Kitchener-Waterloo Community Support for G20 Arrestees

Formed in the wake of the Toronto G20 out of a need to support those targeted by the ensuing legal and political repression, the KWCS works on maintaining strong communities in the face of increasing criminalization and the expanding prison industrial complex, through public education and support for prisoners and their loved ones on the outside.


Recent Updates:

News Roundup: The Plea Deal

On November 22, 2011, six of the 17 defendants in the "main conspiracy group" pled guilty to charges of counselling to commit mischief. Two also pled to counselling to obstruct police. Essentially, the Statement of Facts that supports the guilty pleas, agreed upon by the defendants and the Crown attorneys, says that they encouraged people to protest and should've known that people would respond to their call-out by engaging in property destruction. It also says that there is no proof that anything they said actually led to any mischief/property destruction.

Stop Bill C-10

Preventing Bill C-10 from passing in the Senate is absolutely imperative.

Harper's omnibus crime bill is a massive step backwards for Canada. Literally all the research on criminal justice systems shows that the proposed changes will result in the complete opposite of the intended effects: it will generate more, not less crime, and disproportionately punish those guilty of lesser crimes. It will make our communities LESS safe.

Prisoner Support

Leah Henderson was sentenced on December 20 to 10 months at the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton. Mandy was sentenced on January 13 to 16 months, also at Vanier.

There are three main forms of contact that prisoners have with people on the outside: Mail, phone calls, and visits.

Mail

You can send them letters, photocopied articles, news stories, cards, etc. Everything you send will be opened and can be read by the guards. If you don't know what to write, send jokes or political cartoons or your favourite poems or a book chapter. Don't staple anything.

News Roundup: The Undercover Operation (i.e. Infiltrators)

World Socialist Web Site, Dec 2: Police helped plan vandalism at Toronto G20 summit

Yet despite all these preparations—and advance warning of virtually every specific of the planned “direct action”—hardly a police officer could be seen in the area identified by its own undercover operative and targeted by the anarchists.

A Statement of Support from a Co-Conspirator with the G20 17 Defendants

Submitted by kwcs2 on Wed, 11/23/2011 - 17:07

Reposted in full from a Facebook status, which you can only see if you're on Facebook.

FREE Film Screening: Capitalism is the Crisis

Submitted by kwcs2 on Wed, 11/23/2011 - 12:36
12/07/2011 18:30
Canada/Eastern

Join us for a free screening of 'Capitalism is the Crisis'!

About the Film:

The 2008 “financial crisis” in the United States was a systemic fraud in which the wealthy finance capitalists stole trillions of public dollars. No one was jailed for this crime, the largest theft of public money in history.

Instead, the rich forced working people across the globe to pay for their “crisis” through punitive “austerity” programs that gutted public services and repealed workers’ rights.

Austerity was named “Word of the Year” for 2010.

G20 Reading Week

Submitted by kwcs2 on Wed, 11/23/2011 - 11:45
11/13/2011 00:00
11/26/2011 00:00
Canada/Eastern

Critical to our struggle now is education. We need to educate ourselves, our families, colleagues, neighbours, and communities about the issues that brought us into the streets of Toronto and about the ideas that inspire us to create a better world. Thankfully, this task is not so difficult--there is a wealth of literature on all of these subjects readily available to us.

Whose Streets? - G20 Book Launch Party!

Submitted by kwcs2 on Wed, 11/23/2011 - 11:44
11/25/2011 19:00
Canada/Eastern

Join us for an evening of celebration as we launch the book about the convergence against the G20 in toronto, with a media showcase, selections from the book presented by authors and activists and an opening by videographer/activist Juliet Belmas.

Whose Streets?
(from between the lines - http://www.btlbooks.com/book/whosestreets)
The Toronto G20 and the Challenges of Summit Protest
editors: Tom Malleson and David Wachsmuth

MSNBC on NYPD Police Brutality during Occupy Wall Street

Submitted by kwcs on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 00:31

**Trigger Warning for footage of police brutality (amid a lot of fearful screaming from protestors).** This is an important video that examines the brutality carried out upon people doing absolutely nothing illegal at the Occupy Wall Street protests going on in NY right now - and the targeting of journalists by police so that these stories don't get out.

Want to help? Write to the Attorney General, your MP, and your MPP.

Submitted by kwcs on Thu, 09/29/2011 - 22:37

We get a lot of people asking what they can do to help, and mostly we can say "tell people what's going on". It's true that talking about what happened - and what's still happening - is incredibly important.

But what's also really important is to contact those with the ability to get these charges dropped, and to tell our representatives in government that we will not stand for this criminalization of dissent and persecution of valued community organizers for their political beliefs.

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