"Someone Is Going To Be Seriously Injured Or Killed" At Hands Of RCMP - Fairy Creek Blockade (BC)
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Tensions have passed the boiling point on the southern Vancouver Island frontlines. For weeks protesters have been saying RCMP officers have been using increasingly dangerous tactics during arrests. Videos have shown chainsaws being used near protesters who had chained themselves to logs, a 17-year-old falling at least five metres as police dismantled a structure he was on and RCMP officers pepper spraying protesters.
Protesters use a variety of tactics to prevent RCMP officers and Teal-Jones employees from moving up the logging road. The tactics date back to the 1960s when protesters started chaining themselves to fences to protest nuclear power and weapons manufacturing facilities. But chains can be easily cut with bolt cutters, so protesters adapted their techniques.
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Rob Gordon, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University, said protesters are using “passive opposition techniques” similar to the ones popularized by Mahatma Gandhi, while RCMP officers use paramilitary techniques of “direct conflict.” The RCMP are asked to do “almost the impossible,” said Gordon. On the one hand, they’re required to enforce the injunction and use military tactics to clear out the protesters. On the other hand, they still have to act as a police force, not as an army. Both sides are dug in and “blinded by fury and hatred,” he said. “You don’t need a PhD to figure out what will happen next here: someone is going to be seriously injured or killed.”
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“Every day I’m watching my friends get brutalized, ripped apart and pepper sprayed,” said a BIPOC land defender. “They’re getting picked up and dragged over hard rocks. We’re on the side of the mountain — there’s no grass. There’s big rocks and their tailbones are hitting them.” Dr. Joan Rosenberg, a retired physician from the Victoria area who visited the blockades several times to offer her services, said she’s seen RCMP officers choke people as their faces turn red and drag people in ways that could dislocate limbs. She’s also seen officers remove tarps and tents so that protesters were stuck under the summer sun on 36 C days to the point that they were vomiting from heat stroke.
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https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/09/27/Someone-Going-To-Be-Injured-Killed/
