It resembled a scene from a dystopian Hollywood movie.

The date was Sunday, June 27 and the setting was Queen St. W. and Spadina Ave. A crowd of about 200 people stood huddled beneath dark grey skies, drenched from the pouring rain. They looked frightened yet defiant.

Forming a tightening black circle around them were hundreds of riot police. One by one, they picked people off and arrested them.

This was the image on television sets across the city. Among those watching was Bill Blair, Toronto’s chief of police.

The G20 summit would be the biggest security operation of the chief’s career. But from June 25 to 27, his presence was minimal inside the Major Incident Command Centre — the beating heart of Toronto’s security operations.

Blair had entrusted command to two of his best men — Supts. Hugh Ferguson and Mark Fenton. He also had faith in the complex matrix of directors, planners and strategists designed to keep the city running smoothly. If Blair interfered, this elaborate chain of command would disintegrate.

But on Sunday, the chief walked into the command centre and pulled rank for the first time. Blair stayed only a few minutes, long enough to order the shutting down of the mass containment at Queen and Spadina.

“I went to the command centre and I said, ‘I believe now is the appropriate time to end this thing. End this thing,’ ” Blair told the Star.

“Circumstances no longer warranted continued detention of those individuals and I directed that they all be released immediately and unconditionally.”

Police say criminal elements had burrowed into that crowd at Queen and Spadina. But many detained there said they were merely innocent bystanders or peaceful protesters.

Sunday brought the grand total of arrests over the weekend to 1,105 — believed by some to be the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. Most people were released without charge and numerous allegations have since emerged of police brutality, arbitrary detentions and trampled civil rights.

Police had about 5,400 officers working 12-hour shifts in Toronto — part of the 19,000 deployed overall for the G8 in Huntsville and the G20 — yet, a mob using black bloc tactics still managed to elude the security force and catalyze a shift in police tactics literally overnight.

Many questions linger in the wake of the summit: Who was giving the orders? Why did police fail to stop the black bloc from running amok? And why, in the aftermath of the mob, did so many non-violent protesters feel as if they were treated like criminals?

Some answers will be uncovered by the inquiries and lawsuits that have been launched since the summit. Ontario’s ombudsmen is also investigating the Public Works Protection Act, a controversial regulation amended in June to give police added powers of arrest near the security fence.

But many answers will be found buried in the weekend itself, beginning Friday, June 25 — one day before the broken windows, the burned cars, the brief but consequential explosion of violence.

On Friday, the prospect of a riotous mob was still just a hypothetical scenario for security planners. And police had yet to lose control of their city.

Friday

Toronto crackled with civic dissent in the week leading up to the G20. But on Friday, the eve of the summit weekend, the first spot of black began to seep into peaceful protest crowds.

Security organizers had been preparing for this since June 2009, when a planning team was first assembled for the G8 summit in Huntsville. By the time the G20 in Toronto was announced, a federally-led Integrated Security Unit had been established to govern security for the combined summits.

The brains of the ISU were in Barrie, where senior police officials from the RCMP, OPP, Toronto and Peel police, and armed forces were overseeing every major security detail.

But in Toronto, decisions were made by senior officers at 40 College St., police headquarters. The command centre shared constant information with Barrie but the streets of Toronto — with the exception of the immediate summit site — were Toronto’s responsibility to protect.

The first large-scale protest of the G20 would begin at Allan Gardens and conclude with a tent city at an undisclosed location. By early afternoon, police were already ringing the site, searching people’s bags and confiscating potential weapons.

Inside the park, the atmosphere was spirited, almost festive; there were brass instruments, banner painting and even free food, as volunteers served dishes of chicken, couscous and bulgur salad.

Social justice activist Anna Willats, head marshal of the parade, led a circle of protesters in a pep talk. “This is a peaceful march,” she said. “This is one we want to take to the end.”

But the “end” of the march was a guarded secret, known only to a handful of protest decision makers, according to activist A.J. Withers, one of two police liaisons for the rally. Organizers had some pit-stops in mind — including Jim Flaherty’s office at 150 King St. W. — but the route would be subject to ongoing negotiations with police.

