There is a lesson in the laying of charges Tuesday against a police officer in connection with the beating of a G20 protester: we don’t have to acquiesce when the authorities circle the wagons.

Many allegations of police misconduct were made following the G20 summit in Toronto last June, where more than 1,000 people were arrested, most of them without charge. But in the immediate aftermath of the summit, officialdom excused and even lauded the police overreaction. Toronto City Council passed a motion commending “the outstanding work” of the police. Then councilor -- now mayor -- Rob Ford went further and said “our police were too nice.” The Toronto Police Services Board, which is supposed to exercise civilian oversight over the force, issued a press release thanking the police for “the manner in which they conducted themselves.”

Fortunately, it didn’t end there. Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU) looked into six cases where police actions resulted in serious injury to G20 protesters.

Four weeks ago, the SIU announced that no charges would be laid against police officers for injuries caused to civilians during the protests, despite the fact that in at least one case there was “reasonable ground” to believe that excessive force was used. The SIU explained that certain police wouldn’t co-operate in the investigation and there was no corroborative evidence. Oh, there was a tape of one incident, but it was impossible to identify the officers involved because they all wore identical helmets and uniforms.

The SIU announcement might have been the last word, but for Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair. In a spectacularly ill-advised radio interview, he suggested the tape in question had been doctored and, therefore, his officers had been unfairly maligned.

Then the media jumped in, notably the Star’s Rosie DiManno, who wondered about the “see-no-evil covenant” protecting the police. DiManno’s columns begat other videotapes and evidence from citizens on the scene. Suddenly the impossible – identifying the culprits -- seemed possible. And now someone has been charged.

This should not be the end of the story, however. What happened on the weekend of June 26-27 in our city was not the fault of one police officer -- or, for that matter, of one police chief. Plenty of others were involved, including the RCMP (who were in charge of security at the summit), the provincial government (which promulgated the so-called secret law expanding police powers), and Prime Minister Stephen Harper (who reportedly gave marching orders to senior bureaucrats to crack down hard on any protesters who got out of line). Various other small inquiries into the G20 summit are under way. But only a full public inquiry will get the answers we need on how things went so wrong that weekend.

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