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Mr. Stamatakis has, himself, donned helmet and shield to face rioters and said it is “bewildering.”

“I couldn’t believe I was in Canada.”

Privately, some officers exasperated by the public pummeling — not all of it seen as legitimate — suggest that, increasingly, the answer lies with aggressive but proactive policing: doing more to ferret out problems and remove the threat before it spreads.

“There are three grounds an officer can make an arrest,” said one officer who was involved in G20 security and did not want his name published.

“When you actually catch someone committing a crime; when you have reasonable and probable grounds to believe the person has committed a crime; and when there’s reasonable and probable grounds to believe someone is going to commit a crime.

“We should have done more on that last ground and less on the first and second. Why did we wait until after the stones were thrown? We knew this was going to happen,” he said.

“We had plenty of intelligence about what was going to happen.”

But would mass arrests before anyone had actually done anything really have muted criticism over police actions?

The various reports that emerged since the G20 riots — declared the largest mass arrests in Canadian history — document a litany of things police did wrong but offer little overarching strategy on how such an event, as a whole, might be better handled.

In this week’s report by Office of the Independent Police Review Director, Gerry K. McNeilly said officers violated civil rights, overstepped authority, detained people illegally and used excessive force.