The 31-year-old activist said she and another police liaison arrived at the park around 2 p.m. and immediately sought out an officer in charge. She was eventually pointed toward a couple of staff sergeants, including 55 Division’s Grant Burningham and Shaun Narine, an experienced crowd control officer who had helped manage last summer’s Tamil protest on the Gardiner Expressway.

By about 4 p.m., more than 1,000 people marched west on Carlton St., with police on bicycles. As the mass forged westward, Withers spotted Burningham in the crowd and ran up to him. Could the march continue west of Yonge St.? Yes, he replied.

But soon after, the staff sergeant became visibly agitated. The protest was moving too fast.

“Slow, slow!” he shouted at two police vans leading the march. “Crawl, crawl. Use your vans as a natural barricade to slow them down.”

Burningham spoke brusquely into his cellphone and could be heard saying: “It’s posturing at this point. Until they break off, we’re not going to deploy anything.”

From the upper floors of police headquarters, officers had noticed a black spot being carried along by the current of the crowd, like a drop of oil in a stream of water. It was the first mass public appearance of the black bloc in Toronto.

The black bloc is not an organized group but a tactic used by a collective of smaller, autonomous packs. They are unified in their all-black uniforms, often with masks or bandanas covering their faces, and a shared desire for destruction.

On College St., a group donning black clustered together, some raising banners high in the air to block police and media cameras. Regular-looking protesters would melt into the dark blob, only to emerge moments later dressed in black. “Stay tight, stay tight!” they shouted.

The black bloc was growing. And for police, the timing couldn’t have been worse.

Just two blocks north, a military repatriation ceremony was underway. The body of Sgt. Jimmy MacNeil, killed in Afghanistan on June 21, was being transported to the coroner’s office, just north of where the boisterous rally was headed.

According to Blair, about 30 black-clad protesters began breaking off from the crowd and moving north toward the coroner’s office. Rocks and golf balls were lobbed from the crowd, police said.

For one Toronto police insider, this was a missed opportunity to snag the black bloc early in the weekend.

“They were right outside headquarters. I don’t know why we didn’t put them in a net, stop them,” he said, adding: “Saturday wouldn’t have happened.”

Withers noticed police ratcheting up their presence and officers pulling on helmets. Officers ordered people to move out of the way but Emomotimi Azorbo, a deaf man, failed to hear police demands and was arrested.

Soon after, riot police were streaming out of the alleyways.

As the march moved on, Withers asked if the crowd could turn on Bay St. but police said absolutely not — it was too narrow, too difficult for manoeuvring police lines. They would go down University Ave. instead.

But at Elm St., police were lining up their bikes across University Ave. Mounted units reinforced the barricade. Hundreds of riot police marched in, pounding their batons against their shields. Some had gas masks and crowd-control weapons.

“Let us march!” chanted protesters, growing increasingly agitated while police stood their ground, stone-faced.

According to Staff Sgt. Narine, the black bloc tried breaking free south of University Ave., spurring police to deploy their riot squads.

But nothing was explained to Withers.

“We were angry about the fact that they lied to us that we could go south on University,” she said. “We were very worried about people’s safety, that we would be attacked.”

Withers expressed her frustrations to Burningham and demanded to know what was going on. She said he told her he didn’t know.

“I saw him repeatedly be on a radio,” she said. “(He was) saying his name, his rank, that he was speaking with us and that he wanted to speak to the officer in charge about what was going on.” Burningham, who spoke briefly to the Star during the march, did not return later requests for an interview.

Anxious to defuse the situation, protest organizers herded marchers west on Elm St., where they were met by another wall of police. The black bloc disintegrated back into the crowd and at about 6:30 p.m., the rally was moving north on University and back to Allan Gardens.

In two hours, the protest had moved less than two kilometres.

Willats, an experienced protest marshal, said she had never seen police react the way they had that Friday. “To send the riot police the way that they did, it just riled everybody up,” she said. “At that point we were a really peaceful march.”

