For the past few days, the video of a police intervention involving two plainclothes investigators and a black-skinned vehicle theft suspect has been making a lot of noise in the public space.
Posted yesterday at 11:00 a.m.
Certain ideologues, anti-police officers, of course take advantage of this to automatically link the event to racial profiling, which constitutes the bread and butter of their rhetoric. Nuances and moderation are not part of their speeches, where amalgams rain down on the humans who wear the uniform.
Unfortunately, some elected officials, for political and partisan purposes, have also added fuel to the fire by raising suspicions of racial profiling when the facts are not yet known.
The situation has many similarities to that of the Mamadi Camara case, when the latter had been arrested and detained, by mistake, for several days. The independent investigation, led by Judge Louis Dionne, confirmed that there had been procedural errors, but that there was no element of racial profiling.
Of course, no elected official apologized for his quick judgments.
No matter the skin color
The skin color of a suspect is of no importance during such an intervention. Detentions for investigative purposes are numerous each year and involve people of all skin colors.
In this case, the investigators appeared to be at the suspicion stage and not at the reasonable grounds stage which would have allowed them to proceed directly to a formal arrest.
Police experience indicates that regardless of the skin color of the person who approached the driver’s door, the police would respond in the same way.
Car thieves operate in broad daylight in public parking lots. They often seek to flee on foot when police appear. The police do not have a crystal ball and must sometimes use detention for investigative purposes to obtain or not reasonable grounds which will lead to a formal arrest. This detention normally only lasts a short period of time to allow information or facts to be validated. Handcuffing is done for security reasons or to prevent escape. It will be up to the investigators to explain what motivated their use. In this case, of course, a mistake, a mistake was made, because the investigators were not equipped with the key to the handcuffs, which lengthened the intervention and the detention.
Were there any other operational or procedural errors during the event? Maybe. Were these mistakes made in good faith or with malice? Did the stress and the fact that the investigators were not supported by identified patrol officers at the time of the arrest play a role in the action and the decisions?
An investigation will be conducted and will answer, we hope, all these questions.
A disengagement of the police
Racial profiling amalgams are creating other social problems. The videos on social networks, the media treatment, the premature reactions of certain elected officials, who often and unfortunately only address one side of the coin, are increasing the conscious and unconscious prejudices of a small part of the population. who hates the police. They also have the effect of discouraging the police, which is increasingly leading them to disengage from the SPVM.
According to a study conducted by the Center for Research and Strategic Development of the National Police School of Quebec, police disengagement is indeed present in Quebec. Five causes are among the most often mentioned for police disengagement: fear of repercussions or consequences; public criticism and lack of understanding of the police profession; lack of organizational support; media sensationalism; and the perception of the feeling of injustice.
The first signs of disengagement at the SPVM are clearly visible: some young people want to leave the Police Technology program; several young recruits no longer want to come to work in Montreal, police veterans want to leave their posts before the 30 years of service, normally targeted for retirement; more and more police look to the left when the action is on the right.
Montreal does not have the time to become a second Toronto, where the police hardly stop and intercept people from diverse backgrounds, including violent criminals, so as not to be the target of racial profiling amalgams. The result is clear: 450 shootings per year and hundreds of victims.
Elected officials have a very specific responsibility: to trust their police officers, to value them and to say, until proven otherwise, that the vast majority of them are professionals and that they will wait for the end of a investigation before deciding on a news item.