the urtak blog

Looking back at the G20

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:19:15 -0400

In a democracy, public policy should reflect public opinion. But even in our industrialized North American society, public policy often does not reflect public opinion.

Taking the global perspective, no one can deny that we do not live in a democratic world. Those who take the decisions that govern the lives of billions are accountable to the mass of humanity very indirectly at best. Their decisions take the side of the strong against the weak, the rich against the poor, and the few against the many.

The recent G20 summit took place in Toronto, the very calm and peaceful city where I was born and raised. The G20 countries represent two-thirds of the world’s population, and 85% of the world’s production. As I walked the streets of my city during the last weekend in June, nothing was clearer than the lengths to which the world’s leaders will go to hide from and ignore the opinions of ordinary citizens.

The security operation that protected the high and mighty from Torontonians was the largest in Canadian history. The number of people arrested was also the greatest ever seen in Canada. All this, a massive overreaction to violence that never happened. Not a single person was injured by protesters.

We printed accounts and opinions around this story because to us, the experience of the weekend is yet another example of how far we are from democracy on the global level. This is the project for our lifetimes.

Global democracy will require the construction of global public opinion. With the Urtak project, we hope to change the nature of how public opinion is understood and constructed. The power cannot remain in the hands of those who hold it already. It must be shared.

Vive la révolution!

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 12:28:01 -0400

There are few we admire more than those who dedicate themselves to revolution, insurrection, and the overthrow of the powerful.

And on July 14, it is always good to remember that the process that began in Paris over two hundred years ago, the creation of universal democracy, is as yet incomplete.

I take the liberty of reposting a quote, from Hilaire Belloc’s The French Revolution:

“The privileged of Europe set out to reach Paris and destroy democracy. The first task occupied them for full twenty-two years, upon the latter they are still engaged.”

2,000,000 for Max-Dan-Wiz

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:30:20 -0400

I wonder if a poll has ever gathered more than two million responses. What’s clear is that with the collaborative approach, two million is a very achievable goal.

The James Patterson team, by embedding an Urtak (over a relatively long period of time, to be sure), and promoting it with a few blog posts, has done just that, creating the largest Urtak by responses.

They now have 2,000,000 responses to over 2400 questions. And when we consider the x-tabs, that’s about 5 million different data points. Discovering the most significant question, even by machine, takes many hours.

Here is the Max-Dan-Wiz Urtak, for now, holder of our championship belt.

Max-Dan-Wiz

A reader responds

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:15:52 -0400

Where there is controversy, there is by definition division of opinion, and AM, a friend of the project, has taken exception to the tone of the two earlier accounts of G20 policing.

What do you think of his argument?

—-

just wanted to write you a brief note about a few of your recent postings. in general, i’m a big fan of your commentary/columns about polling issues. they are well-written, rational, based in sound statistical theory. i really respect that you’re trying to ensure that polls are designed in a way that do not skew the views of the public, or the facts on the ground. i love seeing you call out the many idiot pollsters. polls aren’t supposed to be emotional — they should be, at worst, apolitical, and at best, a true reflection of all the available facts.

but i’ve been a bit disappointed with some of the recent posts on your blog about the g20. they are, in a way, the complete opposite of what I thought you stood for in your discussion about polls.

firstly, they are 100% based on emotion. but fine, people get riled up if they spend a night in jail. fair enough.

but mostly, all of this talk about arbitrary arrests, orwellian conditions, is just a bunch of (to put it mildly) irrational, politically-motivated garbage written by people who think being Canadian allows you unlimited freedoms. they weren’t arbitrarily arrested — the cops warned them they were breaching the peace, and they didn’t get out of there. you can disagree with the law, but it wasn’t arbitrary, plain and simple.

regarding conditions in the jails, besides the one guy that jeff described as requiring medical attention (which does indeed worry me), there is nothing that i read which was illegal. people were provided with food and water. people were released within the legal amount of time necessary. people were read their rights. i haven’t read any first-hand accounts of physical/sexual abuse.

spending a night in jail isn’t supposed to be fun. just because a bunch of white, privileged, uts-educated kids didn’t enjoy their overnight stay in a jail, doesn’t mean it’s illegal and orwellian. Oh no, all these rich kids with megaphones just got arrested! what did you expect? a foot massage and some blue-fin tuna? this is the real world. jail ain’t supposed to be comfortable. boohoo — the guard was eating some lunch. boohoo — you were in a crowded cell. what’s shocking to me is that these guys expect some special treatment — why do they deserve any better conditions than any other person ever arrested in toronto — or elsewhere, for that matter? suck it up, learn where you screwed up and why you got arrested (i know plenty of people on the streets who didn’t get arrested because…well…they were smarter), and stop calling the toronto police nazis. it’s laughable, and frankly, quite insulting to my own family history, to hear that sad comparison.

