Sunday, July 31, 2016
By Aidan Cox
Abdirahman Abdi's casket is carried into the main mosque on Friday. JANA CHYTILOVA
Demonstrators marched to the entrance of Ottawa police headquarters Saturday to voice their outrage over last week’s death of Abdirahman Abdi.
The crowd, made up of a few hundred people, wound its way from Somerset Square Park to the station at 474 Elgin St., bunching up against orange wooden barricades that separated protesters from about a dozen police officers who stood in front of the building’s tinted glass doors.
“We cannot ‘bridge’ anything. The bridge was burnt when the Ottawa police chose to kill Abdirahman Abdi,” said protester Amran Ali, a member of the Canadian Somali Mothers Association, through a megaphone.
Abdi, a 37-year-old member of Ottawa’s Somali community, died Monday after a confrontation with several Ottawa police officers in Hintonburg. Witnesses have said police were called to a Bridgehead coffee shop around 9 a.m. after Abdi allegedly grabbed a female customer’s breast. Police chased Abdi to his Hilda Street apartment, where witnesses said he was pepper-sprayed, beaten with batons and left handcuffed on the ground until paramedics arrived to find him without vital signs. The SIU is investigating to determine whether police should be held criminally responsible for his death.
Ali said she was “dismayed, horrified and disgusted” with statements from Ottawa police Chief Charles Bordeleau.
“You claim that you cannot comment on what’s going on, yet you go and give interviews with Ottawa media and talk about how this incident was not about race before the (SIU) investigation finishes,” she said.
Ali also took issue with Bordeleau’s statement that Ottawa police have been subjected to taunting from the public in the wake of Abdi’s death.
“You also shouldn’t be going on the news telling people about how your officers are feeling scared or insecure because people are taking videos of them. I’m sorry, you are civil servants — you wear that uniform, we pay your salaries. The least we can do is videotape,” Ali said.
Demonstrators, including Ali, accused police standing at the station’s entrance of “smiling.”
“You are laughing, you are smirking, you think this is funny. You know why? Because you are white supremacists!” shouted Ali across the barricade at the row of uniformed men and women.
The demonstration posed a stark contrast to the scene at St. Luke’s Park only hours earlier, where the Ottawa Police Service had played a friendly basketball game against members of the community.