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The Daily Photoist: The Arrest

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Each weekday morning, we pick a recent image from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature it here on the site. It’s our way to give the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve!
sircharlie.jpg
Though not exactly certain what happened here, SirCharlie caught the tail end of this arrest in College Park yesterday. He speculates that the arrest may have been connected with a smashed in car window in one of the nearby parking lots. It’s not often we find this sort of photojournalistic montage in our Flickr pool, and it brings up all sorts of mixed emotions/questions about the situation — was so much force needed? Was the person resisting? If the man wasn’t homeless (as SirCharlie claims), would he have been treated differently?
Anyone else happen to see this and can shed more light?

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Comments

  • Gloria

    Does SirCharlie mention this “he would’ve been treated differently if he wasn’t homeless” somewhere else? It’s not on that Flickr post.

  • http://www.livebabylive.com Carrie

    I should’ve worded that a little differently…I meant that Charlie claims the man was homeless. Will edit to clarify.

  • Steve

    Nice to see that we have Little Brothers watching the police, since Big Brother is watching us.

  • andrew

    Was so much force needed? Well, obviously, no – one could make the argument that force is so rarely needed that the police are mostly an excuse to waste taxpayers’ money – but in a less tongue-in-cheek way, probably the TPS’s rules around use of force have all sorts of leeway for the slightest bit of threat the officers perceive against them, a fellow officer, or the public [and I think the arrest subject as well, if they seem like they pose an imminent threat to themselves]. I’ve seen the TPS take down people who are way smaller than the officers in protest situations where its pretty obvious they are an organizer and are kinda granola and not OCAP rock-throwy types in much the same manner as the above photographs. The person probably was resisting. Even if at first they might just be absolutely drunk and wavering around, once someone starts using that kind of force on you, it takes a hell of a lot of discipline not to resist or even move in a manner that the police will view as “resisting”. Passive resistance takes guts and practice.
    Would the police use that kind of force on someone well-dressed and in possession of say, a set of car keys? Depends. Race, gender, class all play into these things. Even a well-dressed white man can quickly get his face smashed into concrete with a knee in the small of his back if he moves wrong, says the wrong thing, or just gets an officer in a bad mood. Sad to say, but despite their protestations our police officers still behave depending on how they feel sometimes, and this is because a combination of the Police Association’s actions and the lack of any real teeth in independent investigations and charges of brutality of police behaviour.
    Happy International Day Against Police Brutality.

  • dave

    No context, no info whatsoever about who this guy is (or whether or not he’s homeless), no info on what he was being taken in for – just a couple of pictures showing a dude getting arrested. Any speculation about police brutality is pointless unless you know at least something about what happened.

  • shaunpierre

    I think this type of behaviour usually depends on the cop (leaving the ‘suspect’ or ‘accused’ out of this). I know this from working in an emergency ward for many years. Some cops are good at negotiating and some are not. If you are under arrest the police reserve the right to use “reasonable force” to “take physical control of you”. I think it is up to the discretion of the officer(s) to do whatever they think is in their best interest.

  • Ryan Coleman

    Dave (#5) Calls it right… with no context you can’t say the police were using “excessive force”.
    As far as I see it in general though the police only have two options – either the person is going to let you cuff them or they are not. How exactly do people suggest cops cuff someone who doesn’t want to be cuffed?

  • Carly Beath

    The thing is, she didn’t say they were using excessive force. She asked if they were. She also asked about the other side, which is “Was he resisting?” Then she asked if anyone had actually seen the incident and could shed some more light on it.

  • brokenengine

    Thats what I thought too Carly, that people were jumping the gun a little bit (No pun intended…ok, maybe it is).
    Funny, yet pleasing, to see so many of the supposed “liberal-elite blogoverse intelligentsia” jumping to the aid of our constabulatory.

  • Carrie

    What Carly said. I was not there, and therefore I made no claims in this post, just purely asked questions to start a conversation.

  • xoro

    Naaah the Cops were just “copping an attitude”, or
    better yet, “copping a feel.”
    Cheers Xoro