Another G20 story

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 17:45:29 -0400

From a very good friend, Jeff Carolin:

hi everybody, thanks to everyone who’s been sending moral support. i still feel totally fucked up. i write this with the fear of coopting the voice of the 100s of other people who have been arrested but i just think right now that we need stories getting out there and this is my 3 hour attempt to share my own. i wont pretend that my writing is at peak form or that i have the patience to give this a proper edit. nor do i have the energy right now to describe my whole account but i just read through the info at the following link and it captures my personal experience. and has made me believe (unsuprisingly) that people who are more vulnerable in these situations - like folks who dont identify as male or heterosexual, folks with disAbilities, and people of colour - had it worse than me. so please read through this first: http://www.thelinknewspaper.ca/articles/2698.

before continuing on, i just want to clarify that this is not a message about the saturday black bloc action that took place for about 1.5 hours without a single one of the 10,000 cops anywhere near it. something that i personally think was a deliberate cop gambit to justify the crackdown that followed, which seemed to have been working out in the media in their favour until some time on sunday when the wild police repression and brutality that took place at queens park late saturday afternoon and later that day in front of the novotel started coming out. (not to mention last night at queen and spadina.) rather its about something thats completely not debatable: the crime of the prisoner processing centre at eastern and pape, torontonamo.

and although torontonamo is a separate point, there is a connection to the police crackdown and the mass arrests. that is, of the 25 other people i shared my overcrowded cage with, not a single one was in there for something legitimate. a lot had been at queens park or the novotel. two were punk kids who were beat up and arrested for wearing black and knew nothing about the g20. i was also with a fully uniformed ttc attendant who was jumped by riot cops leaving queens park subway station. he was kept in for 30 hours. we were also with a 17 year old kid (who had been at the novotel), who was only wearing a t-shirt and was shivering from the cold the whole time and who, of course, had not been allowed to call his parents. (we were all, in fact, effectively disappeared for the entirety of our detention as we were allowed no calls, and the cops werent giving any information about anyone to the outside world.) then there was the self-proclaimed apolitical freelance photographer who had been tackled by a plainclothes officer while running away from riot cops. the same plainclothes officer had just, moments earlier, been inciting the crowd to get closer and to throw stuff at the cops. he was passed to riot cops who stepped on his head and kicked him in the face. he was covered in blood in our cell and was passing in and out of consciousness. obviously there was no medical attention. i asked him, as we left together 20+ hours later, if he felt less apolitical now, at least with respect to the police as an institution and the state that is supposed to oversee it. you can imagine his response.

all that to say, when you hear torontonamo horror stories, as im sure they’ll keep emerging, keep this collective punishment in mind. and maybe also keep in mind how this compares to other parts of the world where, albeit much further along the fascistic spectrum, occupying armies and repressive regimes carry out mass, indiscriminate arrests and sweeps, and keep people in conditions based on the same CIA low intensity psychological torture techniques for breaking people down (as described below and in the link above). and how everyone emerged from our cell - the political and the previously apolitical - completely enraged at the abuses of authority that we had been subject to. and about how much we wanted to strike back. and about how it only took 20 hours of collective punishment and psychological torture - and the imposition of complete powerlessness - to plant within us the desire to take part in militant resistance towards the state that allowed this to happen. again, im talking about the previously apolitcal as well.

and now a few points to personalize the link i sent above.

first, the circumstances of my arrest to provide some context. i wrote this bit when i got home, after having slept for about 30 minutes in the previous 43 hours:

“the most intense shit that i witnessed over the course of saturday was when i returned to the southern law of queens park just under the legislature around 530. a motley crew of random unaffiliated activist-ey folks, passersby and labour people were having a standoff with the riot cops. the riot cops had begun darting out in groups of four or five, grabbing someone doing something completely benign and then dragging them back behind their lines where they usually would beat them for awhile with their batons. Although a part of me wanted to take off my “legal” hat and join the locked arms at the front, it became clear that few people there knew of our group. So I went back and forth just behind the front line passing out “know your rights” literature, and shouting out the legal number that ppl could call if arrested, etc. At some point I took off my hat and was helping keep people calm just behind the front line, as each time the police rushed there was a chance of a stampede. Eventually we got pushed back and back until we were divided into two marches - on Harbord and Devonshire. Cops kept charging at us beating their shield trying to force us backwards. sometimes the horses would come ahead.

Eventually things dissipated and I returned home, only to leave again with some other people to head to the Jail Solidarity action at midnight outside the jail on eastern ave. i felt obligated to go having just witnessed so many illegal arrests and beatings. Arrived at an action already in progress. Peaceful. Was following cops orders that the protest stay on the sidewalk on the north side of the street. Pretty soon after we arrived, the riot cops showed up and completely surrounded us. there was some negotiation and the ultimate decision was that we would be given a way out to the west along eastern avenue. the people i was with had decided that we were going to leave, but that we would try to carry out our legal observing from outside the riot cop ring as the people who decided to stay back were arrested.

It seemed that too few were willing to stay, so after a brief delay (1-2 minutes?) the core organizers followed everyone out to the west and we ended up joining up with them as they passed through the ring of riot cops. We were now slightly behind the main group ahead that had left right away (half block?) and something like a block or a block and a half west of the original encirclement, a second line of riot police appeared in front of us and blocked our way, fully surrounding a group of about 20 of us. we were then arrested for breaching the peace. we were told that we had taken too long.”

second, the overall architecture of this “temporary prisoner processing centre” was the most orwellian, fascistic, brutalizing, fucked up thing that i have ever seen. again, probably designed according to CIA sensory deprivation, psychological torture specs. (who the fuck allowed this to happen? this was the same place that the police said they were building in order to be able to process prisoners quickly and efficiently.) in any particular cage you rarely had a view of any other of the grey metal cages. just the spotlights and surveillance cameras and dark ceiling above, and the white or grey concrete floors. no clocks anywhere. nor were there any cameras on the hallways or places where the cops convened and brought prisoners through. and then there were the cops, guards and officers of all types walking by us. usually ignoring us, sometimes antagonizing us, and often just telling us total bullshit as i describe in two points below. when i close my eyes right now, i have an image of cold harsh lighting, stark white walls and floors, and streams of guards passing back and forth through the squares of the cage. closing my eyes makes me feel nauseous.

