Police officers in downtown Toronto prepare to march to the funeral service for Sgt. Ryan Russell on Jan. 18, 2011.

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In our cities and towns and throughout the vast expanses of our northern half of a continent, we pay the police to serve and protect us with their lives.

When their lives are lost on our behalf, we honour them. Rightly so.

And they honour themselves. Rightly so.

In rituals become tradition, they come together from across the country for funerals of their fallen comrades. They join together to give each other support for the sacrifices they're called upon to make.

We provide our police officers with guns to defend themselves and laws enabling them to arrest us, search us, break down our doors, physically restrain us. But sometimes that is not enough and they get killed.

Thus, all was as it should be Tuesday for the memorial service in Toronto for Sgt. Ryan Russell, killed as he tried to halt a man driving a stolen snowplow.

Conceivably there can be excesses on these occasions. Tuesday in Toronto wasn't one of them. Those of us who live in, or regularly visit, this immensely comfortable city know that to a great degree we go about our lives in safety because of its police and other emergency workers.

And so the downtown was closed, shut down for the day for the first time since the gathering of G20 heads of government in the summer.

An estimated 13,000 men and women marched down the city's ceremonial thoroughfare on University Avenue behind Sgt. Russell's hearse. Construction workers, office workers, sidewalk passersby stopped and stood in the damp cold to pay tribute, many removing their hats and placing their hands over their hearts as the hearse went by.

People began arriving in Toronto's convention centre as early as 8 a.m. to claim seats for a service that began at 2 p.m. The ceremony was moving, the tributes touched the heart, none more so than the words spoken by the officer's widow, Christine.

All of it was live-televised, live-blogged and videographed on newspaper websites, and soaked in columnists' magniloquent prose.

Another legacy

Every aspect of the event, it must be stressed, was in accordance with the desires of the Russell family. If they had wanted less public display, there would have been less public display.

A senior Toronto police officer said on television that the city's residents were paying a tribute both to Sgt. Russell and the Toronto Police Service. Undoubtedly that was the case.

But how much thought did that senior officer give to what he said? And what precisely was the take-away message for him and the thousands of his sister and brother officers?

That all was forgiven and forgotten from the summer and the huge clash of cultures and values that was the G20? Or that there was nothing from the summer to forgive?

'That means there is a social contract we have with the police: we give them power and authority in exchange for, among other things, protecting our right to dissent from authority and our right to make our democracy occasionally look messy.'

Those would not be good ideas.

We entrust our physical safety to the police.

We also entrust to them the protection of our freedoms as inhabitants of a democracy and what many Canadians think of as our special Canadian culture of rights.

That means there is a social contract we have with the police: we give them power and authority in exchange for, among other things, protecting our right to dissent from authority and our right to make our democracy occasionally look messy.

The constant contract

There was, inescapably, an echo Tuesday of the Toronto police behaviour during the G20. It was an echo heard the moment the force announced it would be closing much of the central city for the second time in six months.

At the G20 gathering, democracy did look messy and the Toronto police responded by suppressing lawful dissent. They invoked a law that didn't exist. They beat people illegally and denied they had done so — fabrications that are still being uncovered as private videos surface.

They also illicitly corralled, threatened and insulted Torontonians, jailing people without justification in demeaning conditions.

In that process, they violated the contract they have with the citizenry, a fact that remains on the city's body like an unlanced boil.

Undoubtedly, Toronto Police Chief William Blair, a sensitive, decent man, and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, who bears ultimate accountability for what transpired last summer, regret much of what happened.

But that regret should impose on them a responsibility to cleanse the contract.

I've covered too many protest demonstrations over the years — from apartheid South Africa and Northern Ireland to the Canadian and U.S. street-politics of the 1990s — where police and military have made clear their conviction that dissent is criminal and its perpetrators are wrong-doers who must be stopped by force.

It's an attitude that has seeped into police culture.

What Chief Blair might consider doing, as a fitting response to the tribute Torontonians paid Tuesday to his police force, is to publicly acknowledge that democracy is a fragile thing and pledge that the men and women under his command will protect it with the same fervour and dedication with which Sgt. Russell sought to protect the lives of the citizens in the city that he served.