If it drank from a real police culture, the “District 31” series offered a much more efficient police force than it actually is.
Day after day, for six seasons, withdrawn by the pandemic in front of their small screen, millions of viewers have kept their eyes glued to the cardboard police station imagined by the designers of the show District 31. Day after day, they smiled at the shenanigans of Commander Daniel Chiasson (Gildor Roy), at the candor of investigator Noélie St-Hilaire (Catherine St-Laurent) or, in spite of themselves, at the showy charm of gang leader François Labelle. (Peter Miller).
Six seasons later, how will the Quebec public understand how the Quebec police community works?
Despite the proliferation of adventures, murders, attacks, kidnappings, occurring around such a small team, despite their rate of resolution of crimes well above that which we note in reality, the series gave a realistic overview of the atmosphere that can reign in a police station, according to Stéphane Wall, who was a field supervisor at the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), and who is now retired.
“There was a concentration of events that happened all the time to the same police officers, but in terms of the atmosphere, the camaraderie, the jokes, the police culture, there were really good similarities with reality, says -he. I heard that Luc Dionne had contacts with the police. He’s not making it up, he’s well fed. »
A 50% homicide solve rate
In real life, as we can imagine, the police are not always the heroes we like to cherish on the small screen. While police series show a crime resolution rate of around 90%, the SPVM has a 50% resolution rate for homicides committed on its territory in 2021.
For criminologist Rémi Boivin, this image of the police conveyed in fiction has the effect of raising public expectations of police forces. “It also suggests that the most common type of crime is some form of crime against the person,” he says, “while the most common type of crime is probably larceny or shoplifting.” »
In reality, the majority of calls made to police stations are related to non-criminal matters, says Rémi Boivin, the police are more often busy settling neighborhood disputes or doing mediation than having recourse to secret service.
Ripoux in flesh and bone
As for the crooks, who took on the roles of the villains in District 31, the characters of Denis Corbin (Paul Doucet), Hugo Simard (Alex Godbout) or Nick Romano (Mathieu Baron), they do exist in real life, but they are rarer. Stéphane Wall cites the case of Benoît Guay, an SPVM police officer specializing in spinning who used his knowledge to follow and sexually assault teenage girls and young women. He was charged in 2004.
“Yes, there are cases that have already happened in the past. I remember the case of an RCMP officer, Jocelyn Hotte, who had been Jean Chrétien’s bodyguard, who was in the middle of a love triangle, and who had shot at the car of his ex and his new boyfriend It was in 2001.
According to him, the police community, however corporatist it may be, is less tolerant than before towards the gaps that arise in its ranks. “In the past, there were policemen who could cross the line and the policemen closed their eyes more easily. Nowadays, someone who wants to commit crimes, all we want is to be arrested. As for the use of warrantless information-gathering, it’s much rarer in real life, he says.
Same thing for the use of force, which is, according to Rémi Boivin, overrepresented in police series. As for the Independent Investigations Service, it is called, in real life, the Independent Investigations Bureau (BEI), and it is true that it causes friction with the police forces…
A conservative environment
On April 11, retired lawyer Dominique Legault wrote a letter in The duty to protest against the image of women conveyed in District 31. “In the stories told by the author Luc Dionne, the women are too often hysterical, crazy or liars,” she wrote.
Without commenting specifically on the stories of Luc Dionne, Rémi Boivin confirms that police culture is a conservative environment. “It’s very much about masculinism,” he says.
However, things seem to be changing. The Sûreté du Québec is now headed by a woman, and a woman is also the interim head of the SPVM.
The fact remains that for someone like the political scientist Francis Dupuis-Déri, co-author of the book Police profilingpublished in January, detective series of all kinds, such as detective novels, are quite simply “a scourge”.
“I would like this creative energy to be reserved for other aspects of reality, for other human experiences,” he says, arguing that he cannot zap without falling on a detective series, whether it is from Quebec. , American, Belgian or French.
In addition, he brandishes figures recorded by the firm Léger, according to which citizens were satisfied with 80% of the police in 2022, 75% in 2016, and marked a low point at 65% in 2012, “probably following the student strikes. In 2022, therefore, according to this survey, the police arrived at 31and rank of the most popular professions.
The political scientist also notes that trust in the police drops drastically when different minorities are surveyed. “There can be a difference of two to two when you instead interview black or indigenous people, who are twice as suspicious of the police. He adds, “Studies show that for African-Canadians or African-Americans, the police are seen more as a threat,” he says.
The over-representation of police forces in the series and in the books “makes us believe that we live in a dangerous world where we must be protected by the police”.