Crimes against the person continue to increase rapidly in the Montreal metro, their number having practically doubled last year. And on the ground, the situation is felt very strongly: in just six months, 30,000 calls were made to involve social constables.
In 2023, 662 assaults, 100 robberies, 57 sexual assaults and 1 attempted murder took place in the Montreal metro, for a total of 820 crimes against the person, show new data from the City of Montreal Police Department. Montreal (SPVM) first revealed by Quebecor media.
This represents an increase of just over 80% compared to the 455 comparable events recorded in 2022. In 2021, the Montreal police recorded barely 360 crimes against the person. It must be said that since last fall, the patrol officers of the Métro section have no longer carried out regular surveillance in order to focus on issues specifically related to crime.
In short, special constables are under more pressure than ever. According to data from the Brotherhood of Constables and Peace Officers STM-CSN, nearly 30,000 calls have already been made to have them intervene in 2024, compared to 47,000 for the whole of 2023. “If we make a rule of three, we should reach close to 60,000 calls this year. It would be a summit,” says union president Kevin Grenier.
The festival season helps us a little, but at the same time, there are many other incivilities related to consumption that increase during the summer. We are really overloaded.
Kevin Grenier, President of the Brotherhood of Constables
The latter nevertheless welcomes the recent hiring of 15 additional constables, in December. “They have completed their training and will be able to start next week. It will do us a lot of good. We should be 165 in total with these additions,” notes the union leader. A new cohort of aspiring constables is also in training and another is planned for next September.
As for the safety ambassadors, recently deployed and whose mandate is to detect dangerous situations, there are currently 14 of them, but a dozen more should begin the two-week training at the beginning of July. That will mean there will be 26 in a few weeks. We can add to this group about twenty maintenance workers and eight mobile mediation and social intervention teams (EMMIS), made up of social workers.
“A point of balance”
For several months now, the growing insecurity felt by metro users has been making headlines. In addition to increasingly visible drug use in certain stations, violent physical attacks have made their mark in recent months.
“We would like to see the trend reversed, but that’s not happening. On the contrary, it continues to increase. There are questions to ask very seriously,” says Sarah V. Doyon, general director of Trajectoire Québec, which defends the interests of public transport users, in an interview.
She maintains that governments, particularly that of Quebec, “should get more involved.” “We say it again and again, but it takes more resources in homelessness to fight the opioid crisis. At some point, we will have to ask ourselves if we are not going to exceed a point of balance, that is to say users who leave the network for good because of insecurity,” insists M.me Doyon.
While continuing to invest in hiring special constables – there are currently nearly 200 – the Société de transport de Montréal (STM) “should perhaps soon review certain tolerance policies,” believes the manager. “We must not end up with a metro that is more of a makeshift shelter than a transportation network,” she illustrates.
More vulnerability
At the STM, the increase in insecurity is associated with “an increase in the number of vulnerable people and cases of incivility since the pandemic, caused in particular by an increase in cases of poisoning, mental health cases and the housing crisis”, issues whose “origin goes beyond [des] infrastructure” of the transport company, argues spokesperson Laurence Houde-Roy.
“That said, the safety and feeling of security of our customers and employees is paramount. […] “Our security spending is one of the only items of expenditure that we increase every year,” she adds.
She also recalls that several very targeted measures towards vulnerable customers have been taken, such as the installation of boxes to collect syringes at the Papineau, Frontenac and Beaudry stations. We also already find them in Joliette and Iberville.
The SPVM assures that “responding to emergency calls from the metro remains essential.” “It is now handled by the 16 neighborhood stations that have a station on their territory, a way of doing things that should result in an optimization of our response time,” says a spokesperson for the police force, Mélanie Bergeron.