At Allan Gardens, a few dozen activists began unpacking tents and sleeping bags. Some marched to the Eastern Ave. detention centre, a temporary holding pen for G20 arrestees.

Meanwhile, anarchists and supporters rushed to a meeting spot nearby to plan for the next day.

According to an anarchist communiqué that has been posted online, the preceding week of rallies was buildup to Saturday’s massive labour rally. Thousands were expected in the crowd — a perfect Trojan horse for the black bloc to burrow inside. When the moment was right, they would burst out and charge the fence.

But on the eve of the G20, the anarchists disagreed on a strategy. Those with street experience worried it was a suicide mission. They needed scouts or recon teams to monitor the police.

Multiple plans were suggested and subsequently scrapped. Finally, the plan was to have no plan at all, prompting cheers and applause from those in attendance.

It was decided the anarchists would meet at Queen’s Park. What happened next would be anyone’s guess.

Saturday

The sky was still dark when police began making arrests early Saturday morning.

It was around 4 a.m. when a bang rattled through Alex Hundert’s Westmoreland Ave. apartment. About six police officers, some wearing vests over basketball shorts and t-shirts, burst in with their guns drawn.

Hundert was arrested along with his friend, Amanda Hiscocks, and partner Leah Henderson. Police allege all three are associates of the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance (SOAR), which issued an online call-out urging activists to splinter from the labour rally and pursue a “militant and confrontational” march to the fence.

Two undercover agents had infiltrated the group, whose alleged targets included City Hall, Goldman Sachs, The Bay and a number of consulates, according to Crown attorney Vincent Paris.

At the same time, tactical officers mistakenly raided the wrong apartment in a three-storey High Park home, waking up a veterinarian at gunpoint. They were searching for an activist sleeping in a separate apartment in the house.

Hours later, vocal activist and protest organizer Syed Hussan was arrested after being snatched from the back seat of a cab. He had been on his way to Hundert’s home, where he had planned to attend a news conference about the morning raids.

Those arrested in the morning raids were among more than a dozen alleged “ringleaders” nabbed before that day’s rally. Police, it would seem, were attempting to cripple the black bloc before it could form.

But at Queen’s Park, protesters were converging and the black bloc would soon follow.

Saturday’s labour rally was organized by the Ontario Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress. In the weeks leading up to the summit, organizers braced themselves for a possible infiltration by violent activists. They anticipated any confrontation would take place along Queen St.

The parade had some 200 parade marshals and Const. George Tucker, a community relations officer with the ISU, was tasked with keeping an eye on the front of the march.

But at the rear, a darkly dressed pack began pulling bandanas and balaclavas over their faces. “A group of these black bloc characters came off to the side in front of me,” Tucker recalled. “They came running up the north side of Queen St., tried to infiltrate the front of the rally.”

A skirmish erupted at Queen and John Sts. as the black bloc tried piercing a wall of police, which lined every street along Queen. The mob was deflected but continued toward Spadina Ave., where they made another move south.

Alok Mukherjee, chair of the civilian board overseeing Toronto police, was in his office at police headquarters when this unfolded. Watching television, he was alarmed by the growing presence of protesters in black.

At about 3:45 p.m., there was a flash in the crowd.

“That was kind of the beginning of the disturbances,” Mukherjee said.

Quebecois communists at Queen and Spadina lit a flare, briefly capturing the attention of the hundreds in the street. As the red smoke drifted away, a few black-clad protesters shouted rallying calls.

They started to run.

“I think it’s fair to say we were caught off guard by what happened next,” said one senior G20 planning officer. “They broke away so fast.”

The crowd sprinted east on Queen, overcoming a police cruiser that was tailing the protests. A handful of black bloc members — now revealing a cache of golf balls and hammers — engulfed the lone car and began smashing its windows and lights.

The female officer inside shielded herself as her windshield was shattered with a flagpole. She tumbled out of the car and swung her baton aimlessly, looking stunned. Nearby officers, some hastily reaching for their helmets, rushed into the melee to rescue their colleague.

