Democracy, YouTube style
This story is sure to get pretty stinky.
An activist group is alleging that Quebec undercover police may have tried to instigate violence at the recent “Three Amigos” summit at Chateau Montebello. Protestors claim that three cops, who have admitted to posing as protesters, were trying to get everyone all fired up, with the ultimate hope of busting some of the people they fired up.
Police immediately responded to the claims as spurious. And then some embarrassing footage showed up on YouTube.
Police came under fire Tuesday, when a video surfaced on YouTube that appeared to show three plainclothes police officers at the protest with bandanas across their faces. One of the men was carrying a rock.
In the video, protest organizers in suits order the men to put the rock down, call them police instigators and try unsuccessfully to unmask them.
There will no doubt be all sorts of hinky machinations on the part of the police to try and discredit the video, along with any claims made by the (apparently peaceful) legitimate protesters. That course of action is pretty much a standard reaction, and is often quite effective.
That said, you’re forced to wonder how easy it is to blow off this sort of thing when there’s video, and when the video is so widely accessible. As Rodney King will tell you, video evidence doesn’t mean a whole lot. But in a YouTube world, the echo effect is such that this incident could be a bit of a PR nightmare at best, and some cops on trial at worst.
Whatever else you want to say or think, masked cops posing as protesters seems pretty suspect to me.
Read, watch, decide and stay tuned.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Shockingly they copped to this (ha ha) later on. Of course the bloggers went into a CSI forensic frenzy and identified their boots as standard issue gear for firefighters and cops. (Little yellow triangle at the bottom).
I thought it was pretty odd when you could see the masked, beweaponed “protesters” edging *towards* the police line when they got called out. A police line that did nothing to deter the supposed masked, beweaponed protesters. And when they were “arrested” the cops didn’t remove their masks as they took them away.
Fuck them. They should know better. If you wanna infiltrate the crowd, why not do it without the fucking getup.