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Occupy Montreal Protesters Branded by Police
Some members of the Occupy Montreal movement are considering legal action against the Montreal police after they were branded without their consent.
Occupy Montreal protesters were tagged by police with numbers only seen under a UV light. (Photo Courtesy: Nina Haigh/Facebook) Police expelled the group of protesters from Victoria Square last Friday, as part of the group handcuffed themselves to the outdoor kitchen.
"The police asked us to move and we did not comply," said activist Bed Godin. "They removed us by using force."
Protesters were taken to a bus, where officers processed them, and marked some with an ink that could only be seen under a UV light.
"They took pictures and then they wrote one number. I got the number 5 in black marker," he said.
Police say it was to identify the demonstrators, and described it as the best technique to prevent the group from returning to Victoria Square.
They also said it's a technique long used by clubs and bars.
Constitutional lawyer Julius Grey, however, said protesters weren't in a bar and that the police violated the activists' civil rights.
"If the police said, ‘May we do this?' and the person said, ‘Yes,' then I don't think there would be any problem… You can't do something physically to somebody. You can't brand them, mark them, touch them, cut their head… physical acts," he said.
Ben Godin and others are now considering a civil suit against police.
Meanwhile, the Occupy movement has now moved to the gazebo on Mount Royal.
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58 Comments so far
Show AllRubbing alcohol can erase most permanent marker.
What was the name of that European fascist who branded people back in the thirties ?
Yes, the mindset is striking.
Can rubbing alcohol be abbsorbed through the skin?
Yes very easily. It will kill most tissue cells it surrounds. Also kills certain bacteria and other germs. Sterilizes stuff. Probably could not kill yourself or someone else with rubbing alcohol absorbed through the skin. If you took a bath in it it would be very unpleasant and you would die in the alcohol fumes from lack of oxygen. Definitely die from drinking a pint.
On the other hand, the chemicals in nail polish remover and the polish itself would probably do you more damage than wiping off some marker with alcohol. Particularly if being found with a "mark" might get you disappeared.
[Rogue "bold" tag closed.]
Sue them - this was a violation of their bodies and done without consent. Comparing it to what's done at a bar is ridiculous.
"...You can't brand them, mark them, touch them, cut their head… physical acts," he said."
jgmoebus, that was my thought as well. at this point it seems the "authorities" can do what ever they damn well please to the populace. what are we going to do say - no!! and end up in guantanamo ? oh right that could happen anyway.
...peace...
What we all seem to have trouble with from time to time is dealing with consequences as some banks and police have shown us.
As long as people comply and do not file suit. Yes they will do whatever they like. That's why a suit should be filed in this case. And if it is not productive then moist wipes should be passed out to all and everyone.
No one should just throw up their hands and voluntarily start sewing letters on their clothing. We know how that turns out.
gardenernorcal,
of course your correct on all counts (law suits and moist wipes). i should have been clearer when i said (and i realize montreal is not in US),
'what are we going to do say - no!! and end up in guantanamo ? oh right that could happen anyway.'
i was being a little facetious. in a sense what i meant is that we all could inevitably end up in a fema camps anyway - so as people what have we to lose ? not much if we're speaking of rights that truly don't exist. just stating the obvious - not discouraging people from resisting social/political injustice, regardless of how the people express this resistance. i don't plan on donning the costume of a prisoner w/ a sickle and star (or a big red A) stitched on my sleeve either.
...peace...
Soon real branding, tattoos, and injected RFID tags. Red List and Blue List! IBM will keep track like they did for Hitler
or nail polish remover...suit the pricks first
these are not brand new tactics.
Not at all. See reference to Hitler above.
Sure is a coincidence of how all these cities, decided to crack down on the protestors at the same time.
They (the rulers) must really hate us for our freedom.
I'm not sure that consent is relevent.
for example
I doubt consent is sought when someone is taken to jail to serve time.
iow, there's a whole heap of things a government can do to us without our consent.
Not saying that's necessarily a good thing, just pointing out the bleedin' obvious.
I don't believe they are legally allowed to brand people in jail - even temporarily, in the US or Canada.
Completely different situation. You can lose certain freedoms once convicted of something in a court of law. This was clearly not that, Anyway, the question is what are they legally allowed to do to your body. Probably not brand it.
I'm no longer sure that Morticia isn't on "their" side in all of this.
Uh huh. When you lose governments - and we have - you also lose the security, police and military agencies that they control. Are capitalists stupid?
As for branding people, Of course it's wrong. Even the most redneck, dumb cop should be able to guess that. But maybe rednecks are even dumber than I think they are.
