Toronto police Chief Bill Blair said on Friday that those who were demanding his resignation over "police and political abuses" during last summer's G20 summit should inform themselves about what his force faced on city streets.

Blair was responding to criticisms made by a group of civil rights groups on Friday, one day after the Toronto Police Service released a report detailing the weekend of June 26 and 27 last year.

The report suggested that police forces were overwhelmed by the size and scope of protests throughout the downtown core, and made several recommendations on how to handle large groups of protesters in the future.

"I know my job and we are doing our job," Blair told CTV Toronto on Friday. "My responsibility to the people of this city, to my board and to my service is to make sure that we take a good, objective, honest critical look at everything we did."

While speaking with CTV Toronto, Blair said the Toronto police had learned a number of lessons from the G20 summit. He said the report should provide a context about the sweeping chaos officers faced during the protests.

"We have looked critically at all aspects of our response and we have tried to come up with lessons that we might learn, for ourselves and for other who would be faced with a similar situation in the future," Blair said.

The report recommended Toronto police limit further use of the controversial "kettling" technique, in which officers surrounded demonstrators from all sides without leaving an exit route.

Blair did not say that the kettling tactic used during the last night of the summit was a mistake, but did say he thought there were options that would be far more effective in the future.

"It became quite problematic because you have innocent people who are not there for criminality comingled with all of those who are," Blair said.

"The tactic was not as effective as what I think the operational commanders might have felt it could be. They were concerned with stopping serious criminality and breaches of the peace."

A total of six police cruisers were destroyed during the protests and millions of dollars worth of damage was caused to downtown businesses by aggressive protesters, referred to as the Black Bloc.

Blair said they had been aware of how Black Bloc tactics were used in other protests, but were caught off guard when the aggressive protesters adjusted their plans away from directly attacking their target.

"Generally we were prepared for what was anticipated to be an assault on the summit site. What we found was that those who were engaged in these tactics … had prepared to thwart the traditional response, and our responsibility to protest that summit site. We couldn't just abandon that responsibility."

Judy Rebick, an activist and a Ryerson University political science professor, says a federal inquiry is needed in order to understand exactly what went wrong that week.

Rebick said she was disappointed by the Toronto police's report, which claimed they were caught unprepared for the aggressive "Black Bloc" tactics used by protesters.

"They knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew exactly what was going to happen, and I wasn't even in the meetings," Rebick said.

"With all the so-called investigations, this is all they can come up with? It is very sad."

Civil rights groups called the police report a "joke" on Friday and said it did not outline the mistakes made during the summit. More than 1,118 people were pulled from the street, arrested and detained during the G20 summit. The majority of those people were released without being charged, or had charges dropped in the wake of the summit.

A many as 39 protesters reported being injured during the arrests, while 97 officers were also hurt.

At a press conference on Friday, the Council of Canadians, Amnesty International, the Ontario Federation of Labour and individual activists said Blair must resign for letting officers hide behind a "thin blue line" of silence, and for refusing to identify police who were videotaped hitting protesters.

York University political science professor David McNally said Blair should resign for the "havoc and mayhem waged by police" during the G20.

"When you are the chief in command of such a debacle, it is your responsibility, you wear it, and there is no alternative if you want to restore public faith in the judicial and policing systems than for Blair to resign," McNally said.

Labour federation president Sid Ryan said Ontario's provincial government also had to answer for passing a secret law that it allowed the public to believe granted police special powers of arrest during the summit.

"The secret amendments to the Ontario Public Works Protection Act became the fig leaf used to justify the mass violation of civil liberties during the G20, yet the very substance of this law turned out to be deliberately misleading," he said.

"This confusion was not the result of miscommunication, but it was an act of willful and deliberate deceit to make the public believe that police had the legal authority to violate their civil rights."

Earlier this week, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty declined to apologize for the secret law, adding that Prime Minister Stephen Harper would be responsible for launching any public inquiry.

"It was his G20," said McGuinty. "It was his invitation. It was his choice to bring it to Toronto. It was his police predominantly that ran the security for this major undertaking."

With files from CTV Toronto's Austin Delaney and The Canadian Press