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Tales from the police blotter There were rave reviews in the dailies of the MUC police's year-end report last week. "In just more than a decade," The Gazette said, "life in the big city has never been so safe." The journalist went on to call the report a "glowing snapshot" and acting police chief Claude Rochon a man "basking in glory." >> Not mentioned was the full hour's worth of questions and comments critical of the police that preceded the meeting: >> Two city councillors complained that too little was known about the new community police force. Two sex workers accused them of relinquishing their old role as near-knights and taking up a new one as a military assault force, one that treated marginal communities like human garbage. A young man in ragged clothes asked why police were systematically whisking him and his friends out of the public park known as Place Pasteur. Citoyen-ne-s opposé-e-s à la brutalité policière spokesperson Yves Manseau brought up the fact that pepper spray is considered torture in some countries. Black Coalition leader Dan Philip expressed bafflement at the $3,147 given to the mother of Martin Suazo, and wondered aloud how this compared to the amount the police had paid the lawyers defending them in the case. And a retired accountant named M. Labrosse complained with some passion about having been spoken to by a policeman as if he were five years old. >> Uptown, a few days later, a crowd at the corner of Pine and St-Laurent got a look at what so many people were complaining about. Two police officers slammed a slightly-built teenage busker against a police car and pepper sprayed him in the eyes after they searched his knapsack and found a bottle of beer. When 20 or so onlookers began to tell the officers things like "Look, this isn't right," and "You don't have to hurt him," 10 police cars arrived on the scene, radioed by the first. "They called for help the moment they saw the public standing up to them," a witness told the Mirror. --Jacquie Charlton
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