third, something that doesnt really come across through the list of things described in the link above was the group psychology in the cages and how we actually spent the time (at least in my cage). we spent the first few hours indignantly demanding our civil liberties (calls to counsel especially) and insulting the guards, calling them pigs, etc, when they refused. by the end i was grovelling and pleading on my knees with my bound hands in a supplicating position, begging for water, food, blankets and medical attention for those who needed it.

there was much in between these two extremes as well. the moment of collective laughter when we decided to conquer the toilet-paperless, doorless port-a-potty that faced the guards. after a few hours of ignoring the unappealing toilet, i stood up and announced (as loud as i possibly could) to the guards that i was going to take a shit, and i invited them to watch. it broke the proverbial seal and became a source of collective strength as others began to use it. we transformed what had been designed to humiliate us. (though i know that as a “man” cage we had an ability to do this that wasnt the same for the “woman” cages.) and then there was the stand up routine that one guy did, ripping into all the guards that walked by that had us all cracking up. there were moments when we tried to appeal to the humanity of the guards. ive never called anyone a nazi in my life, but there i was telling them that they had been assigned to work in a concentration camp and that when this all came to light the excuse that they were just following orders wouldnt cut it. we asked them if they had children and what they would think if their children were in it. no one would engage with us in these points. and finally, at certain points, we were screaming any possible insult we could think of. there was also a rousing rendition of “if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands”… that immediately followed an incredibly intense expression of rage of the four cages in our room. almost everyone was kicking and rattling and screaming in our cages for at least 10 minutes. it the loudest and most intense creation of sound that i have ever been a part of.

then there was a moment when it looked like our cage was going to slip into total chaos. i became aware of it at the point when i myself hit my own low. i had been watching a guard eat his vast lunch five feet away from me. bite by bite. i kept up a constant stream of insults and commentary, telling him how hungry i was and if he enjoyed watching me suffer as he ate, telling him how looking at him was making me more physically ill than i had even felt up to that point. that i was going to puke and try to get as much as i could in his direction. and then pretty soon after, i was standing up, gripping the cage and screaming as loud as i could, “we need food!” i slumped back down and a really strong soul, one of the older ones amongst us, came up to me slumped in the corner and told me that he needed me to be strong. he got through to me. i looked up and i became aware that we had one guy, lips turning purple, who was going into shock both due to cold, exposure and exhaustion, and also because we had a guy with a blood condition who was semi-conscious and who was oozing blood out of his finger tips. our requests for medical attention were ignored and this one guy was getting so worked up that he was trying to convince all of us that we just had to bust through the door the next time the guards came. i got him to sit down and breathe with me and i turned to my buddy who was in there with me and said that we were collectively losing it. just then, the guy who earlier had been regaling us with his stand up routine stood up and screamed at the top of his lungs for about 10 seconds. i grabbed another guy who was in there to help get everyone quiet and i led us in a deep-breathing exercise and with the help of others got us to start reflecting on this experience. on how the only thing we could control was the space within our cage. how that was the only power that remained to us.

this was necessary after only 15 hours of arbitrary detention and deprivation.

fourth, i want to add another thing to the link above that didnt really come up. its that i believe that 100% of the apparent administrative incompetence was one more subtle but ultimate really powerful tool to fuck with our heads. it was both their excuse for why we werent getting food, water, phone calls to lawyers and medical attention for those who needed it and it also toyed with our minds, emotions and spirits. this part was totally sadistic. basically it seems consistent that in all “breach of the peace” cages they would make it seem that the delays were all due to processing slowdowns. “we’re really trying here. but it just takes time. you’ll get to make your phone calls soon. why dont you just calm down.” etc etc. that was when they talked to us; most of the time they just ignored all of our requests or were verbally hostile to us.

they would keep our hope alive that things actually were being processed by taking someone out every few hours. for example, 2 guys were taken out from my cage after 2 hours, and we thought, yes, we’re going to get out soon. and that was the implication of what the guard told us. we saw them 15 hours later in different cages. they did this periodically throughout the day. also, almost every half hour a guard would come by looking for people who were almost never in our cage. it made it seem that they had no idea where anyone was. new people would keep coming on shifts and say that everything was a mess, and then they’d make us line up in our cage and give our last names and prison IDs. in our cage we did this three times. they also took people out of our cage, implied they were getting out and then would only take their pictures (one guy was photograhed three times) and then they were sent back. around hour 16 they came to our cage and told us that our group had gotten lost in the system and that they had been looking for this one guy in every cell. the implication was now that they had finally found him we’d all finally be processed. we didnt get any more releases for 3 hours. etc etc etc. they also kept coming around, pausing in front of us, getting us to be quiet and then would read out 2 or 3 names and prison IDs that 95% of the time were not in there with us. this both got our hopes up and then would totally dash them when none of the people were us. it also kept up the justification for why none of our rights and needs were being satisfied.

as it was approaching 24 hours, and a lot of us finally did get released, we basically walked around the corner from our cage, got handed our property bags and the forms filled out by the original arresting officer (no other paper work or processing to be done!) and were told to leave (into the pouring rain).

