives with me is there, not even wearing a costume as he watches the glamorous people who did dress up. They chatter and drift about, waiting for the bike ride to begin. Fool that he is, my supposed owner is on a bike instead of the rollerblades he always wore in the past. That’s ‘cause police creamed him at the last Critical Mass/Reclaim the Streets run. They hit him with a tackle and a bunch of phony charges that left him with legal fees and physically a badly sprained foot.
Down the road from the gathering and the Temperance Society, a bit around a corner on Bay, a bunch of dishonest cops are ghoul gathering in the exhaust smoke of an ugly grid-locked non public feeling. These are the type of guys that wear buttons supporting the cops that ended it all for Otto, while taking out people like my feeble-minded owner and others at the last Mass. The head bike cop is saying, “Fantino and Gottschalk want these scumbag activists cleaned up and away from Dundas Square. We got a small bike cop army out tonight, so let’s get the job done, and don’t forget to hail John Tory and bribery when we’re finished.”
At this point let me bore you with a bit of background.
A recent policing letter from Julian Fantino outlines a problem where portions of the public believe that Dundas Square is a public space. Of course that isn’t a problem at all, but it gives us the answer behind the stepped up police harassment of Mass and Reclaim.
Fantino’s man on the volunteer board of management appointed by city hall to govern Dundas Square is 52 Division Superintendent Paul Gottschalk. This Fantino backroom boy is also the person you email when you contact 52 Division via the link at the bottom.
More background says that Chief Fantino wanted all protest governed by permit so police could simply disallow it all. He didn’t get that and it happened that the justice minister emailed my owner long before he contacted Fantino, so we knew he wouldn’t get it.
Now we have Fantino, Gottschalk and business reps working to simply eliminate activism, especially outings by anarchists and public space advocates. Over two issues … public space and protest permits. Their motive is fascist. When Julian Fantino changed the cop uniform to Mussolini black he probably wasn’t joking. The whole idea is that if you eliminate public space, citizens will have no rights. Everything in non public space can be governed by the arbitrary laws fascist cop reps on appointed boards bring in. Plus police can allow some protests and bill for payment for their work via permit … meaning that the police don’t want anarchism or protest that they don’t get big bundles of cash to control. The Toronto cops of today are robbers on a big scale. If I had every dollar that paid for cops to harass protesters at small demos over the last few years, I could pay off Dalton McGuinty’s deficit and afford the fee it would take to have Mike Harris come out and say that maybe he killed Dudley George.
So we’re back to Halloween and the mass bike riders heading out on their monthly ride. The costumed people look happy, maybe ready for fun. It isn’t too large of a group, but just enough to take a lane of those grid locked Toronto streets.
Up on the corner the army of bike cops appears, like some black magic in a bad Ernie Eves Halloween deficit dream. My owner is about to start talking to a beautiful woman cycling beside him, then he sees the cops, frowns and shuts up. I mean, what are the cops there for other than to bum people out. Even drivers don’t want them around. Head back to 905 you Ernie Eves, Mike Harris, John Tory, rich cop, pro pollution, corruption, black lung, violent Cartillery scumbags. We don’t need you muscling into the bike ride, making it look like a cop outing, or suddenly bumping cyclists nearly hard enough to knock them over … or like last month, throwing women to the pavement. Beat it cop scumbags ‘cause Shadow the Black Cat is cursing you now, yesterday and tomorrow … this Halloween and the next, with Mike Harris, Craig Brommel, Julian Fantino, and all those pigs who got a fake footprint in the nothingness concrete of an ugly Dundas Square.
Then a ways along the road, the happy green Halloween ride is about to turn right on Dundas, headed in the direction of Dundas Square. At that moment a line of goblin bike cops tighten up and a creepy oink number named Officer Young makes a spooky announcement to this threatening effect. …. We will be ticketing all those people without front and rear lights … and so on and so forth, so you can either drop out of this ride now or proceed and be fined.
This separates the rich from the poor, the cowards from the courageous and the clever from the dumb. My owner, coward that he is, decides to drop out, fearing cops are going to target him for more than a ticket.
He sits there for a while with the rest, some drop out, then those with lights move on. At Dundas Square the cops curb a woman, and ticket her, threatening a violent arrest if she doesn’t properly identify herself. (Take note that there had already been tickets earlier.)
The police actually slowed the ride so much that my owner walked his bike there, and offered to be a witness for the woman. In a few not so smart statements he called the cops politically motivated, and not there for traffic reasons, but only to enforce commands from above regarding Dundas Square, anarchists and public space.
If you had a negative view you might even believe that the old mean cop Julian Fantino was behind it. But that couldn’t be the truth. He’s an honest sort and I remember the Tory convention when OCAP marched out of Allan Gardens. My owner took a photo after bike cops threw Sarah to the road and started kicking her. Another witness, just up the street, directing the police, was the lovely Julian Fantino. And hey, he got away with it didn’t he … and lived again to persecute innocent people like John Clarke.
In that same sense the police won the early Halloween day through organized bully tactics. My owner and the poor who can’t afford tickets or arrest were humiliated.
In the colder month of November the police hope to break the ride altogether. And don’t think for a moment that it wasn’t all planned at slime headquarters.
There is always a better day. So why be ticketed or arrested today when you can wait for next month. Some options would be as follows.
- confront them with large numbers.
- find donors to supply front and rear lights for cyclists arriving at Mass.
- a legal strategy and maybe volunteer lawyers, fight all tickets on the basis that they are politically motivated and not legit traffic tickets.
- come to the ride on rollerblades.
- and don’t forget to ignore John Tory in the city vote. We don’t need 400 more asshole 905 cops on Toronto streets.
- and complain via email as listed below. Because if they know you know about their lies and bullshit, they’ll be in disarray. Even if they’re reading this.
- Then go to Dundas Square and shit on the concrete, hoping that maybe someday something will grow there … or bring a flower you might be able to drop before the pigs pound the hell out of you on behalf of some asshole in the business improvement association.
- And don’t forget to break all your promises like Dalton, because your personal deficit is more than you thought it would be.
You know they want us to live in fear of the corrupt police today and everyday. They’ll follow you and try to get you like they did to my owner tonight. At Critical Mass it‘s economic sanctions via tickets and more than that through threat of arrest. And at Reclaim it was false charges.
How much power do these cop crappers really have? Well, it’s a lot if you live on the street or in the neighbourhood.
Still, you can stick a pin in the plastic pumpkin of police playing creepy politics to bribe themselves. They got no genuine philosophy other than delusions of power.
I wish we had a right to fresh air … and to freedom on the smog free streets … instead of a right to the choking political crap and ignorance that comes out of the OPG tailpipe of the business-improvement-cop-payoff-mayor friends of a bastard who is a spiteful police chief named Julian Fantino.
He’s a fat pumpkin liar but we got him now … at the open air roast. Fantino got some people scared of the police today. He scared my chicken owner today. Yet these cowards are rotting and fading. We can’t be frightened of the police on any day, so let’s get that bastard Fantino on the run from the people tomorrow.
Shadow the Cat
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52 division email
Web form email
http://www.torontopolice.on.ca/directory/mail.php?id=448
Fax Julian Fantino Chief of Police
416-808-8002