Whether it’s at an encampment clearing, a demonstration against police brutality, or a march drawing attention to the plight of a marginalized community, there’s very often a group of people on the periphery watching how the police respond to protests: the Legal Observers.
In the GTA, those people are us.
What are Legal Observers (LOs)?
LOs are people who are trained to support the legal rights of activists. We’re there to provide basic legal information, and document police behaviour.
LOing as a practice goes back to the 1930s in Britain¹, in response to police agent provocateurs who were agitating from within the group of protesters. At this point, the legal observers were lawyers embedded to observe and document police behaviour in order to help people who were entrapped.
In the 1960s, the Black Panthers² in Oakland, California were the first to use community members to watch and document what the police were doing (copwatch)
Very soon after this, in 1968, the National Lawyers Guild in the US combined the copwatch of the Black Panthers with tangible legal support to create an integrated strategy of providing legal support to activists. This was during the era of massive civil rights and anti-war protests.
The Orange Hats approach.
In Canada, we had modeled after the NLG approach, until very recently. But we have always had a key difference: We have always taken the stance that we are part of the movement, not separate from it.
Our goal is to have Orange Hats come from different communities, train up, and take that knowledge back to their community and teach as many people as possible.
Everyone should be able to properly document police interactions.
If you are interested in taking one of our trainings, whether it is to join us, or to simply understand how to document police interactions, stay tuned. We are putting together our schedule of trainings.
To contact us, send mail to: orangehats [at] fastmail.com
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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_observer#History
² https://mals.au/2021/06/09/a-brief-incomplete-history-of-legal-observing/, https://www.nlg.org/massdefenseprogram/los/