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🧵 Why are we suing the Calgary Police? It’s hard to describe what happens to you physiologically while being smeared in public by powerful people. It’s a mix of uncertainty, fear, frustration, rage, indignation, and anguish, on a thick layer of pity — for self and others you know are in it, too. 1/

I remember the moments after a police officer smashed me in the face, purposelessly, several times while face-down on the ground. I craned to face the student next to me, going through a similar ordeal. We reassured each other. It was a show of mutual care amid utter violence. 2/

A weird thing happens when you go through something like that but powerful people say you didn’t. You watch reality get swallowed, digested, and reconstituted by power in real time. I think a lot more people can see that now, two years on. 4/

I’ve done everything to reconstruct the events that we know happened, that we all had injuries and medical records to show for. Nearly 40 freedom of information requests. Countless hours sifting through redacted documents. All the while watching power digesting, reconstituting our story. 5/

What kept it all going was much bigger than the emotions of the fallout. It was the terror of watching Gaza turn into Iran turn into Lebanon. It was knowing that however depressed we felt about our experience, it was just a peephole into the concentration camps we tried to stop in May 2024. 6/