Then again, Police gatekeepers - gatekeepers being any whose politics are shared by those with power, which allows them to make trouble, legally or illegally, for those who don't share the ideology of those with power - are easy to come by because the standards for entry into any of the police/military orgs are seriously low. Why would they be high? Police are servants of criminal power, not the people. Police aren't thinkers. They in fact are paid to turn their guns on thinkers in society - when push comes to shove. The corporatocracy doesn't need cops who think critically about what they're doing. It doesn't need cops with principles. It certainly doesn't need (grunt level) cops who have even the most rudimentary grasp of the concept of democracy.
This is what things have come to people and we are responsible to some extent. No one explicitly asks to be made into a dumb slave herded by well paid thugs, but when you leave politics entirely in the hands of uncaring elites, then such a situation, clearly, can come about.
A lot of us are squawking, due to the squeezing that macho capitalists are applying to us, but squawking, while understandable and natural, isn't the kind of fightback needed and your enemy - the parasitic minority of corporacrats who call what they do 'democracy' - knows that, which is why it strategically responds to your feeble efforts to fight the way it does. It's striking at our heads when it strikes at selected protesters when it does and the way it does. It wants to fill the rest of us with the fear of God, God being them.
It's along the lines of 'an offer we can't refuse'. Making us afraid, confused, distracted and angry is not going to help us to think clearly. And if we haven't been in the habit of thinking critically about matters affecting us because "politics sucks," then our minds will be even more easily crippled by the corporatocracy's counter-revolutionary police state measures.
Actually, We 'must' refuse their offer to cower in fear. Being brave, however we do it, won't slow the beast down. It loves a fight and it loves all this chaos and bloodletting, while it believes that it will only ever be on the delivery, rather than receiving, end of it. That's just that beast's nature. We must allow the lawless horde the freedom to act the way it wishes so that it can believe the way it wishes so that it can then be judged. And we must also care, not because that has the power to accomplish the impossible, but because this is also about us as individuals. Believe it or not. It's not about winning in an evil game (which I call 'riches for the strongest'). It's about caring enough that you want to see a new game in which not only you, but everyone (decent), wins.
The beast and it's worshippers have a pretty high view of the corporatocracy and the mafia capitalist system within it. That world's attitude, as the Christian Bible accurately reports, is "Who can do battle with the wild beast?"
Actually, The wild beast is sort of right. 'We' won't slay it. We don't have the power and if we wanted to use our numbers and go for it anyway, What kind of destruction and lawlessness would 'we' have to unleash in order to destroy the present system of oppression and exploitation? Therefore, The needed battle will be fought, successfully, by a higher power that can't be bought off or reduced to adopting the principles and attitude of the beast begging to be destroyed.
Please use paragraphs. I doubt anyone would bother to read that. Clear thinkers are often concise, too.
Wow. Way to waste your time.
There's another problem here, besides the branding. Why should the protesters not have been able to return to Victoria Square?
They were arrested. They were not convicted of anything, yet. Why can't they go where they like? Innocent until guilty?
Disrespect leads do demonization, and that leads to dehumanization and a host of bad things including branding. Once people are dehumanized, anything goes. It is extremely important to challenge this branding.
Dudes, this is not "branding". This is called inking, and is very temporary and has been used for centuries. If you think anything else, you need to get a life. Ditto the Occupy Montealites.
Cripes, some people are so thin-skinned.
Maybe if someone speaks out of turn the police should cut their lips off. That should stop these dirty protesters, and let everyone know what they did. Long live Obama Khan!
Sorry, you are too extremist to be taken seriously.
What we need from journalists is to cut the histrionics, tantrums, spin and overt lying and report in an honest, and verifiable manner.
Common Dreams is failing to do that these days, instead preferring to indulge in histrionics, extremist views and outright lies to garner attention, and presumably funding. Common Dreams staff are, at best, third-rate journalists for using such cheap propagandist techniques.
They use inking in hospitals too. When you have surgery on things you have two, arms, legs, hands etc. This is a make sure that the correct "one" is identified in addition to the routine charts. In this case I think it would be hard to prove it caused harm as opposed to tear gas, rubber bullets and other methods. The issue might be if it is sanitary to use markers on more than one person. In the hospital you get to keep the marker.
I want to be branded too. It's a source of pride and patriotism. Where do I get one? Can I go down to my local police station and say, please give me one or do I have to go to a protest like the others? ;)
Just get some UV paint and get creative and prolific : -)
I was just kidding but that's actually a brilliant idea! UV paint for everyone!
Police in Quebec have a long, inglorious, well documented history of being some of the worst anti-freedom thugs in Canada.
Spot on, Galenwright.
Armed, uniformed goons, with absolute impunity in their history of smashing strikers or enforcing fascist rules (as in the asbestos strikes or the padlock laws against a free press, in the 50s), or shooting unarmed kids today.
Truly fearsome. I wouldn't want to be stopped by them even for a minor traffic violation if I lived there and I were young, or a person of colour, or a poor person or even someone who couldn't pass for a corporate executive.
