More than a hundred people demonstrated Wednesday evening in Montreal, in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce district, against police brutality. The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), which had deployed several personnel to the scene, announced in the evening that it had observed five misdeeds and made an arrest.
The demonstrators had initially been invited by social networks to meet around 6 p.m. at Notre-Dame-de-Grâce park, located at the intersection of avenue Girouard and rue Sherbrooke Ouest, as part of the 27e International Day Against Police Brutality.
“Police kill in jail and on the streets,” read a large poster carried by members of the crowd platoon, who also had red flags in their hands. “Ending police brutality is possible” or “SPVM: political police” was also written on other displays seen by The Press.
PHOTO DOMINICK GRAVEL, THE PRESS
On Facebook, the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality (COBP), which has held an annual rally of this kind on March 15 for several years, had denounced that “police officers and detention officers can in theory have different names and functions, they play the same role of repression and violence”.
“The state is constantly building new prisons and investing ever more in ever more deadly police forces”, also argued the organization, calling not to let “police repression in prison go unmentioned”. .
Five harms observed
In a report on the event made public at the end of the evening, the SPVM spokesperson, Manuel Couture, indicated that “smoke bombs were deployed by the demonstrators and that misdeeds – we are mainly talking about graffiti and broken windows – were observed at the scene.
PHOTO DOMINICK GRAVEL, THE PRESS
“Subsequently, several objects, such as garbage cans, traffic cones and signs, were placed on the sidewalk to interfere with the work of the police,” he also noted.
In total, five misdeeds were identified by the police, who also arrested a person during the demonstration, a 39-year-old man, finally reported agent Couture.
The whole thing ended around 8 p.m., when most of the demonstrators entered the Vendôme metro station in order to leave the scene. No one was seriously injured during the event, according to information collected in the evening from the police authorities.