its hard to describe the significance of this final point. they told us that there had been an admin fuck up and that’s why our group was held so long. when, a bit earlier, i said to one of the guards, “does anyone know whats going on? is it just that there’s no one in charge who know’s whats happening”. he replied, “yeah this guys finally figured it out. this is a smart guy.” and it didnt sound sarcastic at all. but as i sat down to write this last night, i pictured this final scene again. the outdoors were just around the corner. there was just a folding table with a commanding officer and all he had to do was hand us our belongings and tell us to leave. basically it took 2 minutes to process us. But they had led us through this puppy mill of caged people to make it seem that we were in the middle of this huge complex full of overcrowded cages that we couldnt see, under spotlights and surveillance cameras, cops and guards rushing by, hunger and dehydration, people going into shock from the cold and exposure. barely sufficient medical attention (and only after hours of chanting and screaming)… and this underlying admin incompetence that was used as the excuse for it all.

and as i started writing it down last night i went through the final moments again and suddenly felt a tightness in my neck. i realized that we were basically 35 feet and 2 minutes away from being released the entire time. i couldnt breathe and felt like i was going to puke all at once. i had to get leah to calm me down and help me breathe again. it hit me like a 1000 tons that the entire display of admin incompetence was an act. they wanted us off the streets until the g20 was over and they succeeded. they wanted to criminalize dissent and prevent anyone empowered by g20 demos to remain politically active. they wanted to gather intelligence. they mollified us with the admin bullshit stuff and strung us along and toyed with us all at once. sick and debased. and consistent from what ive been hearing from other people who were released with no charges.

fifth, i was in plastic wrist restraints the whole time.

sixth, i recognize that none of this was about the issues around social and environmental justice that protesters have been trying to bring attention to all week. but i think that this does address a core underlying issue of a hierarchical state that is not accountable nor democratic to those who do not fit into the mainstream.

seventh, for the legally inclined, they read us a breach of the peace statement that said something like if we were found at another g20 demo we would be given a real criminal charge. i tried to argue with the guard that he couldnt impose conditions (something i dont know but assumed) but my fellow arrestees told me they just wanted to leave. so i acceded and we left.

eigth, today i turn 28.

in peace, solidarity, and rage,

jeff/hedge

Two heroes of history

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 14:01:25 -0400

In honor of today’s game between Uruguay and Ghana we bring to you two Wikipedia articles.

José Gervasio Artigas, the father of Uruguayan independence, and a man with notably advanced ideas for his time. His influence is perhaps one of the reasons that Uruguay has always been one of the most equitable countries in Latin America.

And Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana, and one of the strongest promoters of Pan-Africanism. When it was unheard of to do so, he believed that Africa could and should be free.

Best of luck to the two contenders!

Arrested at the G20

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:56:26 -0400

Last weekend was one of the worst times in history to try to express one’s opinion in Toronto.

The government of Ontario passed secret laws reducing citizens’ civil rights, and more than 1,000 people ended up arbitrarily detained, locked in cages, or held incommunicado.

All this in response to an outbreak of minor vandalism, that as far as I could tell from my personal experience, must have been intentionally tolerated by the 19,000 heavily armed cops on the streets. There’s no other explanation for why windows were broken literally next to the police headquarters. Armed with a pretext, the crackdown began.

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon walking around Toronto’s downtown, looking at the various barricades of riot police, who seemed to be defending nothing in particular. Without doubt, the cops outnumbered the protesters. Twice during that afternoon, I crossed paths with David Wachsmuth, a friend and ally of the project. The fact that so many intersections were blocked probably increased our chances of bumping into each other.

On my way home, I walked past a very peaceful gathering at Queen’s Park that was just a few minutes later broken up by force. David stayed out later, and ended up spending his Sunday disappeared by the Toronto police.

Below is his account. It is a testament to how much the rulers of the world fear the opinions of ordinary people that they will treat peaceful citizens with this level of disrespect.

—-

Friends and family,

As many of you know, I was one of the over 1000 people arrested at the G20 in Toronto over the weekend. After a few days to think about what happened, I’ve written up the following description and reflection of the events. Please forward this to anyone you think should read it.

David

…

Arrested at the G20

This weekend I was in Toronto demonstrating against the meeting of the G20 that was taking place there. At 2:45 AM on Saturday night I was arrested for a ‘breach of the peace’. The nineteen hours that followed were probably the most infuriating, frustrating, frightening ones of my life. Unfortunately, from what I now know, my experience was very similar to that of many of the over 1000 people who were arrested over the weekend. So what I’m about to describe, despite being intensely personal, probably speaks for many of us, at least in part.

In preparation for the huge number of arrests they presumably planned on carrying out, the police had set up an ad hoc detention centre at an old film studio in the east end of Toronto. On Saturday night, I went with one of my best friends—who was a legal observer at the demonstrations—to the detention centre to join a midnight jail solidarity action in support of those who had been picked up earlier in a violent and arbitrary series of beatings and arrests, including of many people not demonstrating at all but simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. After a few hours of peaceful and spirited demonstration (featuring an excellent marching band), the police ordered us to disperse shortly before 2:00 AM. Like everything else this weekend, that was accomplished by surrounding us on all sides in enormous numbers of cops in full riot gear. (I filmed some video of the demonstration and the arrival of the police, which I have uploaded at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7Ue64fOuak.) The 150 of us were outnumbered at least two to one. There was some discussion of staying despite the order to disperse, but that only lasted a minute or so, and shortly everyone was filing between the ranks of riot police in the direction we had been ordered to go. A few minutes after we started leaving, and with no warning whatsoever, riot cops cut through the column of protesters and sealed off the two dozen of us at the back. We asked to be allowed to leave as they had just told us we were instructed to do, but we were instead told that we had had our chance to leave and had failed to take it (an odd idea, since we were walking away when they sealed us in). We were all arrested.

