Flashpoints of Contention; Policing Public Order in Toronto a Comparative Case Study

Flashpoints of Contention; Policing Public Order in Toronto a Comparative Case Study
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Institution
Flashpoints of Contention; Policing Public Order in Toronto a Comparative Case Study
The issue of public policing has been met with some controversies in the recent past especially when dealing with public protests and demonstrations. Undoubtedly, the method employed in public policing of public order occurrences largely determines the outcomes of the situation. This fact is evident in the separate cases of the G-20 summit and the Tamil protests in Toronto. The former case took pace a week before the 2010 G20 Toronto summit and the main causes for the protests and demonstrations were poverty and capitalism. This began as peaceful demonstrations and rallies, which eventually turned to riots and vandalism following the use of black bloc tactics on the part of the protesters. The Tamil protests took place between 2008 and 2009 and the protesters in this case were concerned about the Sri Lankan Civil War and unanimously wanted a ceasefire to that war. This was because the Sri Lankan Tamil people were being targeted and killed in huge numbers in the war and therefore the Tamil population was protesting this fact. The protest was generally non-violent and included internet activism, hunger strikes, student protests and occupation. This paper therefore aims to apply the Flashpoints model to give a detailed explanation for the outcomes of the G-20 and Tamil protests that are rather contrasting. The paper suggests that the contrasting outcomes were due to differences in the structural, political/ideological, cultural, contextual, situational, and interactional contexts of the two public order occurrences in Toronto.
The flashpoints model identifies six levels to be used in explaining the outcomes of public protests and demonstration. The first level is structural and this refers to inequalities in terms of material things, inferior life chances, and political inaction patterns in society that all support collective grievances (King, & Waddington, 2005). In this case, members of the society often feel powerless due to several factors including repressive legislation or accountability structures used by the police and which are often disregard the idea of democracy. In other instances, the state may also alienate itself from the ideologies shared by members of a given group and this can cause conflicts. Structural level also refers to a situation whereby people have mutual feelings of moral responsibility towards important issues such as the environment or war. In these cases, conflicts can occur when the protesters feel that the police are repressing their efforts (Waddington, 2010). With this in mind, the elements of this level are evident in the G20 and Tamil protests. In the Tamil protests for instance, the Tamil diaspora people had the feeling of moral responsibility towards the war, which was going on in Sri Lanka and was leaving many Tamil people dead (Jeyapal, 2014). For this reason, they wanted the intervention of politicians to call for a ceasefire. The Tamil population in Sri Lanka was also deprived of their civil rights and the protest was therefore aimed to restoring these rights. In the G20 summit protests, the cau...