I sat in a plain, ordinary downtown hotel seminar room for two days this week, listening, one after another, to utterly jarring stories of police sadism at the G20.

Tales of women forced to pee through their jeans. Naked students ordered to lift their testicles for inspection. A woman snatched from a downtown corner and dropped off near midnight in the shadows of Scarborough, no directions or hope of finding her way home.

The hearings by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and National Union of Public and General Employees were focused on the summit this past summer in Toronto. But it often felt like a history lesson on 1935 Germany.

John Pruyn hobbled to the front of the room, leaning on a metal ski pole. The 57-year-old Christmas tree farmer and Canada Revenue Agency worker had his left leg ripped off in a gruesome accident 17 years ago. He now walks with a metal prosthetic.

He was sitting with his 24-year-old daughter in the designated “free speech” zone at Queen’s Park during the protest on Saturday, June 26, when riot police jumped him, he told the room. They knocked off his glasses, handcuffed him and told him to stand. He couldn’t. One officer ripped off his prosthetic leg, he said. “He tells me to put it back on. Of course, I can’t put my leg back on with my hands behind my back.”

“Then he says ‘hop.’”

Pruyn spent 27 hours in the Eastern Avenue flashy-film-studio-turned-squalid detention centre before police let him go, without his walking sticks or glasses. His charges had been “lost,” he said.

“These weren’t thugs being arrested,” Pruyn told the room, his voice breaking. “Just people who wanted to get a message out.”

The thugs, we all now know, were the men and women dressed in black who ransacked Yonge Street on Saturday afternoon, unimpeded by the city’s 5,400 armed-to-the-teeth police officers. We all had been warned for weeks that “violent anarchists” were coming. That’s why we needed the $5-million fence, we were told, the eardrum-splitting sound gun normally reserved for Somali pirates, the secret five-metre search and question law that turned out to apply to not just five metres.

There was no violence, but lots of vandalism, and that is why the once-immobile police sprung into action, we were told, treating protesters like rapists — beating them, tying them up, denying them water in a cold cell.

Except, the police activity wasn’t a reaction, if you believe Sean Salvati’s story.

Salvati was the 10th person to slip behind the skirted table Thursday afternoon. He looked like a guy’s guy — jeans, long-sleeve T-shirt, short brown hair. He’s 32 and works as a paralegal.

He went to a Blue Jays game with four buddies three nights before the G20 summit. On his way out, he passed two police officers. He wished them good luck on Saturday, before hopping into a cab.

The cab made it two blocks before he was “pulled forcefully” out by the same officers and asked about his “suspicious comment.”

After an hour-long interrogation by a growing number of officers, he was arrested for “being intoxicated in a public place.” He’d drunk 31/2 beers over the course of the ball game.

At the station, Salvati said he was violently strip-searched — “they kicked me in the knees, kneed me in the torso, slapped me in the face, dragged me along the floor until my pants and underwear were removed” — and left naked in a holding cell for four hours. He was never permitted to speak to a lawyer. Upon his release, he asked the sergeant for the name of the officers who interviewed him.

“I was told nobody came to interview me. I imagined the entire interview,” he said.

None of the stories have been proven in court, nor will many ever reach a courtroom, although Salvati plans to sue police.

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Even if some of it was theatrical licence, the nasty details piled up. Kicking. Punching. Threats of gang rape. All this from people paid well to protect us.

Their job is to enforce the law. Instead they themselves broke it.

Many people in the room wore poppies. The session stopped early for Remembrance Day, so people could hurry to ceremonies. That irony wasn’t lost on us. What is freedom worth, if it can be so thoughtlessly snatched away? What was all that fighting for?

“One of the main tenets of the rule of law is police will not overreact,” said Paul Cavalluzzo, the Toronto lawyer who acted as lead counsel on both the Walkerton and Maher Arar inquiries. “Otherwise we will end up being a police state.”

Twice, I heard the sad statement, “I wasn’t even protesting.” A businessman was so frightened by what he saw on the streets that weekend he didn’t want to be photographed at the hearing. He worried police were watching him.

It reminded me of that slippery slope and a line from Auden’s Refugee Blues: “Once we had a country and we thought it fair.”

First it was the anarchists, who deserved the draconian measures. Then the protesters. Then anyone wearing black. Then anyone on Queen Street. Then anyone in a cab who casually said something nice to a police officer.

Rights are not easily gained. Nor should they be easily withdrawn, for a weekend, for an evening, for a moment.

Our faith in our police was effortlessly broken. It will take careful effort and months of hard work to rebuild it.

If you take your constitutional rights as seriously as I do, send a protest letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper demanding a public inquiry. His email address is: pm@pm.gc.ca.

Catherine Porter can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca