How I interpret what happened this weekend. I'm still scratching my head over how the cops never really made it to Yonge though. I guess they were just caught off guard and their orders were for them to wait...
I wonder too, having seen the hooligans proceeding up Yonge below Queen, marching as a well-defined "en bloc" group--ripe for the picking, so to speak, and surrounded by relatively few other people once they left Queen/Adelaide and turned north.
I think it's probably some combination of a) the hooligans moved
really quickly after they trashed things around Queen/Spadina, b) the police may have been aware of the movement tactics that might be used, but simply did not have the officers in place along Adelaide and other east/west streets giving the commanders sufficient immediate updates (perhaps they were depending too much on remotely controlled CCTV cameras) to make expeditious arrangements to intercept the hooligans (after all, there must have been at least 30mins between their exit from the Queen/Spadina area, to their arrival at Yonge/Adelaide), c) the whole command structure was centralized and inflexible, and d) officer numbers and transport capacity might have been lacking in the S. Yonge area, or perhaps, if adequate to bring several hundred officers into the area, not optimally pre-positioned to cordon off groups of people rapidly. (And that's to say nothing about the public relations disaster if they cordon off too many bystanders--that must also have played some role in any decision, if there was an explicit one, not to intervene.)
But what do I know about policing under any circumstances, let alone those that prevailed on Saturday? Nothing! As others here have remarked, there is an extraordinary randomness in the behaviour of crowds, policing actions are always going to be at the extremes of such behaviour, and we can be all happy that (with the exception of some police cars), these hooligans did not decide to celebrate a "Molotov Cocktail Happy Hour" .
Maybe TPS should have out-sourced the anti-hooligan component of their mandate to the French or German specilized anti-riot police squads--they have
more experience with
this kind of thing.