The Sarlacc

When I was about seven, I watch Return of the Jedi and fixated for days afterward on the sarlacc – the giant sand worm that Luke, Han, and Chewie are to be fed into. Someone explains that its prey are digested alive for millennia.

The scariest thing is you don’t die. You just get processed, presumably in great agony.

Like an ancient sand worm, power does this to truth. You see reality fall in, hoping it reemerges from the bristling blackness. After a while everything stills again, the worm belches, and you lose hope.

Why are we suing the Calgary police?

It’s hard to describe how it feels to be smeared in public by powerful people. It’s a mix of uncertainty, fear, frustration, rage, indignation, and anguish, on a thick layer of pity — for self and others you know are in it, too.

In the moments after the police officer smashed me in the face, purposelessly, several times while I was prone on the ground, I craned to face the student next to me. Aidan was surviving a similar ordeal.

We reassured each other – a tiny show of mutual care amid utter violence.

We got arrested and split up. Aidan was handed off to EMS by the cops. Face bloodied after multiple officers witnessed my assaults, I was never offered medical assistance. My arresting officer said something like, "You good?" And that was it.

In the days to come, the police chief would tell everyone no injuries were reported.

A strange thing happens when you experience trauma like this but powerful people say you didn’t.

You watch reality get swallowed, digested, and reconstituted in real time. Like a sarlacc receiving its latest execution victim.

I think a lot more people can see this now, two years on, as the reality of the Palestinian genocide continues its slow churn in the guts of the sarlacc.

I’ve tried everything to reconstruct the events that we all had injuries, medical records, and trauma to show for. Nearly 40 freedom of information requests. Countless hours sifting through redacted documents. Legal disclosure. Formal complaints – denied. Law Enforcement Review Board Appeal – ongoing.

All the while, watching the sarlacc digest and reconstitute our story.

What kept all this going was much bigger than the emotional and physical fallout.

It was the terror of watching Gaza turn into Iran turn into Lebanon. It was knowing that however depressed we felt about our experience, it was just a peephole into the concentration camps we tried to stop in May 2024.

Formal complaints to the Chief, to the police commission, to ASIRT - all swallowed, digested, reconstituted. Lies deepening through the digestion process, getting repeated and passed around, eventually becoming the official record.

So we’ll sue CPS and the university and the city, and we will all watch them once again, in real time, lie to obstruct justice. It is how they operate.

The time to let systems create accountability is long past. In hindsight, it seems they were never built to function at all.

We’ll sue, to get the accountability so far denied to this situation. I hope you watch, and I hope you can bring yourself to help us out a bit.

The legal fund page is here, and we'll update it with news and documents like the press release (find the Statement of Claim there).

If you can't chip in, that is OK – you can help by sharing the fundraising page around to your friends. We are up against three massive institutions with a lot of lawyers, and we will need support.

Raheleh Tarani is one of the plaintiffs. She's a mother of two students who were attending UofC in 2024, and who joined the protest.

She's also the sister of a young man who was killed by the Iranian government at a protest when he was barely in his twenties. She went to the protest on May 9, 2024 to make sure her sons — both a similar age to her brother — got home in one piece.

She ended up in an ambulance with serious injuries.

Here's what she wanted to say to Calgary on Monday: