Montreal Riot

Finally something is taking over the news and replaces the over-advertised Pekin, a riot took place in Montreal during the night of August 11th 2008. However, the population isn’t quite opposed to what happened, surprisingly.

August 10th 2008, young adults are playing dice in a park and a policeman decided to arrest one of them for no apparent reason. The young man of 22 years old asked why he was being arrested and the policeman didn’t reply and threw him to the ground and proceeded to arrest him. Seeing this, his younger brother went toward them and asked why he was arresting his brother. The policeman apparently turned around and shot him.

In reacting to this, the youth of North Montreal gathered in an unstructured manner and started to protest yet young people from other areas of Montreal jumped in and started what soon became a riot. Many cars got set on fire, they broked into stores and stole items, etc…

The population of the area seems to understand what happened and while some are scared, most are requesting that the police and the leaders of the riot sit and discuss ways to calm things down and make it so the police stops beating down the young immigrants and people who have no reason to be arrested.

Of course, we also have the extremist right-wing party (ADQ) that goes and claims like idiots that it’s street gangs and that it’s nothing unusual. -Everyone- even the media, said that it wasn’t related to street gangs.

On tv, all we hear about is how the police didn’t react quick enough to the riot. There were policemen screaming to rush in and they were being held back. There’s also an urge to solve the issue regarding -why- was the young Freddy killed.

It’s not the first time we hear about the police beating down people, arresting them for nothing or adopting behaviors that aren’t to protect the population. However, this time, they managed to kill someone and even worse for them, the young person wasn’t known to be a trouble-maker, was rather calm and shy, he had a project for his life and it was far from criminality. This is not something the population of Montreal, even more on a national level, will see forgotten.

Sadly, I personally don’t expect any apologize from the police corps, to the family of the young man they killed. They will probably pull the solidarity card and throw all the blame on something the teenager did, instead of assuming they did a mistake that took away the life of an innocent and promising citizen.

- Sabbi

The Answer to Violence is NonLethal

Through whatever possible process, a socialistic democracy coming into a country must invariably decide on the process by which to ensure their authority, as a government that does not have a basis in the populace will succumb to a new revolution quickly after. The typical response has been over-zealous repression of ideals considered contrary to the state. While stemming from a pure intent, this method soon results in populace resentment of the government, which will unchecked eventually result in a revolt or reverting to a capitalistic ideal. Instead, they must work at length to establish a non-lethal police and military force.

There are already many ways to detain individuals with little to no permanent damage done to them. Stemming from these examples, a military force equipped purely with weapons designed to incapacitate or restrain their targets will achieve a massive public relations victory. One of the easiest ways to cause resentment towards a government regardless of their actions is the death of their own population. Blame will inevitably be placed on the government to some extent. Minimizing these occurrences is key.

This military methodology does not answer the ‘how’ of its full use and application, but in an ideal government it is necessary. If the government adheres fully to all other factors that might be necessary in such an ideal place, a police force that purely protects even the criminals themselves will be hard to resent. In this way, law can be maintained with minimum public disturbance and aggravation, and the elimination of the resentment would allow for public cries for change to be directed at the laws in question instead of the force used to enforce them.

Understand that this would not be the only factor needed to achieving said ideal government, but is simply one of the necessary factors. In order to reach the ideal, we must all think every moment how to improve even the slightest problem within the government at hand

. Even something small could one day could blow out of proportion if left unchecked. This is simply my answer as to how a non-lethal enforcement method is one of those things needing to be changed.

- Justin