The arrest itself took about 40 minutes and was uneventful. The only notable thing was how uncomfortable and difficult it is to hold your hands on your head for that amount of time. Since I was nearly the last person to get handcuffed, I had a lot of time for this to sink in. It is much more uncomfortable having your hands handcuffed behind your back, which is what happened next, but I expected that. The cop who dealt with me took me to the edge of where all the arrests were being made, asked me various questions, searched me, and so on. After a minute or two, I realized there was quite a lot of light on me, and it turned out that I was being processed right in front of a television camera, with a reporter making a report. So I asked to be moved to somewhere a little less obtrusive, but the reporter apparently got the footage she was looking for, since various people (including my mother) subsequently told me that they saw me on the news. This had at least the positive effect of letting my loved ones know what happened to me, since I was not allowed a phone call in the 19 hours during which I was detained. My arrest papers say I was arrested at 2:49 AM.

We were slowly loaded into paddy wagons to be taken to the detention centre. After various delays, we were stuffed into little miniature jails inside the vans (in my van there were four cells, each of which held two of us) and off we went. We spent the next 30 minutes or so sitting in these tiny little van-jails. Sitting, because the drive was only a minute or so to the detention centre (we had been protesting outside of it). The rest of the time we were parked in what sounded (we couldn’t see anything out the tiny little grated windows) like a big room with a lot of prisoners in it. The highlight of this time was the spontaneous round of mass meowing that came from the prisoners outside; the cages we were in really did feel like animal pens. The lowlight was my increasingly aching left arm from being held awkwardly behind my back in the handcuffs (the plastic cable-tie kind, incidentally, not the real metal deal).

We were unloaded from the paddy wagons into a set of gender-segregated cages. In the end I spent time in three separate ones, although they were all the same. They were twenty feet by ten feet, with a four-by-four-foot washroom inside. The washrooms had no door, and no toilet paper (some previous inhabitant had stashed a little in our first cage, but it was quickly used up). There were generally 25 or 26 people in my cage, which comes out to just over seven square feet of space each. For the entire time we were imprisoned, we had to rotate between standing, sitting and lying down, since there wasn’t nearly enough room for all of us to do either of the latter two at the same time. Lying down wasn’t a means to actually sleep; at least in my case the combination of the cold temperatures and bright lights (plus the steady ruckus) ruled that out.

I don’t know how to describe the way we were treated in those cages except as blatant and probably illegal harassment and violation of our basic rights and freedoms. The list is fairly long. None of us was ever given the opportunity to make a phone call or speak with a lawyer, despite having told that we had the right to do so upon being arrested. Some people (not including myself) were never even read their rights in the first place or informed of their charges. We were kept in handcuffs throughout the day. In the entire time I was incarcerated we were given two tiny little ‘sandwiches’—a single slice of soy cheese and a bit of margarine on a dinner roll. I believe we were given four small styrofoam cups of water, although it may have been five. One of us was a minor, who was never allowed to contact his parents. Two people had serious medical problems that received pathetically insufficient attention. It took us something like 40 minutes to get a medic when one of them was bleeding from under his fingernails and on the verge of collapsing. The guards alternatively taunted us, threatened us, lied to us, or ignored us. Once, when we had been calling for food for some time, a guard deliberately sat down in front of our cell and ate his lunch.

And it was not as if we were a bunch of hardened criminals. Of course, even if we had been, the guards’ behaviour would have been completely inexcusable, but in fact not a single one of us had been arrested for anything that resembled just cause. A little under half of the people in my cages had been at the same demonstration as me. About the same number had been arrested en masse outside the Novatel hotel; they were surrounded on all sides by police while engaged in a peaceful demonstration, and then beaten and taken into custody. The rest of the people I met were random passersby. The most egregious was a TTC employee in full uniform, who was jumped by riot cops as he was leaving his shift to go home. I later found out that he spent 36 hours in custody with no phone call, lawyer, or charges, which I understand to be unequivocally illegal. A few people were arrested for the hitherto unknown crime of dressing in black and going to punk rock shows. One of these was in from out of town, and didn’t even know what the G20 was. Two women we talked to cage-to-cage were trampled by cops on horseback (one, who looked like she was in her 60s, got a broken arm), and were being charged with obstruction of police.

It would take far too long to describe all the various forms of harassment we were subjected to, but the major theme was fear and uncertainty. The guards took people from one cage and put them in another, keeping them disoriented and preventing them from getting to know their cage-mates, and keeping the rest of us uncertain about whether they had been released or just shuffled. The police told us on a number of occasions that we were about to be released, only to immediately ignore us for hours and hours. We were repeatedly asked to identify ourselves—twice guards took an inventory of everyone’s name and ID number, and tried to do so a third time—but we were also repeatedly asked if so-and-so was in our cage. He almost never was.

While I was in the detention centre, I was inclined to chalk these things up to incompetence and confusion on behalf of the police. Almost 900 people were arrested, and the centre was clearly swamped. But after getting out, talking to others who were imprisoned, and thinking more about it, I now find it hard to escape the conclusion that this confusion and uncertainty was deliberate. We were told too many times to count that the guards were working as fast as they could to process us, but that the paperwork was taking a long time. But when they actually released us, the paperwork they had told us we would need to participate in never happened. They just walked us 50 feet to the exit and handed us our possessions. After talking with a number of people who were arrested, it seems clear that many or most people in my situation were held for 18 to 23 hours—just under the legal maximum—and that therefore the endless promises of impending release were deliberate lies.