Police guarding the fence, obligated to protect the perimeter, could only listen to their radios helplessly.

“You can hear the call for help from other officers,” said Staff Sgt. Scott Boyd, a Calgary police officer on loan to the G20. “It’s unsettling when there are other officers in need of assistance.”

Black bloc members urged their “comrades” to move quickly. A wall of tactical officers lined the south side of Queen St., forcing the mob to continue east.

But in the swarm of black, there was infighting. At Bay St., a fist fight nearly broke out. Some wanted to pierce the heart of the financial district; others believed they were marching straight into a police trap.

Billiard balls and stones whizzed overhead and the sound of shattering glass echoed down the corridor of bank towers. “To the fence!” a woman screamed through a megaphone.

They forged south of King St., but not before smashing and setting fire to another abandoned cruiser, “murderer” scrawled on its hood.

The security fence was now in sight but the rioters appeared lost. Few actually expected to reach this point.

Parked nearby were at least two coach buses filled with about 20 riot police each.

Const. Steve Zielie was one of them. The Edmonton police officer had been hired for the G20 as a “special munitions and chemicals” operator within the public order unit. To that point he had spent most of his time waiting on the bus, wearing 20 pounds of riot gear.

Zielie’s unit was sent to King and Bay. He remembers looking out the window as the bus crossed King St., catching a glimpse of the burning cruiser.

Dark plumes of smoke filled the sky and people were shouting and running everywhere.

“It was like Beirut,” Zielie remembered. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is crazy.’ ”

Zielie’s unit marched to King and Bay, where about 100 tactical officers filled the intersection. They formed lines, pushing the crowd away from the street.

Zielie said he had no orders to make arrests, which would have been extremely difficult under the circumstances.

“You can’t just as an officer say, ‘I’m going to go arrest this guy’ because you’re going to get swarmed,” he said. “So you have to coordinate. And the black bloc groups know this.”

The mob was driven out of the intersection but the cat and mouse game continued as they moved onto Yonge St.

The fence, once their sole fixation, was abandoned.

“I admit, frankly, to being surprised they turned their criminal intent against what we call softer, more vulnerable targets,” Blair admitted, weeks after the summit. “I’d like to have known beforehand of the intent of this group to engage in criminal acts away from the summit site. We would have planned for that. You can’t plan for everything.”

Earlier, the vandals targeted banks and capitalist emblems such as Starbucks. Now they smashed indiscriminately, hitting everything from an independent jewellery store to a tourist booth at Dundas Square. Chain stores were still a particular delight; at American Apparel, they shattered the storefront and snatched mannequin limbs, using the legs and arms to batter the strip joint, Zanzibar.

“This isn’t violence,” said one of the black-clad vandals as the mob paraded up Yonge. “This is vandalism against violent corporations. We did not hurt anybody.”

Their 90-minute tour of destruction ultimately caused more than $250,000 in damages. The black bloc boasted it had succeeded in “embarrassing the security apparatus.”

Frontline officers later described to reporters confusion over the radios, with conflicting orders of “engage” and “don’t engage.”

Many question why rioters were allowed to get as far as they did. How could thousands of police on the ground have failed to stop a mob of a few hundred?

Police say their lines were stretched thin; officers could not disengage from their responsibilities. At one point, police were facilitating the transportation of a kidney to a downtown hospital, according to Insp. Scott Weidmark, a planner stationed at the command centre.

There was also the G20 fence to protect and some 10,000 people still marching in the labour rally, Blair said. As much as some officers wanted to, they could not leave their posts to chase a small group of vandals, he said.

“We’re protecting a line and we’re also managing a large protest, so those are two very significant activities that are taking place simultaneously,” Blair said. “Our first responsibility is the safety of the public. . . . Property damage is also a serious criminal matter but it’s a less urgent response.”

After smashing up Yonge and across College St., a few dozen protesters huddled on a patch of grass near the south lawn of Queen’s Park.

