Vancouver Police Won't Arrest People over Olympic Protest Signs

As Vancouver prepares to host the 2010 Winter Games, locals began fretting about a supposed police plan to arrest people for having Olympic protest signs in their windows. This turned out not to be true. However, that this story even spread in the first place shows a deep level of mistrust in local law enforcement vis-a-vis the IOC: the overall feeling is that a corporate body is coming to town to run Vancouver for a month, then up stakes and leave. This is pretty much the case, actually, but it won't involve police search-and-seizure missions over protest signs.

(I can picture the IOC considering this and dismissing it due to manpower requirements, but that's just my own opinion)

As for the protest zones, I have a very difficult time believing that VPD will actually let groups of protestors gather in public spaces-- that's just not how a city's police department behaves in the face of public protest, no matter where you are.

More about the signs, though: the idea that cops would be running up on you if you had an anti-Olympics sign stemmed from a bylaw which expedites Vancouver's ability to deal with ambush marketing and graffiti. While this clearly targets companies that are not Olympic sponsors, and is grounds for a whole new story about what happens when a corporate giant comes to town, this isn't about signs displayed in the windows of private homes.

Keep an eye out, though, for local media campaigns, and clever non-Olympic-sponsor advertisements. Vancouver is a very, very media-savvy town at the heart of the Web 2.0 industry, which the IOC has never dealt with before, and barely seems to even understand.

Vancouver 2010 Winter Games feature coverage