Following up on yesterday's post about the G20 protests turning to widespread property damage (decide for yourself whether that constitutes "violence") on the part of a small group of agitators. It's very difficult to create any kind of coherent narrative about so many events in so many places. So I'll highlight a few anecdotes I've found that give some kind of flavour of the protests and the Police response.
On the bright side, I'm not aware of anyone being seriously hurt during the day or night's events, though naturally there will be some amount of injuries sustained by those arrested, and at a protest this morning a small number of rubber bullets were fired which likely injured some people. No deaths is still something to breathe a sigh of relief over.
A large protest march outside the G20 security zone through downtown Toronto has turned violent, smashing up multiple stores and burning at least one police car in Toronto's main shopping district, Yonge st and College, with other reports of conflicts with police at Queen and John area (several blocks south-west).
So far no deaths, but the violence has been attributed to organized anarchist groups such as the "black bloc" (which I know nothing about and may not be a coherent group as such) which despite being a tiny portion of the protest, are obviously effective at provoking vandalism and damage within a charged up crowd.
As night is falling I don't know what will happen, whether the crowds will disperse, or if the overthrow-society twits will succeed at instigating even worse harm than ruining any positive message that the peaceful protests might have achieved. Way to create a backlash against the left and against the change you seek, morons.
I'm safely a couple kilometers out of the downtown core, though I do live quite near to the containment site for arrested protestors. Drove by on errands and the Police milling about there are all wearing gas mask carriers on their belts.