The result of all this was that we were constantly on edge. We were alternately furious, frightened, depressed, manic, and inert. At some points we were all banging on the cage and screaming at the top of our lungs. At other points we brooded silently. One of us went into shock. By the time we were released, the random passersby were sounding just as radical as the protesters. We had been arrested for different reasons, but the appalling treatment we received was the same, and united us in our outrage.

Why did this happen? At the largest scale, it seems clear that the police made extended preparations for mass arrests and an intimidation campaign against people exercising their democratic rights to protest. This is a key component of the ‘Miami Model’ of protest disruption and repression that Toronto police followed so strictly (http://bit.ly/al8eaR). Earlier in the day, the police had strategically abandoned the streets to a group of ‘black bloc’ protesters, and left a few empty police cars in the middle of the road. This point should be emphasized: there were thousands of police on the streets throughout the entire weekend, but, somehow, when a small group of protesters decided to break off from the main rally and ‘go rogue’, the police simply melted away. The Sun has now reported that this was an explicit order from police central command: http://bit.ly/cnAqIv. The resulting hour or two of smashed windows and burned cars happened with more or less no police presence whatsoever, despite the fact that it happened on the busiest streets in the downtown. The cops didn’t lose track of the protesters; police helicopters were filming the black bloc from above (and passing on the footage to the media). It would have been the easiest thing in the world to simply surround the one or two hundred black bloc protesters with five or six hundred cops and arrest them, if that had been what the police had wanted to do. Instead, the cops left them completely undisturbed until they had smashed their way from King and Bay all the way up Yonge St. to College and then back to Queen’s Park (passing by police headquarters, even!), where they changed out of their black clothing.

I can’t figure out an explanation for this other than that the police deliberately encouraged property destruction as a pretext for subsequent repression. The black bloc obliged, and after the cruisers were set on fire and a bunch of storefront windows were smashed, the cops announced that their tactics would have to change in response to this property destruction, and began a violent and arbitrary series of beatings and arrests, including of many people not demonstrating at all but simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This was the context for all the arrests that filled the cages of the detention centre, and the harassment and intimidation that police inflicted inside the cages is an exact counterpart to the violence that they inflicted outside. At a smaller scale, many of the individual guards chose to taunt, harass, and abuse us, when they could have chosen not to. I’m sure many thought that we deserved it, and others who didn’t found it easier to just let it happen. The abuse was worse because it was completely arbitrary. Sometimes if we asked for a medic, guards would show up quickly and our ill cage-mate would be taken to a medic. Sometimes guards would show up quickly but do nothing. Sometimes guards would not show up at all. This is the same arbitrariness that terrorized the peaceful protests at Queens Park and elsewhere, where riot cops made ‘dash and grab’ arrests—rushing quickly at a single protester (or passerby) with no warning, beating her, and taking her into custody. It is one of the most disturbing features of all the police violence that occurred over the weekend, because it defies logic and accountability.

I’m acutely aware of how lucky I was relative to so many of the other innocent people who were arrested over the weekend. For one, I wasn’t physically abused prior to being taken into custody. But more than that, I’m an educated, well-off, straight white male. I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that the person in my cage held the longest was an indigenous man. And we now know that queer people were segregated into separate cages; women were threatened with rape and subjected to invasive strip searches (http://bit.ly/9Qlxfb).

I’m now back in New York City, where I live, so I haven’t been able to participate directly in the growing collective efforts to seek justice for all the injustice that occurred in Toronto over the weekend. I wish I could. Being on the business end of police brutality hasn’t changed my politics at all; it’s confirmed them, and made me angrier. At the same time, while I am optimistic that forthcoming investigations and inquiries will condemn a certain amount of the police tactics, I don’t think that would be a ‘loss’ for the cops. It’s probably best to see their strategy as one of kicking the ball forward as far as they can in terms of the tactics they can get away with. Public outrage and judicial action may subsequently kick the ball back a certain distance, but as long as it ends up further than it was before last weekend, that is a police victory of sorts. So in general I am pessimistic about how much good can come directly out of all this.

Indirectly, though, I think there is reason to hope that this outrage is bringing more people together, and building awareness of the fundamental injustice which underpins our society, which cannot be confronted until it is exposed, and which is now harder to ignore when over 1000 peaceful protesters and bystanders have been arbitrarily beaten, jailed, or both.

Turning lead into gold

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:55:24 -0400

Yesterday, we here at Urtak HQ were very interested to learn that for the past year and a half, the Daily Kos blog has been publishing what is almost certainly the fraudulent polling of the Research 2000 firm. And since the Daily Kos was footing the bill for the polls, they’re now suing to get their money back.

Here is an article explaining the problems with Research 2000’s polling: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/6/29/880179/-Research-2000:-Problems-in-plain-sight

To us of course, the larger problem is one that we touched on earlier this month, in the critique of the Toronto Star’s bad polling, and worse reporting.

Media organizations are shockingly ignorant of polling techniques, and yet are dependent on them for their analysis. It seems that all it takes is a polling firm’s president to assure them that they are “scientific,” and no further questions are asked. To say this does a disservice to the public is an understatement.

Is it fair to say that the “scientific” pollsters are the alchemists of our time? That is the direction of our thought, at least.

A new model for finding out what people think is necessary. At Urtak, we are building it.

Join us!

