Police, media discuss protest rules
Meeting to foster understanding will not be the last of its kind
After a series of high-profile clashes between Montreal police and journalists during the 2012 student protests and beyond, both groups are meeting in hopes of forging a better working relationship in the future.
Representatives from the city’s independent press and a national media coalition sat down with Montreal police commander Ian Lafrenière on Monday to iron out past differences and lay down ground rules for future interactions. Since the 2012 protests — many of which ended in mass arrests and violence — there have been a number of high-profile incidents in which reporters have been detained or assaulted by riot police.
“It was a great meeting,” said Tom Henheffer, the executive director of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. “Lafrenière was even quite apologetic about the situation that had happened in the past. He apologized for officers he said had stepped out of line. He said they were more than willing to continue the conversation to work with us so that these instances of journalists being arrested or assaulted are reduced as much as possible. ... There was a buildup of animosity between these two groups that was diffused with this meeting.”
Three of the journalists who met with Lafrenière work for the student press, which developed something of an acrimonious relationship with police in the past few years. There were about 700 anti-austerity marches throughout Quebec during the spring and summer of 2012 and student journalists were frequently detained alongside protesters.
The McGill Daily’s Shane Murphy was shot with a rubber bullet while covering a protest and two others were arrested on the job. Police say that, in the chaos of a turbulent march, it’s difficult for officers to identify who is working and who is illegally protesting.
One of the chief problems that arose since the 2012 protests is that police became the unofficial arbiters of who is and who isn’t a professional journalist. The people they deemed journalists were often limited to those working for mainstream outlets. They allowed these reporters to escape arrest after police surrounded a crowd and began rounding up protesters.
Others from student newspapers — like Matt D’Amours from The Link — were sometimes handcuffed, given a hefty fine and had their equipment seized, preventing them from finishing their assignment.
“Asking the police to identify who is a journalist is a tall order,” said Lafrenière. “(In 2012) we could have 200 people claim they were journalists during a march and it’s not always easy to sort that out.”
But the new ground rules are expected to clarify this.
“(Police are) going to base their treatment of journalists based on (the journalist’s) behaviour,” said Henheffer. “So if they’re behaving like professional journalists, they’ll be treated like professional journalists.”
This means, according to Henheffer, obeying police orders. But that too could pose problems. For instance, since the city adopted the P6-bylaw — which gives police arbitrary powers to consider a march illegal — cops often declare a protest illegal before it even begins.
Obeying such orders, which might prevent journalists from being able to record arrests and potential police excesses up close, is a concern for D’Amours. But he says there’s a way around this.
“When police give an order to the crowd, I don’t consider them to be giving me, the journalist, that same order,” he told the Montreal Gazette. “I’m not protesting, I’m covering the protest.”
None of the ground rules are final and though Henheffer and Lafrenière were both encouraged by the tone of the conversation, they say there are many more to come before anything is settled.
“This isn’t the last meeting and that’s a great thing,” said Lafrenière. “We’re talking, we’re opening the lines of communication and we’re figuring out how to resolve the problems that arise between us. We’re learning how to work together.”