Montreal police officers are not too keen on researchers looking into their practices, even when they have requested it. This week, we learned that researchers mandated by the Montreal Police Department (SPVM) to investigate racism and arrest practices within the police force have been put under pressure by the organization.
“Interference” and “attempts to frame the study,” reported THE Montreal Journal Tuesday about two reports, published in 2019 and 2023 — produced by Victor Armony, of the Department of Sociology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Massimiliano Mulone, of the School of Criminology at the Université de Montréal, and Mariam Hassaoui, of TELUQ — which highlight the obvious racial profiling in the SPVM’s arrest practices.
Researchers now claim that successive police chiefs tried to obtain transcripts of confidential interviews, interfered in the questions asked of participants and prevented interviews with SPVM community partners. In the context of scientific research, this is clearly a red line that should not be crossed. Researcher Massimiliano Mulone said he had never seen anything like this in his career.
Then, still according to The Montreal Journalat the time of the publication of the reports, the SPVM would have asked that the analyses of the interviews be made less visible, sought to control the message relayed publicly by the researchers on their conclusions and attempted to discredit the validity of the analyses themselves. Commissioning research and then sabotaging it. It’s elegant.
Recall that in 2019, an initial report found that Indigenous and Black people were four or five times more likely to be stopped by the police, and Arab people were twice as likely. Another overwhelming overrepresentation: Indigenous women were 11 times more likely than white women to be stopped without a clear reason by the police.
Faced with these implacable conclusions, the SPVM, of course, played the contrition card. The head of the police service, who was then Sylvain Caron, said he was highly concerned and promised to “do everything” to resolve the problem. In particular, he proposed implementing measures to better supervise these interventions.
Despite these pious wishes, a second report, produced by the same researchers, noted in 2023 that things had not improved. The SPVM had promised several times to review its practices, and it plans to present a “new policy” in the fall aimed at regulating arrests. For their part, the researchers made only one recommendation: impose a moratorium on this practice.
It is unequivocal. The 285-page report contains a section entitled “Recommendation,” in the singular. The recommendation reads: “That a moratorium be declared on all police stops that are not justified by the investigation of a specific crime or by reasonable suspicion of illegal activity.” It then suggests that this moratorium be accompanied by a thorough review of the practice of stops, and a series of measures designed to reduce profiling in all police interventions, not just arrests.
This practice, which consists of an arbitrary identity check that can lead to the recording of a person’s information even if they were not legally required to identify themselves, has clear discriminatory effects. It is not based in law, and there is no evidence that it actually contributes to police investigations. At this point, if we want to eliminate its contribution to racial and social profiling, there are no 36 solutions. The moratorium addresses both the effects and the causes.
In this regard, the researchers conclude: “It may seem surprising to conclude a research study that took place over two years, as well as a research report of nearly 300 pages, with a single recommendation as we have just done. […] However, and we insist on this, the first measure that must be taken, before all others, is that of the moratorium, the only real way to change things at the present time.”
At the Montreal Public Security Commission in June, Lynda Khelil, speaking on behalf of the League for Rights and Freedoms, directly challenged the head of the SPVM, Fady Dagher, about his department’s stubbornness in defending this practice despite its illegality, its discriminatory nature and the recommendations of researchers to this effect.
The police chief defended himself by saying that the moratorium was not the best way to combat racial profiling, that we had to tackle the causes and not just the symptoms. A vague response, delivered in a paternalistic tone, supported by the proposition that moratoriums don’t work anyway. The data supporting this proposition? We don’t know them. Research tends to show the opposite.
No matter, the SPVM continues to do as it pleases — even interfering in research work to make sure it looks good in public. Meanwhile, the City of Montreal does not seem to be very worried. They say they are very concerned about racial profiling, but they tolerate the SPVM’s stubbornness and shenanigans, all while continuing to increase its budget, year after year.
And when we discover that the Police Service does not hesitate to intervene directly to twist the facts and prevent the public from getting the truth, we say to ourselves that its impunity really has no limits. What will it take for the Plante administration to react?