The International Copwatching Conference was hosted by Winnipeg Copwatch, an anti police-brutality group founded in 2007. The July 22-24 event attracted participants from every major Canadian city, as well as the U.S.
It's been just over a year since the gates of "Torontonamo Bay", the nickname for the makeshift prison which caged 1,105 demonstrators during last June's G20 mass protests in Toronto, finally closed. During that weekend, the largest police deployment in Canada's history of 20,000 officers led to gunpoint raids, dozens of activists facing years of legal battles, and emerging stories of threats, homophobia, and sexual harassment.
In the wake of these and other widely publicised incidents of police misconduct in Canada -- including the deaths of Dudley George, Robert Dziekanski, J.J. Harper, Matthew Dumas, and the failure to investigate more than 600 missing and murdered Indigenous women -- concern with police brutality in Canada brought several hundred people to Winnipeg.
"These incidents are not isolated -- they are integral to policing," said keynote speaker Andrea Ritchie, a lawyer and co-founder of the group INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. "Until we produce a world that does not contain or produce police and prisons, we will never live in a world without violence or imagine alternatives."
At the conference, it was not only police departments who faced criticism. Workshops and panels addressed problems of immigration and border officers, prison guards, as well as the capitalist economic system. Immigrants and refugees face racial profiling, detention, deportation, only set to increase with the Conservatives' proposed immigration laws.
"Copwatching" is a tactic which started in the Black Panther movement but was later taken up by organizers in Berkeley, California, following several high-profile killings and beatings of men of colour by police in the early 1990s, including Rodney King's videotaped assault in Los Angeles, which led to extensive rioting, protests and demands for accountability.
The aim of copwatching, organizers said, is to document and deter police misconduct by observing police and holding them publically accountable.
"The goal of copwatching is to show police we are watching them too, to show people that resistance is possible, and to denounce what is happening on the streets," said François Du Canal, with Montreal's Collective Opposed to Police Brutality.
The international conference was the second gathering of the growing copwatching movement, following one hosted by the founding Berkeley Copwatch in 2007. Copwatch groups -- as well as others who use similar strategies -- use tactics including videotaping police, filing official complaints, protesting police misconduct, and hosting "know your rights" public workshops and sharing circles.
"Proactively our tactic is to educate about rights, to observe the police, to build relationships in the community," said Andrea Pritchett, with Berkeley Copwatch.
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