The police are not held to the standard of perfection and they committed no fault on the day of the Metropolis attack in 2012, argued the lawyer for the Service de police de la ville de Montréal (SPVM) by presenting his pleading to dismiss the lawsuit of four survivors.
When evaluating police work after the fact, we must avoid doing so with the benefit of hindsight and looking at the scale of the tragedy, argued Ms.e Pierre-Yves Boisvert. “We must put ourselves in the moment”, and assess whether the actions of the police were “reasonable”, and not whether better conduct could have been adopted, he pleaded.
On September 4, 2012, the leader of the Parti Québécois (PQ), Pauline Marois, was savoring her electoral victory on the stage of the Metropolis when Richard Henry Bain approached the back door of the building, an assault weapon at the hand, firing bullets that killed stage technician Denis Blanchette and severely injured his colleague Dave Courage.
Those who brought the lawsuit against the SPVM and the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) are four stage technicians who were present that evening. They allege that they suffered serious psychological injuries and various traumas for which they are each claiming $175,000, in addition to $120,000 in punitive damages.
They blame various faults on the two police forces, including the lack of staff around the Metropolis, and a lack of coordination and planning by not having analyzed the various threats formulated the same day against Mr.me Marois and by not adapting their plans to these new potential dangers.
More concretely, their lawyer, Me Virginie Dufresne-Lemire hammered home this finding Thursday during her own argument: there was no policeman watching the back door of the Metropolis, where Bain went.
But to succeed in their action for damages, the four survivors must prove that the police breached a rule, standard or custom of police work.
“But I didn’t hear anything. It’s total emptiness, “repeated Me Green wood. “There is not the shadow of a beginning of a fault. »
It is not enough to say that one does not agree with the way the police acted or that one would have done otherwise, he says: it is necessary to demonstrate a fault.
too late
Then, M.e Boisvert argued that the four survivors did not file their lawsuits in time. The action against the SPVM, a municipal police force, must be brought no later than six months after the fault, as prescribed by the Cities and Towns Act. As for the SQ, the maximum period would be 3 years. Either way, it’s too late, the defense lawyers argued.
Me Dufresne-Lemire had pleaded on Thursday “the impossibility of acting for his clients”, who did not immediately understand that their trauma resulted from the attack. And they were too confused to retain the services of a lawyer, she added, pleading this exception which allows an action to be brought later.
Me Boisvert opposed his argument: when we claim that everything changed on the evening of September 4 and that we experienced “terror”, “it is noticeable”.
All four plaintiffs are entitled to our sympathy, he continued, but the rules of law apply to everyone. For that reason alone, their lawsuit cannot succeed, he said.