(Montreal) Could the candor of Fady Dagher cost the City of Montreal 171 million?
The new director of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) was called to testify on Thursday before the Superior Court in the context of the class action led by the Ligue des Noirs du Québec in support of Alexandre Lamontagne against the City of Montreal for racial profiling.
Fady Dagher thus recognized before Judge Dominique Poulin the existence of racial profiling within his police force, whose culture he aspires to change. “It’s a very insidious, very subtle, very sneaky problem and you don’t realize you’re doing it,” he said.
Questioned later in a scrum by the press on the possibility that his remarks served the interests of the applicants, Mr. Dagher simply replied, without any hesitation: “You have to tell the truth! »
Victim of profiling
Mr. Lamontagne had been intercepted leaving a bar in August 2014 and the arrest had quickly gone wrong. The young man had been brutally pinned to the ground, handcuffed and taken to the station to finally end up with three statements of offense and two charges, one of obstructing the work of the police and another of assaulting a police officer, charges which are subsequently fell.
The League of Blacks is claiming damages of $5,000 per racialized person arrested without valid reason between August 2017 and January 2019.
One of the reasons behind the hiring of Fady Dagher by the City of Montreal is precisely linked to the fight he has been waging for a long time against this problem within the police forces and the success he has obtained in this regard with the police of the agglomeration of Longueuil (SPAL), of which he was the director from 2016 to last December.
Previously, he had worked for nearly 25 years as a police officer at the SPVM, where he rose through the ranks to become its deputy director. During his testimony, he made a long list of awareness-raising efforts and multiple training sessions to counter racial profiling within the SPVM, over more than twenty years.
Unconscious biases
“How can I make my police officers realize that they have unconscious and sometimes even conscious biases? “, he wondered aloud in front of the magistrate.
Because even today, “we have racist police officers. That said, the vast majority are not,” he said, arguing that the phenomenon tends to fade not only through formation, but also through evolution. “The more we advanced, the more the recruits had grown up with diversity in daycare centers and schools. »
Although the random arrests were deemed unconstitutional by Judge Michel Yergeau last October precisely because they are a source of racial profiling – a decision that was appealed – Fady Dagher remains convinced of their usefulness.
“It is still needed. You just have to do it well, you have to do it on the right beacons. And that is the issue. The challenge is that it was sometimes made on the wrong beacons, ”he argued at the end of the hearing.
Systemic character
But during his testimony and in an interview afterwards, he insisted on the systemic nature of this profiling. “We must above all review the system because in 20 years, we will talk to each other again if we only focus on individuals,” he said.
Out of 6800 employees, are there people who have racist behavior or events that are racist? There are. But me, if each time I focus on each person, I will never move forward. If I change the system, then I expect there to be a really profound culture change.
Fady Dagher, Director of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM)
In front of the journalists, he also argued that the profiling attributed to the police often originates from the citizens themselves.
“The number of 9-1-1 calls we receive from citizens who are already profiling the call, who tell us that there are young people doing such and such a thing, who are already calls full of prejudice and discrimination , we respond to these calls and when we arrive on the scene, suddenly, we are the people who have instigated the event. But it’s not us, it’s the 9-1-1 call.
“Racial profiling is a problem with the police. It has to be settled. We have a lot to do. We made it. We have to keep doing it, but it’s a social problem,” he concluded.
Mayor Valérie Plante must also appear in court. His testimony is scheduled for next Tuesday.