Cop watchers divided

>> Police watchdogs sniff vigorously at each other

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

You know something's wrong when your natural allies start using quotation marks when they call you "respectable." It might also be a sign that things are less than hunky-dory when they issue a press release calling you "naïve" and suggest that you're "dirtying the spirit of solidarity--apparently for political ends."

While the local Citizens Opposed to Police Brutality normally aims its vitriolic missives at the fuzz, their press release following the annual March 15 anti-police-brutality rally kept its sharpest criticism for former leader Yves Manseau, who left to found the Mouvement Action Justice in December 1998.

The only thing the two cop watchdogs appear to agree on lately is their disdain for a third self-appointed police watchdog, headed by ex-QPP Corporal Gaetan Rivest, who along with Robert Savard, published a bombastic anti-police tabloid called Le Juste Mileu. Savard, a well-known underworld enforcer, was murdered in a restaurant last year. Rivest has since been busted in connection with assault and loan sharking.

If the COPB and MAJ agree to shun Rivest, it's one of the few issues they're seeing eye to eye upon lately. The deepened rift between the organizations first opened last year along the old-protester fault line of passive vs. active resistance, a debate that has been dividing protest groups since Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X disagreed on tactics.

Fight or fall

The philosophical differences between the copwatchers were publicly exposed after last year's anti-police-brutality protest in which protesters vandalized and damaged property along their route, a sport Manseau vigorously condemns.

But Bernard Cooper of the COPB is more forgiving. "Why should we be focusing on [protester] violence? Trashing a cop shop is no big deal, it's a drop in the bucket compared to all the people who have been beaten, killed and tortured by the police," says Cooper, whose organization is currently assisting with the legal defence of the marchers charged with vandalism.

"In a way they're right," concedes Manseau. "The violence society does to the poor is much worse than breaking windows, but we can't engage in that discourse. If there's violence, we've got to fight it. There are some who say that we need violence to change society and I'm against that. I think that protesters should be more vocal in denouncing violence. We've got to oppose not just those who condone it but those who say they don't want to condemn violent protesters."

Manseau's group marked International Day Against Police Brutality this year with a candlelight vigil featuring friends and family of six people killed by the police. "It's not my favourite way of protesting but we did it to bring down the level of violence. That sort of thing forces other groups to be non-violent."

No smiles for cameras

The internecine feud flared anew this year over the issue of TV cameras at the COPB march. The group asked TV cameras not to tape their rally and later aggressively denounced a TVA attempt to break the ban. But Manseau, conversely, considers media attention as a blessing. "We still need the media. It's still one of our main tools in getting our message across, and to say otherwise you'd have to be a total hypocrite."

"Of course Manseau is incorrect about that," says Cooper. "People get roughed up [by police] in the alleys after a demo and the cameras are asked to turn away. And they do because the cameramen and their outfits, like TQS, which are close to the police, have--and want to keep--good relations with the cops because cops feed them stories. When you're in bed with the police, you've got an interest in getting along. Manseau is aware of that.

"The [police] have a well-established system dealing with journalists. They have some who they don't talk to and some they cultivate. The TV cameras give a false sense of security and certainly a false sense of objectivity," says Cooper.

While the tensions rise among police watchdogs, the tenor of anti-police sentiment has fallen from the fever pitch of a few years back when Rivest would publish pictorials re-enacting scenes of alleged police brutality. One typical Le Juste Mileu spread featured a stripper graphically recreating a rectal search she claimed police laid on her.

Rivest's paper also regularly labelled individual officers "rats" and published home addresses of cops. He was personally reacquainted with police methods when arrested for loan sharking November 26, 1999, after a terrified debtor reported him to the police.

"Rivest often asked me to work with him, but I refused," says Manseau, who had helped a successful lawsuit against Rivest back when Rivest was still a provincial cop. "The only time that we sat together was at a press conference where he confessed to beating confessions out of people."