They formed a human shield and changed into street clothes.

Within moments, all that remained of the black bloc was a pile of dark garments rumpled on the wet grass. They had camouflaged themselves back into the crowd.

South of Queen’s Park, both protesters and police accumulated in numbers.

The legislative grounds were not a sanctuary for criminals to seek refuge, police say. Orders were given to clear the park.

“We just form our line and start yelling at people leave, leave, and they’re not leaving,” Zielie said. “So we just start slowly moving the line forward.”

Some protesters grew nervous and fled. Another group, emboldened, sat on a grassy median — some wore black bandanas, others wore regular street clothes. “Come on! It’s public property! You won’t get arrested,” one woman shouted to the crowd.

A wall of police officers and their bicycles began rapidly closing in from the north, blowing whistles and commanding “Move!” The protesters did not budge and officers pushed their bike tires into them, firing pepper spray and swinging their batons.

Panic rippled through the crowd and people screamed as they scattered. One man looked dazed as blood trickled down his face. Another shouted: “We are peaceful! Where do you want us to go?”

Journalism student Alison Blais was pepper sprayed in the face and she stumbled off the median wailing. She moved to the east side and a pair of street medics working with protesters rushed to her side, pouring a white mixture of water and antacids into her eyes to mitigate the sting.

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“I was trying to leave,” the bleary-eyed 29-year-old said. “They just attacked. They came on like crazy.”

Court services trucks pulled into the area. Police started making arrests.

Zielie said he was forced to deployed “exact impact” munitions, or rubber bullets, on two people at Queen’s Park.

As a special munitions operator, Zielie said he had authority to decide when to use his crowd-control weapons. As a rule, they would have to have refused police commands or be instigating others into criminal activity.

“You’d tell an arrest team, we’re going to try and shoot that guy and then once you hit him, hopefully they can go and arrest him,” Zielie explained. “You drop him so he can’t run away . . . We don’t chase after them because you’re in danger of being surrounded.”

Police engaged protesters in a dance of advance and retreat, dragging the occasional person behind police lines. At one point, horse-mounted units were sent charging into the crowd.

The mob changed police from facilitators into aggressors, said Nathalie Des Rosiers, counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

“We saw a transformation of the policing,” Des Rosiers said. “Anyone who was a protester was becoming the focus of policing attention as if they were part of the black bloc.”

To Blair, the destruction on Saturday necessitated a different approach.

“We do have to change our tactics in response to their criminal behaviour. We knew they weren’t done,” he said.

Police eventually pushed the crowd north of the legislature building, at which point some officers were given a short break to refuel on Gatorade. Operating on five hours sleep, Zielie had already worked six hours and would not finish his shift until well after midnight.

“I was just completely drenched in sweat,” he said.

At about 10 p.m., a crowd of protesters managed to reach the security fence on Wellington St., some getting close enough to touch the steel before tactical officers scared them away.

They moved to the Novotel Hotel on the Esplanade, where they staged a sit-in and demanded to speak with dignitaries at the hotel.

Riot police quickly moved in from the east and west. Police say they told the crowd to leave but some say they heard no such orders. Blair said he is unaware of the specifics around the Novotel incident but it is part of an internal review of G20 policing.

Scores of people were trapped as police lines squeezed tighter. Officers darted in and pulled people out. Over the next few hours, everyone was arrested.

A few journalists were permitted to leave, including Steve Paikin, host of TVO’s The Agenda. “I can appreciate that the police were on edge today, after seeing four or five of their cruisers burned,” he tweeted from Novotel. “But why such overreaction tonight?”

“Shame on the vandals,” he added. “And shame on those that ordered peaceful protesters attacked and arrested. That is not consistent with democracy in Toronto, G20 or no G20.”

But Novotel would not be the last of the mass arrests.

Sunday

About 100 kilometres north of Toronto, senior officers in Barrie approved a request for an additional 1,500 officers to police the G20. At about 10:30 a.m., 16 coach buses carrying police officers wound their way down the Don Valley Parkway.