Meanwhile, in South Africa

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 13:25:00 -0400

In Toronto this weekend, the leaders of the G20 tell outrageous lies about having the interests of humanity at heart.

The attention of the world, however, is focused on the World Cup in South Africa, the last African country to gain its freedom. No amount of simulation can obscure the fact that we are watching something that is really real.

Today’s match between the USA and Ghana raises the kind of question that inspired us to create the Urtak project, and also motivates us to continue onward to our goal.

If we could ask Africa how many of them care about this game, how many would that be? And of those football-lovers, how many will be supporting Ghana?

What if we extended the idea to the whole world? How many people want Ghana to win, and how many the Americans?

Why is there no way to know this?

In 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain its independence.

As CLR James put it, “This revolution by the Gold Coast was the blow which made so many cracks in the piece of African colonialism that it proved impossible ever to stick them together again.”

Today, surely, Africa and the whole world desire victory for Ghana, the team that wears the black star.

Urtak: Live from the G20

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 02:32:00 -0400

Toronto is quiet.

But the question of the weekend is:

Do the leaders of the G20 states have too much power?

In fact, that’s the only question in the Urtak so far. As always, please add questions!

Urtak at the G20

Thinking about Gen. McChrystal

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:15:17 -0400

Yesterday, Barack Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal for his bizarre indiscretion.

FOX News ran the following web poll:

205,283 responses and 4346 comments later, we learn that 67% of the respondents believe Obama should have forgiven McChrystal. And nothing else.

One question garnered huge response, but we know nothing about who they are. That massive amount of engagement was channeled into a dead end.

Our friends at The Toilet Paper made McChrystal the subject of the Urtak of the day.

They collected over 1300 responses to ten questions. When we add the x-tabs, that means that they generated 100 opinion facts about McChrystal, every one of which is publicly available on urtak.com. Incidentally, only 54% of their readers thought the general should be forgiven. Still very high, I think!

With far less traffic, The Toilet Paper generated more information than the mighty FOX News organization. Once again, the value of the collaborative approach is demonstrated.

100. 200. 400?

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:52:39 -0400

We are pleased to announce that today we have reached the milestone of 200 Urtaks in the public directory. That means 200 collaborative polls that anyone can study to gain new insights into how people think.

It took us more than a year to get to 100 Urtaks in the directory. The second 100 has taken three months.

Our sincerest thanks to everyone who has participated. Onward and upward!

Do you have a favorite Urtak? Let us know in the comments!

A response from The Toronto Star

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:35:25 -0400

Last week, I wrote an article for The Faster Times challenging the Toronto Star’s reporting of a Toronto mayoral election poll.

Here is the response of The Star’s Public Editor to my article:

Dear Marc:

I have now had opportunity to speak to David Rider and City Editor Graham Parley about your concerns.

As you may know, David has also blogged about some of the issues you have raised http://thestar.blogs.com/thegoods/2010/06/qas-about-the-forum-poll-on-ford-smitherman-and-tory.html and we have ascertained that the entire poll is now available online. [link]

To be honest, I don’t know enough about the art and science of polling to judge whether this poll is problematic. You certainly know more than me about polling but so too does the firm that conducted this poll.

The newsroom is of the view that Lorne Bozinoff is a reputable pollster whose firm has been in operation since 1993 —though associated more with market research than political polling. Mr. Bozinoff, who has no connection to any of the candidates, offered this poll to the Star. That should have been made clear to readers.

We do understand that a high number of undecideds can skew a poll. But, Mr. Parley, who directed the Star’s coverage of the last federal election campaign, tells me that: “But I also know you don’t simply subtract the undecideds and only report the decideds. Virtually every political poll I’ve ever seen is reported with the undecideds proportionately divided so that the preference answer always adds up to 100. (For example, PC 42, Libs 38, NDP 15, Bloc, 5).”

I do recall that some readers had some concerns about federal election polls not including information about undecided voters. I think this is an interesting issue for journalists in reporting on polls and I would like to learn more about it, as we move more fully into the municipal election campaign.

In this instance however, the bottom line for the Star is that Forum Research’s name is behind this poll and Lorne Bozinoff appears amply qualified to design and analyze it.

This wasn’t a poll commissioned by the Star and the article never suggested it was. It was a piece of reporting on an independent poll done by a reputable pollster and I believe Dave Rider reported it accurately.

Please give me a call if you wish to discuss further.

Best Regards,

Kathy English

I am not satisfied by this reply, especially since it doesn’t address the error made by misreporting the poll’s margin of error, and especially that of reading far too much into statistically meaningless figures. It is disappointing that the Star does not seem to have a terribly profound grasp of polling, yet gives poll results so much weight in its pages.

I would be very interested to hear other points of view. Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Public Opinion - From xkcd

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 18:23:07 -0400

http://xkcd.com/756/

No one has ever called us gamines

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:39:00 -0400

Some Urtaks are very large. Others are smaller. But what makes the collaborative poll more interesting than any other is always the quality of the questions.

The Gamine is a blog that defies categorization. Its content is a confluence of art, fashion, and lifestyle, with a focus on how these are experienced in New York. I always find it to be attractive, insightful, and unexpected.

But of course, we really love them for their Urtak, the gamine wants to know…. They have asked some very, very important questions.

As a man once berated for wearing black with navy, I was pleased to find that the readers unanimously agree that this is no crime.

They ask the factual and the transgressive together.

And of course, The Gamine believes as we do, that rules are meant to be broken.

