Encampment Support Network Parkdale Statement on the Clearing of Charges for all those Arrested at the 2021 Lamport Encampment Evictions
On July 27, 2021, the City carried out a violent, militarized eviction of unhoused residents at Lamport Stadium. Residents and supporters alike were beaten, kettled and pepper sprayed. 56 were ticketed or charged at both Lamport and 14th Division (where supporters were protesting arrests and providing jail support as the day went on.)
Two years later, a judge has rejected the Crown’s case, characterizing it as “farcical,” and calling the defendants “outstanding citizens.” Arrestees all left with absolute, unconditional discharges.
This is a clear victory, but one that is difficult to celebrate in the context of Toronto’s ongoing criminalization of the unhoused, and its suppression of dissent. There is no legal win that could undo the calamitous, deadly displacement the City inflicted on Lamport residents that day; or the insurmountable emotional and physical trauma endured by residents and supporters alike; or the time and expenses accumulated by arrestees through the state’s “punishment by process” tactic.
We recommend reading comrade and arrestee Jazzy Kieser’s full editorial on it for The Grind, who summarizes these costs plainly:
“We all left with absolute discharges. That felt like a major win, and vindication. But ultimately what was the cost? Encampments went away for a while. The community built there was shattered, scattered to the wind and had to struggle to maintain itself. I haven’t gone back to volunteering. I felt quite defeated and for quite a while the threat of a prison sentence was floating over our heads.”
The media recklessly parroted the City line against arrestees, sharing names and photos of those wanted by the police. On September 24th, 2021, these likenesses were played on heavy rotation on CP24, where news presenters read a script presenting police accusations as plain fact. They treated Alaa Soufyan - a person with an easily recognizable Muslim name - as though he were a convicted criminal.
This three-pronged strategy of brutal police violence, reactionary media backlash and costly, frivolous court charges has been used to wear down many sites of struggle over the years. The lessons learned from the summer of 2021 can be applied to Toronto 2024, after months of watching the police and the City try to chill the dissent of Palestinian solidarity work. The ongoing Indigo 11 case saw arrestees facing down early morning raids and kicked out doors. The incident sparked citywide criticism of police overreach, using violent tactics normally reserved for drug raids, and criminal charges including harassment, mischief over $5000 and conspiracy as a response to a commonplace act of civil disobedience. The arrestees were chosen based on loose, tangential organizing connections, with reporting already suggesting that some might not even know each other. Additional arrests across the City come alongside police dispatches characterizing Palestinian solidarity as a form of “hate crime” or “hate speech” (often without any formal hate crime charges laid.) The media uncritically repeats their language verbatim, and even offers column space to Canada’s top police union to suggest a return to notoriously violent G20-style tactics. Similarly, a court ruled out an attempt to ban peaceful pro-Palestinian protests on a highway overpass, but even the forceful bid to stop those protests has made vulnerable citizens feel even more vulnerable. This is all happening in tandem with a police-driven media blitz asking for more funding: shortly after unfounded claims that anti-Zionist protesters targeted Mount Sinai Hospital on February 12, 2024, politicians dramatized the protest’s brief stop by Mt. Sinai to justify increasing the Toronto Police budget again and to quell citizen pushback.
The City only responds with these displays of force when the cracks in its veneer of authority are exposed. For instance, the state doesn’t bat an eye when homelessness is outside of public view - under stairwells, trapped in the shelter system, or scattered across the city. But encampments form because residents know the strength of communal care and collective resistance. Left with no other choice, the residents at Lamport in 2021 banded together to face down the state’s violent displacement. The supporters who came out to join them recognized the power of that solidarity.
We must continue to hold this line of collective resistance. Lamport’s legal win was a result of unity and resolve. Arrestees resisted unconstitutional conditions that would have banned them from City parks and encampments while the trials moved through the courts. They refused plea deals, even when threatened with jail time. They asserted their right to plead in front of a judge who showed them respect and humanity after Judge Lucia Favret misgendered arrestees and displayed inappropriate bursts of anger. They never gave the symbolic and material concessions the Crown was trying to squeeze out of them: that demonstration can only happen on the state’s terms.
When the state asserts its cruel tactics and feckless doctrines, let us expand the possibilities of what resistance can look like. When they try to subdue us, let us be too flexible, cunning and all-expansive to be contained.
In solidarity,
ESNP