And they don't brand sheep.
yes they do, and with paint.
http://www.sheep101.info/201/Images/ID/paintbrandedsheep.jpg
Everyone is branded...Nike, GE, PT Cruser, Villa Verde East, The Town Mall, think outside the bun, and nothing tastes better than folgers in your cup.
This branding was predicted in the book of Revelation 13, 16-18.
It's called the mark of the beast.
sugarsnap88,
..................Beasts love to brand; it's an unresolved power/control issue.
What an idiotic article, from the description i expected people getting branded with hot iron but instead its a bunch of hippies with some ink on there hands complaining about how it won't rub off.
Winterhead: It may not be branding with a hot iron but it is a violation of their rights. It's not just a bunch of hippies, either. I suggest you take your ignorance and go troll somewhere else.
You sound like the kind of person who when the robothugs break into the house next door to kidnap or kill your neighbours would simply say to yourself "They must have done something wrong" and plug your ears with loud music to shut out the reality of fascism. That was the type of denial many middle-class Argentines opted for during the police-military-corporate repression of 1975-83 - shutter their windows, crank up the music and mutter "Por algo será", or rationalize that only radical/subversive/communist/troublemaking/unpatriotic people got swept up in those raids.
And check your spelling: It's not its, their hands not there hands.
(I know you're by far not the only one who dashes off comments without concern for proper spelling, but you're the straw that broke my camel's back, so to speak.)
hoodeet: sorry about improper spelling but you have to admit the Title of the article makes it sound like something else entirely. Inking someones hands can never be related to "robothugs" (not sure what that word means) or some sort of government conspiracy. Police have been "taging" individuals for years, example: putting known pedophiles names out so people can protect themselves. And also i do not apreciate peolze hwo carez aboust goods spellings ons internetz... these comments are like texts as long as their legible their good.
I agree with you winterhead! Why have we never met?? We both understand how Liberal America has to be stopped. In other words, we need a Liberal Holocaust.
For those inclined to complain about my lack of paragraphs: I have no idea how to do it here. I have tried spacing and double spacing. I'm using windows 7 on a new Toshiba laptop. Feel free to clue me in. Is there a formatting action I can take. I am well aware that a single gigantic paragraph will be offputting. In all honesty, I'm inclined to respond the same way to similarly thoughtless presentations. Where do we draw the line though? Who has their grammar or spelling nailed down here? Almost no one.
*After a Google search - and the disappointing discovery that CD offers zero help to those who visit here and participate in discussions, while asking for donations - I found a helpful but short discussion about the subject in another CD topic discussion not related to paragraphs of course. The solution suggested didn't work. But I experimented and found that a two < p >s (without spaces) in a row at the end of each paragraph works. I will attempt to fix my long post below. Is it just some of us who can't simply use the normal keys to make paragraphs in CD?
Re: "For those inclined to complain about my lack of paragraphs: I have no idea how to do it here."
______________________Ybra, sorry-- only after I posted the following information did I read your footnote and realize that you'd answered your own question. But it might help to know that no, it's not "you".The hassle with creating paragraphs stems from the peculiar fact that this site employs two different incompatible methods for posting comments; one is HTML-based, one isn't. As the following information discloses, one must adjust one's formatting according to the location of the comments thread!So : to create paragraph breaks, type this pair (i.e. you need to use two) of HTML tags where you want the break, like this:
< br >< br >
Don't put the spaces, included only for display purposes here, between the brackets and enclosed letters used in the above example.
< p >< p > should work also. (Again, without the spaces between the letter and enclosing brackets.)
You can test or check if you're doing it correctly by using the "preview" feature. Hope this helps.
Note: This is only necessary when posting comments to "News" articles, which includes both articles posted under the "News" header and the headlines on the top of the page above the headers.
Using the carriage return key (↵ "enter" key), aka "leaving a line blank" still works to create paragraph breaks in comments threads in the "Views" and "Further" columns.
Thanks. I'll keep this info in my OpenOffice for further reference. It's a little confusing, but now I have the info I need. In my view, what needs to be done here, formatting-wise, just so people don't annoy each other, should be uneccessary. I'll give everyone here a break now and find other things to do.
This is not branding, it is marking with a pen. While I do take issue with the practice, referring to it as branding is way over the top sensationalism.
Thank you. Not only is it sensationalism, it is histrionics. The staff at Common Dreams should be ashamed for the headline which is not only misleading, it is a blatant lie.
I see the edit button on my above comment, which I assume means that I 'can' edit. I click on it - to tell folks that, while I would like to edit the long post I did previously, it seems that there's a time limitation for editing and I don't see the edit button - and I get met with the msg that I don't have permission. I see the edit button. I only just finished with the post but I can't edit it to say the above (in this post) -?