Take a look at The Gamine, and then examine their Urtak. As always, the results and x-tabs are fascinating. Submit an interesting discovery in the comments!

the gamine wants to know…

Made in America

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:58:00 -0400

While watching yesterday’s World Cup disaster, Aaron and I had the good fortune to catch this Dodge Challenger ad, starring Robin Williams as George Washington.

After teaching the limeys another lesson (when will they learn?), the narrator reminds us that, “Here’s a couple of things America got right: Cars, and freedom.” This is the typical American modesty.

The U.S.A. has given the world so much more than cars and freedom. Among others, the swivel chair, potato chips, lasers, and volleyball (indoor and beach).

Next time, we hope the good people at Dodge will show their country more respect.

BONUS: Check out what people have said about CARS and FREEDOM in the general interest Urtak.

UPDATE: The Dodge Challenger is not an American car at all. It is produced in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. For shame.

UPDATE #2: Of course, a Canadian car is still “American.” What it isn’t is estadounidense, as our Latin brothers and sisters say.

Live from New York!

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:10:00 -0400

On Saturday, I had the good fortune to be invited to give a short talk at NYC Startup Weekend. NYCSW is a very cool event where over a hundred people come together to create and launch new ideas over the course of just one weekend.

I talked about how Aaron and I took Urtak from an idea in our minds to the dynamic product that it is. I also shared some of our next steps for the future. Unfortunately, only the last eight minutes of it were captured on video. Though to be fair, that should be more than enough for any civilized person anyway!

Here is the video, from NYC Startup Weekend at NYU’s Courant Insitute:

At the end of the video, I also took a quick look at the results of the Urtak set up for the event. If you want to take a look at it yourself, here it is, below:

Startup Weekend survey

6,000,000

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:02:43 -0400

Six million responses is a big deal.

It took us less than seven weeks to gain our last million responses, our fastest ever.

Hundreds of thousands of people have participated in our project to create both a resource and a technology for collaborative public opinion research.

With a small group of dedicated individuals, and a much larger group of friends and allies, we have shown that gathering millions of responses is something that is within reach of many, many organizations.

Collaborative public opinion is real. Now our task is to make it hegemonic. More than two years after the first response came in to our system, we are determined to grow faster. Expect exciting new releases in the next 30 days, 12 months, and years to come.

Next stop is 60 million responses. Any guesses as to when that will be?

Less than a year, say Aaron and I.

Bad Polling in Toronto

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:26:00 -0400

From The Faster Times:

This morning, readers of the Toronto Star woke up to a new fact. On page GT1, Urban Affairs Bureau Chief David Rider writes that Rob Ford, the right-wing populist candidate for the mayoralty of Canada’s largest city has caught up to George Smitherman, the centrist candidate of Toronto’s liberal establishment.

How does The Star know? It’s simple. Lorne Bozinoff, president of the little-known polling firm Forum Research, Inc. told them. Forum Research conducted a telephone poll of 405 Torontonians over the weekend and supplied the results exclusively to the Star.

The Star gives the results as a percentage of decided voters.

George Smitherman: 29%
Rob Ford: 26%
Sarah Thomson: 17%
Joe Pantalone: 12%
Rocco Rossi: 10%
Giorgio Mammoliti: 4%.

The Star then informs that since the poll’s margin of error is 4.9%, 19 times out of 20, Ford and Smitherman are statistically tied. This is problematic. Since Bozinoff informs that 44% of voters are undecided, that means that only about 227 of the 405 respondents actually expressed a preference, and that the margin of error of the results of this subsample is considerably higher.

For a margin of error of 4.9%, all opinions should be represented, which would look like this:

George Smitherman: 16%
Rob Ford: 15%
Sarah Thomson: 10%
Joe Pantalone: 7%
Rocco Rossi: 6%
Giorgio Mammoliti: 2%
Undecided: 44%

Bozinoff not only supplies this article’s facts but also the bulk of its analysis. He claims that it shows, “It’s a dogfight between Ford and Smitherman — they are well ahead of the others.”

This is demonstrably false. Since a poll’s swing can be either plus or minus, it becomes clear that the real story is that no candidate has any significant public support, and that five months away from election day, all the candidates (even Mammoliti), are within striking distance of one another.

Bozinoff also makes a comment about Ford’s support in the area of Etobicoke. Given that Etobicoke represents 13% of Toronto’s population, we can assume that it represents 13% of a diligent pollster’s sample. In this case, that would be about 53 people. That is a very small number of opinions from which to be drawing conclusions so confidently.

All of this makes the critical reader want to take a closer look at the poll’s results. What were the questions asked? In what order? And what is the demographic makeup of the sample? The Star has not made this information available to its readers, and a visit to forumresearch.com turns up no data either. Readers of the Star (including the author) are left having to take these opinion facts on faith.

In the Star’s article, David Rider proves himself an uncritical reporter, and Lorne Bozinoff a pollster with a poor command of his own numbers. They do not inspire trust.

This inaccurate and incomplete piece of journalism is a disservice to the city of Toronto. It can be argued that it does more to shape public opinion than it does to reflect it. To defend its credibility, the Star must make the full results of its polls available to the public and explain why it has printed and distributed these errors to hundreds of thousands of people.

Quick Hit

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:30:00 -0400

From the Meta-Urtak, the Urtak about the Urtak Project (it’s in the right sidebar).

Do you personally know a member of the Urtak team?

Right now, it’s 61% yes. I wonder where it will be in 30 days. Remind me if I forget.