A half-hour earlier, police raided a University of Toronto gymnasium, converted by the graduate students’ union into a makeshift hostel for out-of-town protesters. Seventy were arrested, some allegedly possessing black clothing and “weapons of opportunity” — a catch-all for anything from rocks to sharp objects.

With the tally of arrests having climbed to 500, legal watchdogs complained of a processing backlog at the Eastern Ave. temporary detention centre.

The old film studio had capacity for 600 prisoners at one time. About 1,000 were processed there throughout the weekend. Those held at the facility have since made varying allegations of mistreatment and inadequate access to legal assistance, which police challenge. Blair said 3,000 hours of video footage — captured by cameras installed every five metres on the ceiling— is now in the hands of the police review director.

Outside the jail, 200 protesters gathered, chanting slogans of solidarity for those inside. Police on bikes were friendly, joking with marchers as they marshaled them across Queen St. to the prison.

But at Eastern Ave., a pack of plain clothes officers piled out of unmarked vans, batons in hand. They stormed into the crowd and snatched two protesters.

Police fired multiple rubber bullets, striking activist Natalie Gray on her left arm and chest. She crumpled to the ground and was arrested.

“These things are carefully planned to ensure that any risk to anyone else is kept to an absolute minimum. And it was done with surgical precision,” said police spokesperson Mark Pugash. “(People in the crowd) may not understand why we’re doing what we’re doing, but it’s based on absolutely up-to-date information.”

Critics, however, claim the police targeting was based on little more than profiling.

Officers near the Bay St. bus depot were stopping and questioning young people. Quebecois protesters alleged they were being pulled over because of their licence plates. There have been numerous reports of people dressed in black getting searched as far north as Bloor.

“What we saw was many people were arrested, detained and searched because they fit the profile of looking like they were from a subculture, were young, spoke French, were wearing black and so on,” said Des Rosiers of the civil liberties association.

Blair says he does not believe a specific directive had been given for police to target people based on their appearances. But they feared the black bloc would strike again.

A bike protest was weaving across the city, spreading police lines thin and creating points for another mob to break loose, Blair said. Police insist they had evidence suggesting armed activists were converging at Queen and Spadina.

Police across the city were stopping dozens of people “with weapons, with incendiary devices, with the uniforms of the black bloc,” Blair said.

Senior officials decided they couldn’t allow a repeat of Saturday.

“We weren’t going to let that happen,” Blair said. “The people who were managing that protest were very much complicit in the criminal intent of the black bloc.”

“So we contained them. It was the only way.”

For Const. Tucker, it was a lose-lose situation for police.

“Imagine if there was a repeat of Saturday, the criticism that would have been levelled at police?” he said.

After what a police source called a heated internal debate, senior officers decided to detain hundreds of people — a jumble of alleged suspects, peaceful protesters and curious onlookers who had drifted too close.

“Quite frankly, a lot of people came down because they wanted to be part of the action,” Blair said. “Instead they became part of the problem.”

Citing an internal police review that is now underway, Blair would not comment on who ordered the corralling. Supts. Ferguson and Fenton, who oversaw the command centre, declined to be interviewed for this story.

“We have a responsibility to prevent criminal acts and a breach of the peace,” Blair said, adding people were given warnings to leave.

From the rooftops, onlookers camped out with video cameras could see officers blocking streets in every direction.

Over the next hour or so, police herded people into tighter and tighter pockets. By 6 p.m., a cluster of about 200 people were completely surrounded.

From behind a police line, an officer shouted instructions, his voice intermittently drowned out by chatter among the crowd. “You’re all going to be arrested. Line up here and be arrested nicely.”

Protesters backed away. A young man carrying a sign that read “Everything is OK!” retreated into the safety of the crowd. The officer continued: “We don’t want to go into the crowd and hurt anybody. So please do it now.”

“F--- you, fascist,” was the rejoinder from the crowd.

Police plucked out protesters one by one. Some whimpered and cried out to their friends, panicked at the prospect of arrest.

