In a letter relayed by Duty On September 24, Commander Patrice Vilceus of the Montreal City Police Service (SPVM) announced his retirement, calling racism and racial profiling a “cancer that is eating away at the organization.”
This shocking statement comes as no surprise. It echoes an important observation from the second report on police arrests (street checks) commissioned by the SPVM and made public in June 2023: many police officers deny the existence of a problem of racial profiling within the police. According to them, this is a problem of misperception.
The director of the SPVM, Fady Dagher, rejected the researchers’ only recommendation by describing it as “symbolic”: a moratorium on police arrests, a concrete measure which brings immediate beneficial effects. The SPVM continues to rely on training and recruitment, measures that have been in place for more than 30 years without having produced significant changes. The municipal administration, for its part, remained rather silent, abdicating its responsibility to protect the rights and freedoms of Montrealers.
The entry into office of the new director of the SPVM in 2022 has clearly changed nothing. We can even wonder if hopes for the presence of a racialized person in this position have slowed down the collective fight against racial profiling, giving way to calls to “give him a chance”.
It must be remembered: racial profiling is a systemic problem. This involves focusing on the many police practices that generate racial profiling and violations of human rights (right to equality, right to life and security, right to liberty, right to dignity).
One of these practices is police arrests, which result in arbitrary identity checks that violate rights and disproportionately target indigenous, black, racialized and marginalized people in public spaces. They must be banned once and for all.
Judge Dominique Poulin, of the Superior Court, declared in her decision on the collective action of the Quebec Black League that the City of Montreal “contributes to the phenomenon of racial profiling by asking its police officers to carry out prevention and to carry out arrests, in a context of systemic racism”.
The necessary tangible and systemic changes will not come from the police institution, whether from the SPVM or any other police force. Let us recall this shocking sentence from Judge Michel Yergeau in the Luamba decision on unmotivated road interceptions of black and racialized people: “The rights guaranteed by the Charter cannot be left any longer in the wake of an improbable moment of epiphany of the police forces. » Faced with the inertia of this institution, political authorities must stop being complacent with the police and take their responsibilities to impose the changes necessary to respect human rights.
Since the fall of 2023, the Public Safety Commission of the City of Montreal has been stalling on the question of arrests. Several organizations are demanding that it present the results of the second report to the population and organize a public debate on this subject, to which it has committed in August 2023. Then, a turnaround: the commission cited several pretexts for delaying the holding of a public session, such as the fact that one of the researchers had to testify during the collective action of the Black League or difficulties in obtaining its own quorum.
No date has yet been announced. Obviously, there is a blockage within the municipal apparatus, which is unduly delaying its completion. Where does it come from? From the mayor’s office? From the SPVM? From the Deputy Directorate General for Urban Security and Compliance?
While the Montreal administration claims to take the problem of profiling and systemic racism seriously, we propose to consider the practice of arrests as a barometer of its desire to really act. The day the City announces the ban on police stops, we will be able to believe it!