Mr. John Pruyn, 57, of Thorold was among the protesters at the recent G20 summit in Toronto; unlike most of the protesters, he has a prosthetic leg – but, so he alleges, that didn’t stop the police mistreating him:

“‘Get the four of them!'” Pruyn recalled a police officer saying.

“One of them put a knee on my head, and pinned me to the ground [and] my arms were underneath me,” he said. “And one of them said I was trying to resist arrest, but I wasn’t… I couldn’t move.”

Police then “yanked” his arms out from underneath him, tied his wrists together behind his back with plastic ties, and ordered him to get up and walk, he alleges.

“I said I couldn’t. So then one of them grabbed my artificial leg, and yanked it off and then they ordered me to hop.”

When Pruyn told police he couldn’t hop, they picked him up by his armpits and dragged him across the ground, scraping his elbows on the rough pavement, he said. His glasses fell off at some point during the altercation and were lost.

Police took Pruyn to a police van, where he sat without his leg for more than an hour, he said. He was later transported to a temporary detention centre in the city’s east end, given a wheelchair and put in a cell, he said.

Police refused to give him back his prosthetic leg for fear he would use it as a weapon, he said.

It’s difficult not to feel sorry for someone with a prosthetic leg, so, in spite of the nagging thought that Mr. Pruyn is well aware of this and has used it to his advantage, I am trying to see his side of things and feel the outrage he obviously wants me to feel at his misadventure with the Canadian police force. At the same time, I find myself valiantly struggling (Anglicans enjoy struggling) against a rising note of comedy that would find itself quite at home in a P. G. Wodehouse story.

Here is Mr. Pruyn shortly before losing his leg: his unwillingness to move doesn’t help his case, neither does the squeaky voice do much to bolster my resolve not to see him as Wodehouse creation:

Many years ago I was in San Francisco when flag burning was a popular way of expressing distaste for something or other the US was doing overseas. As I wandered innocently along the sidewalk admiring the view and inhaling the salty air, a man sidled up to me and suggested I cross the road; he flashed a police badge. I obliged and stood to watch the scene that unfolded. After a few minutes a couple of youngish men ran to the middle of the road and ignited a flag; police and news cameras followed. Before the police actually reached the young men, they started rolling on the ground screaming “police brutality” – all recorded for public edification. As Malcolm Muggeridge used to like saying – often while in front of a camera – “the camera always lies.”

Very probably Mr. Pruyn was treated badly by the police. In the aftermath, he does seem to be enjoying the attention, though: his photograph is popping up in newspapers all over the place – with and without leg.