Silly Little Country

Pleased to Have Roger Reis in Toronto

Someone who has a vague notion of what it means to be a citizen.

As he stood outside the Bell Store on Yonge south of College, a man walked through the newly smashed window, grabbed a box with a phone inside, and walked out, which is right when Reis grabbed the man, wrestled him easily to the ground, threw the box back into the store, and yelled "Don't steal!" A few feet away, Corey Surge recorded the whole seventeen-second encounter in a video that's now been watched more than 700,000 times.

The video also makes it clear what a pathetic little wimp the thief is. A dozen Roger Reis' might have shut the whole hting down.
Watching the coverage last week, I saw several incidents in which citizens thwarted attempts at destruction and looting; Reis was not alone.
Reis has no illusions about the capabilities of the police in such contexts:
Still, Reis, who by all accounts should not have needed to be the one to tackle looters, won't blame police officers for their apparent absence. "I think they did a great job," he says, of the Integrated Security Unit's work over the weekend of the G20. "I've never been a police officer, but...what are you really going to do?

Are you going to hold the line, and keep each other [AND the conference! ed] safe, and look out for macro-level crimes? Or are you going to go after every wacko with a lighter and a camera? What would you do? You can't monitor every finger and every hand in a mob. You're probably just going to sit back and watch for people getting hurt."

h/t The Torontoist

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:24 AM