Editor’s note: The following speech was given on Dec. 10 by Dalia Awwad, a Palestinian organizer with the Legal Support Committee, at a press conference announcing the charges laid against Adam Melanson had been dropped. At a pro-Palestine protest a year earlier on December 10, 2023, Melanson saw police knock his wife over. He tried to intervene to protect her, pushing a police officer over in the process. Multiple officers then pinned Melanson to the ground, punched him, and an officer kneed him in the head and knelt on his head and neck, supposedly a banned technique. Melanson said he was dissociating and thought he “was going to die.” When police eventually picked him up, he was in a dazed state and he suffered a concussion. New video of the arrest has been posted, and is embedded at the end of this article.
Dalia Awwad: I will be speaking about Adam’s arrest in the context of the broader Palestine movement in Toronto and how this was not an isolated incident but part of broader police trends and tactics employed against pro-Palestine protesters for over a year now, in an attempt to suppress dissent.
Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide, it appears the Toronto Police Service’s (TPS) role has been to criminalize, vilify, surveil, and brutalize the masses showing up in solidarity with Palestine. The harm the state is trying to inflict through TPS is multifaceted, physically through beatings, psychologically through surveillance and harassment, and materially through doxxing and criminalization.
Adam’s arrest was a moment when community members in attendance managed to document the brutality of TPS and their use of the knee-on-the-neck restraint. TPS went on to lie to the media and stated that they did no such thing despite the video evidence circulating. This would not be the first or last time they used this tactic against protesters. In January the knee-to-the-neck restraint was employed again against a different pro-Palestine protester at Avenue Road, according to the arrestee and witnesses.
Sadly, Adam’s assault is the tip of the iceberg of police violence, harassment and intimidation that we have experienced over the last year.
In the last 14 months, 100 people have been arrested and charged. Of those 100, at least 22 have had their charges withdrawn. Arrestees are subjected to unnecessary and lengthy legal proceedings, which do nothing but waste public funds and serve as a means to prolong the state of limbo and isolation an arrestee is in. Not to mention the astronomical waste of public funds at the hands of TPS being used to over-police and surveil our community — a community out in collective grief and solidarity against this genocide of Palestinians.
By design, these arrests are brutal and sinister in nature. They aim to inflict the maximum amount of harm and fear on the person arrested and the larger community. Following being charged, the bail conditions placed on arrestees isolate them from the broader community. A common condition has been non-association with other organizers, and conditions have gone so far as to include protest bans, a clear violation of our Charter-protected rights.
Most of these arrests have been investigated through the Hate Crimes Unit, regardless of the nature or details of the arrest, furthering TPS’s racist narrative about Palestinians and our supporters. In reality, the violence employed at the hands of TPS has caused at least 20 people to be sent to hospital. And at least 10 people have had their homes searched, some of which were viciously raided at the hours of dawn.
This is a very brief overview of what the Palestine movement has faced in the last 14 months at the hands of TPS and the state. Adam is part of a large community of pro-Palestine arrestees. His case is one of many. In this particular situation, the community’s documentation of what happened acted as undeniable proof in the face of TPS’s lies. We were able to show up for each other and keep each other safe.
In the face of unrelenting state repression, we refuse to be intimidated or silenced. We will continue to show up for one another!
These practices are not exclusively used against the Palestine movement. TPS lies, as they did with Umar Zameer. They over-arrest people and then charges are dropped to bolster their numbers and stats to present an illusion of effectiveness. We saw this with the recent shooting on Queen Street when they arrested eight people and charges against five of them were quickly dropped. This is an attempt to justify TPS’s ludicrous budget when public infrastructure all around the city is crumbling.
Gone unchecked, the violence and escalations employed by TPS have only increased in severity. What’s worse than the gross abuses at the hands of TPS is the media’s insistence to only regurgitate TPS media releases without exercising any journalistic integrity, investigating police claims, or striving to operate like a genuine free press. I say this to urge you, the members of the media, to be the voice of accountability, to speak truth to power rather than being the voice of the armed forces of the state.
“Gone unchecked, the violence and escalations employed by TPS have only increased in severity. What’s worse than the gross abuses at the hands of TPS is the media’s insistence to only regurgitate TPS media releases without exercising any journalistic integrity, investigating police claims, or striving to operate like a genuine free press.”
Lastly, I would like to emphasize that the criminalization of the Palestine movement has been an attempt to obfuscate the genocide Israel is carrying out against more than two million Palestinians in Gaza and the role the Canadian state and capital have in profiting off and facilitating Israel’s crimes. Rather, the conversation has been dominated by a racist narrative about Palestinian protesters and our allies. It is by design that the media focuses on someone in a Spider-Man costume climbing scaffolding or on repeating TPS releases.
The media does this rather than focusing on the continuous flow of weapons to and from Israel, or how the the state ignores that public opinion is in favour of cutting ties with genocide, or how government officials are caught in lies.
You have a role to play as the free press and, as of late, you have not been rising to the occasion. I invite you to cover the role the state has played in this genocide and the role their police forces have played in criminalizing and brutalizing those of us demanding an end to complicity in the genocide.