Last Thursday, the CBC reported Toronto Police had closely monitored Black activists within Black Lives Matter during the group’s 2016 protest outside Toronto City Hall and police headquarters. Concurrently, they had kept files on the social media postings of Desmond Cole, a journalist and activist.

This scrutiny of journalists by police is disconcerting.

Canada’s press freedom global score, as measured by Reporters Without Borders, has slipped in the past year. The organization pointed particularly to how in Quebec, provincial police spied on the phones of six reporters during a 2013 investigation; reporters only learned of this in late 2017.

The policing of activist groups also represents a danger to civil rights. This includes extensive monitoring of Indigenous activism, especially at the height of Idle No More, as reported by Vice News.

By calling Indigenous ant-pipeline protesters a “coalition of like-minded violent extremists” in policing records, the RCMP are being antagonistic, said authors Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan.

Activists who erected a teepee on Parliament Hill as a protest on Canada Day were also closely watched by the RCMP.

Under the guise of intelligence-gathering and security, the police apparatus in Canada pre-emptively tar activist movements as violent.

This allows them to create the suspicion of violence without much rationale for it. For example, in the case of Desmond Cole, a detective in the police’s intelligence Services Unit wrote in an email: “Desmond Cole is on 1010 radio right now talking about Police shootings.” The detective added, “Nothing new about his tone or rhetoric.”

Toronto Police would not explain to CBC why this had caught their attention.

Last year, documents obtained by the Guardian revealed the New York Police Department intimately infiltrated Black activists groups that were organizing in protest of the death of Eric Garner:

“Emails show that undercover officers were able to pose as protesters even within small groups, giving them extensive access to details about protesters’ whereabouts and plans,” reporter George Joseph said.

“This intimate access appears to have helped police pass as trusted organizers and extract information about demonstrations.”

Where violence is a valid concern, police should intervene.

But intense monitoring of activist groups’ activities is cause for concern. It can have dangerous consequences. As Crosby and Monaghan note, the police’s desire for security and order results in the “criminalization of dissent.”

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Intelligence and surveillance activities can overstate the extremism of movements, thus priming police to meet peaceful activists with unnecessary force.

We ought to be free to disagree without the police describing that disagreement as “violent.”

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