I just watched a very disturbing video. It’s a video of Officer Bubbles damn near getting assaulted by a crazy vigilante thug using chemicals in an obvious attempt to blind the officer, who is just doing his job. Of course, that’s not the case. It’s a video of a girl blowing bubbles at a police barricade in Toronto during the G20 demonstrations. Yeah, bubbles. And his reaction was to threaten her with assault charges, belittle her, and generally act like an ass. There’s also a video that tells a much broader explanation of the incident.

Now, I can’t comment on what happened in Toronto at the time. I know that there were a lot of incidents and I know that there were some really scary moments during the summit, and I don’t trust either side to give me a clear picture of what happened, but videos like this really do make me angry. Once upon a time, I wrote about Calgary’s G8 summit from 2002for the debut of my buddies Charles and Kim’s new zine,  Newtopia Magazine, and one of the biggest things things I gave credit to for the success of that event was the actions of the police. There was (at least from what I saw and heard) no real strong-man police presence. They were there in droves, and the stormtroopers were waiting in case there was a need, but the front line cops were bike cops who were smiling and pleasant to everyone. Guys like this provoke a situation that need not even exist, and actions like the detainings that took place are ridiculous and counterproductive.

I found out about this Officer Bubbles from my roommate, who encourages anyone interesting in sending some bubbles to Officer Bubbles to do so:
 
Mailing Address for the Toronto Police Headquarters:
Toronto Police Service
40 College Street
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
M5G 2J3

Jim