After five months at the head of the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), Fady Dagher took the floor to outline his vision. But instead of a coherent vision, the new director presented a catch-all which can be summed up in a slogan often chanted during the demonstrations: “Police everywhere, justice nowhere”.
The former director of the Longueuil police department is a longtime member of the SPVM, where he first distinguished himself as director of the Saint-Michel neighborhood station. For years now, Mr. Dagher has given central importance to the repression and prevention of crime. In his speech, he returned to this theme over and over, emphasizing that seizing the guns and arresting the perpetrators of the shootings would do nothing to stem the gun violence in the city.
There is nothing new or controversial here. But the question is always how to prevent violence, and this is where Fady Dagher’s vision deviates from the norm — and in a chilling way.
To fight armed violence, four SPVM squads will work together this summer to target and neutralize “at risk” individuals. These will be followed by the police for weeks or even months to make them understand that any act of violence will have consequences. Community partners and relatives of these people will participate in the operation in order to motivate them to change course.
Racial profiling
This approach is based on the “targeted deterrence” model developed in Boston in the 1990s and implemented worldwide since. This led to a slight reduction in armed violence in some cities. But there is a catch. It requires a high level of collaboration between the community and the police. Yet, as several scholars have noted, such collaboration is unlikely in contexts where policing has been anything but targeted — where racial profiling, for example, is evident.
Given this caveat, one would have expected Mr. Dagher to present a bold plan to end racial profiling practices. It was not the case. To a journalist who asked him if the implementation of the new arrest policy in 2021 had changed anything, he replied that it will be impossible to know until the publication of the report on racial profiling next fall. In fact, this report was completed last year and the SPVM refuses to make it public. We can assume that Mr. Dagher probably read it.
In his speech, the head of the SPVM specified that violence prevention must take minor offenses seriously, such as shoplifting in a grocery store, since these acts constitute the first step leading to the acquisition and use of a firearm. This statement is false, but it is also worrying. She encourages the police to assess for themselves whether a minor crime portends future violent acts, with all the racial biases that often color such predictions. We are a long way from a targeted deterrence model.
Surrounded and watched
In light of the foregoing, a second element should be considered. By leveraging a variety of new and existing programs, Dagher hopes to further integrate the police into community life. By asserting that the latter must know the family of a person to keep them on the right track and that they are, as such, part of the “village which raises a child”, Mr. Dagher seems however to imagine the police as a quasi-parental figure.
What Mr. Dagher does not seem to understand is how many racialized young people feel that the police are already too present in their lives. In a report produced in 2018 by MTL without profiling, young people in the Saint-Michel district said they felt surrounded and watched by the police wherever they went. This feeling is not only the result of police repression, but of prevention. Predictably, young people who are arrested by the police one day will not look favorably on a prevention operation carried out in their school or a park the next. They will feel watched either way.
In the end, Fady Dagher wants everything and its opposite for the police. He wants his resources to be focused on high-risk individuals, but he also wants to disperse them to end petty crime. He wants the police to earn the trust of the community, but he also wants them to be omnipresent there, like an obsessive parent. A vision that is both incoherent and costly. It is therefore not surprising that he hopes to hire 750 additional police officers to strengthen a police force that is already the largest in the country per capita.
There is, however, another solution: to respect the mandate and competences of the police in modern society. Getting the police to crack down on serious crime while equipping and funding community groups and non-police institutions to do the prevention work they have always done.