Police arrests still disproportionately target black, Arab and Indigenous people, according to an “extremely critical” report commissioned by the Service de police de la Ville Montréal (SPVM). But the latter already rejects the main recommendation of the vast document: to impose a moratorium on police arrests.
Almost four years after having published, in October 2019, a very critical first report on police arrests in Montreal, the new document, of more than 280 pages, piloted by the same group of university experts, has been described as ” extremely critical” Thursday by the director of the police force, Fady Dagher. “Racial profiling is a subject that affects me personally,” he noted at a press conference at SPVM headquarters in the middle of the afternoon.
The report, written by four university experts, analyzed the over-representation of visible minorities in police stops in Montreal between 2014 and 2021. In short, it shows that racial profiling in this type of police intervention persists, despite the cultural shift initiated in 2020 by the SPVM to tackle this issue. “The indicators for 2020 and 2021 do not show any break with previous years”, we can read, despite the adoption of a first Policy on police arrests by the SPVM, in July 2020.
“No doubt it takes more time [pour voir des résultats de cette politique], but also go faster, act stronger,” noted Mr. Dagher. “Together, we must accelerate. »
No moratorium
The four Montreal university researchers behind this report thus note that in 2021, Aboriginal people were 6 times more likely to be arrested than white people; black populations, 3.5 times, and Arab people, 2.6 times. The researchers also found that visible minorities are much more likely to be stopped in the street for intelligence or investigation purposes, while police stops for “prevention and assistance” purposes are more likely to target white people.
“Going fishing can have an advantage for the police: I arrest 10 people and I catch one or two criminals. But there are eight in the lot who had nothing to reproach themselves for, who were sometimes arrested several times because of their social identity […] and these people are beginning to see their confidence in the police eroded,” noted Professor Victor Armony, from the Department of Sociology at UQAM, who is one of the authors of this report, on Thursday.
In this context, the researchers made their main recommendation of this report that a moratorium be put in place for “any police arrest that is not justified by the investigation of a specific crime or by the reasonable suspicion of a illegal activity”. This pause in police arrests would be accompanied by an “in-depth examination of the arrest and the implementation of effective measures that significantly reduce the risk of racial profiling in all police interventions”, propose the four researchers.
However, this recommendation, the cornerstone of the report according to its authors, present at the SPVM press conference, was rejected out of hand by Fady Dagher, by making police arrests remain an “important tool” for the body of police.
“Am I going to announce such a moratorium today? No”, dropped the director of the SPVM, who prefers to tackle the problem of racial profiling “at the source”. In this sense, Fady Dagher has announced his intention to review the hiring criteria for police officers to facilitate the recruitment of people from visible minorities. In addition, “we are in the process of completely reviewing our promotion processes” in order to help police officers from visible minorities to have access to management positions, he underlined.
“I won’t hide it from you, we have a huge amount of work ahead of us,” added Mr. Dagher, who acknowledged that “years” of work will be needed before the fruits of the efforts put in place by the SPVM to counter the racial profiling are bearing fruit.
Disappointment for researchers
The authors of the report for their part criticized Thursday the decision of the SPVM not to go ahead with the main recommendation resulting from their research. “It’s as if finally, [le SPVM] said: yes, we see that there is systemic racism and discrimination, but we will still continue to do so to fight against crime, ”lamented researcher Mariam Hassaoui, from TÉLUQ University, in an interview.
“We will do everything to eliminate profiling within the SPVM”, reacted the head of public security on the executive committee, Alain Vaillancourt, who said he was “comfortable” with the strategy put in place by the SPVM. to implement “deep changes” within the police force.