They're full of sh!t. "I was just standing here peacefully protesting in the designated area when the big bad policeman assaulted me and hauled me away."
Yeah, right!
You've never been to a protest have you? Sadists in the police force--not all police are like that but the force has the lion's share of them--will often look for even the
slightest excuse to let someone have it and the draconian G20 "rules" gave ample opportunity for that kind of behaviour.
There are too many Canadians like you who fail to understand what happened: the G20 protests were among the most peaceful in the world, with the media naturally focusing almost exclusively on the few spectacles of vandalism. The broken windows were all by the same few people and that one burning police car (lit while the vehicle was abandoned) that attracted surprisingly little concern from spectators of the wreck is mainly symbolic of the abusive and dominating nature of that city's police force against a fairly, passive and non-violent population (the police forces' size and budget are colossal and among the largest in North America, yet Toronto has never had a particularly high crime rate and most crime is usually restricted to key problem spots within recent decades directly related to increased poverty in the city). What's more, most of the people who came in from the outside were average well-meaning folks who felt the need to join the protest and have their voices heard, if only from a distance (and through alternative media channels), as these Summits represent globalizing market trends that have proven to be economically destructive throughout the world, so peoples' opposition to them is completely justified.
Putting aside that the whole point of protest is to not accept the status quo within a given situation so setting up rules of where one can and cannot protest is absurd, those mass arrests were in gross violation of the right to peaceful protest, among other civil rights. The fact that the police were able to get away with it, with only one psychotic cop getting a slap on the wrist and only after an intense investigation, gives you some idea of just what kind of clout the police force of that city carries.
What also says a lot is that the 'Stop and Search' law (meant only for emergencies) is still an issue almost a year after the G20 summit took place.