The Political Bias of the Police: The Cases of a Knife-Wielding Supporter of Israel Versus a Crowd Engaging in an Act of Hiding Its Painting a Symbolic Red Line

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John Clarke, former major organizer for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), recently posted the following on Facebook:

John Clarke

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A short while ago, a supporter of Israel, who was holding a knife, pulled down banners at the University of Toronto Palestine solidarity encampment. The police quietly escorted her away, with no charges being laid and without the knife even being confiscated.

At the last Palestine solidarity action, a major police attack was launched against the crowd, in response to the painting of a red line in the street.

These two incidents are instructive in two ways. Firstly, they confirm which side the Canadian state is on, as the Gaza Genocide unfolds. That’s worth noting but it’s hardly news.

The more interesting insight is what this shows about the role of policing in this society. The laws that the police enforce are, of course, heavily weighted in favour of ‘the men of property’ but the priorities that the cops set and the selectivity with which they carry out their function also play a big part.

This is clearly at work in the cases I’ve pointed to. In the first instance, conduct that could have been heavily criminalized (and would have been if it had come for the pro-Palestinian side) was tactfully swept under the rug. In the second case, something that was, at most, a very minor infraction, was seized upon to unleash a reckless display of force. It was obviously both an act of intimidation and an attempt to provoke a major incident.

By no reasonable standards can these two events be presented as fair minded or even handed. The development of modern policing, in the first part of the 19th Century, gave the state power a remarkable ability to enforce class based public order to a very much greater degree. This capacity to patrol and control was an innovation of huge significance.

The ability to fine tune the repressive function of the state to further the strategic objectives of those with economic and political power has been in full view in the targeting of Palestine solidarity just as much as we can see it in the persecution of unhoused people and the harassment of racialized communities.