Then came the deluge, so heavy it washed out two highways and flooded a subway station.

“It was terrifying. There were grown men shedding tears. There were women crying, pleading with the police to get out of here,” said Sam Wisnicki, 22, who huddled with friends under an overhang to escape the pounding rain.

Watching the developing standoff from his home at St. Clair Ave. and Bathurst St., a question flashed through Alok Mukherjee’s mind: “What the hell is going on here?”

The police board chair’s cellphone was soon abuzz with text messages from fellow board members, all raising similar questions.

For Mukherjee, a significant question emerging from the summit is who was calling the shots. City streets were Toronto police’s jurisdiction but there was never one person unilaterally issuing orders. It remains unclear how much influence the integrated force had over local policing decisions — this created a grey area over who exactly was accountable for certain orders.

“You almost need to do a frame-by-frame analysis of what transpired over those two or four days,” he said. “(You) ask yourself, which of these frames belong to Toronto Police Service and which of these frames belongs to somebody else? And who is that somebody else?”

He said it remains unclear how much influence the Barrie unified command centre had on policing decisions in Toronto. But according to Staff Supt. Mike Federico, the highest-ranking Toronto officer stationed in Barrie: “We don’t insert ourselves in that because we’re not there.

“Unified command was not directing the police to do certain things down on the streets of Toronto.”

The “kettling” tactic, where police corral protesters into a tight, enclosed space without access to food, water or bathrooms, has been the focus of much criticism over the past decade. During the London G20 summit in 2009, a 47-year-old newspaper vendor died after being kettled.

In Toronto, a woman contained at Queen and Spadina is now spearheading a $45 million class-action lawsuit against the Toronto Police Services Board and the Attorney-General of Canada.

People in the crowd, detainees said, posed no danger to the public or the police. “There were no weapons. There were no protest signs. No masks. This looked like a family day parade,” Wisnicki said.

As the rain drummed down, police continued processing detainees, a few dozen of whom stood with their hands bound by zip ties. It had been more than three hours since the containment started.

Everyone was wet. Everyone was tired. Strangers, many shaking in soaked t-shirts, formed football huddles to stay warm. They shared whatever food they had.

A senior officer announced TTC buses were available for detainees to wait inside and seek refuge from the rain. Many cheered but some stayed back, fearing the buses would just take them straight to Eastern Ave.

It was now about 9:40 p.m. A half-hour walk northeast, Chief Blair had briefly taken control of the command centre for the first time that weekend. Orders came down and the crowd was told they were unconditionally released.

Numb and exhausted, the freed detainees milled about the intersection.

“I can’t believe I’m in Canada. My Charter rights have been trampled,” said Wisnicki as lines of police pulled back from the intersection.

“My human rights have been trampled. It’s shameful.”

About two hours later, construction crews began removing the concrete and steel that made up the security barriers. Police checkpoints vanished. And, except for two dozen protesters still gathered outside the Eastern Ave. detention centre, whooping each time a new detainee walked free, the streets were mostly quiet.

Protests, however, continued into the week. They no longer focused on the summit, but what it had turned the city into.

There have been repeated calls for a public inquiry into the G20, accompanied by concerns police and provincial reviews won’t pry deep enough.

“I think it was the saddest days in the city’s history, certainly in my lifetime,” said defence lawyer Howard Morton, who served 25 years as a Crown attorney and once directed the Special Investigations Unit, the provincial police watchdog. “This was a military operation under the guise of police action and it took place in an armed camp.”

Staff Supt. Jeff McGuire, standing before a huddle of reporters on Sunday night, offered a candid response to concerns over the police’s actions — not just during the Queen and Spadina containment, but the entire weekend.

“We faced very trying circumstances that none of the citizens in this city had ever faced before, nor have many of the police officers,” McGuire said.

“In these large events, you’re going to have successes and you’re going to have things that don’t work out perfectly. I’ve said a number of times here, folks, believe me, we don’t think we’re perfect,” he continued.

“But our interest was in the safety of the citizens of Toronto.”

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