The director of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), Fady Dagher, acknowledges that Montreal police officers still do racial profiling, but says he is more determined than ever to put an end to it. If this site meets “a lot of resistance”, he did not hesitate to promise “profound changes. »
For him, it’s not a mandate, “it’s a cause”. The police chief said he himself was the victim of racial profiling.
In office for barely three weeks, Fady Dagher found himself in the witness box in the context of a lawsuit for damages brought on the grounds of racial profiling.
$171 million is claimed from the City of Montreal on behalf of racialized people who were victims of this form of racism at the hands of the police between 2017 and 2019.
“We have racist police officers,” admitted Mr. Dagher, stressing that they do not form the majority. “We are not in a bubble. We are human and we make mistakes, ”recognizes Chief Dagher, called to the witness stand by the lawyers for Alexandre Lamontagne and the Black League of Quebec, who are carrying out this class action. “We are evolving and moving forward,” he added.
Alexandre Lamontagne testified on Wednesday, the first day of the trial, that he was leaving a club and heading peacefully to his car when two police officers arrested him. “They rushed towards me and threw me to the ground”. The man says he hit his head and one of the officers put his knee on his neck. He had to receive medical treatment after spending the night in a cell.
According to him, the police targeted him because of his race, because they did not shout at the other people present near the club – all white, he told Judge Dominique Poulin of the Superior Court. He was then humiliated and forced to lie down in the urine of a cell in the detention center, he added.
Fady Dagher was not Montreal’s police chief when this event happened in August 2017. But he was called to testify to explain what he intends to do as chief to end racial profiling.
He first made a point of specifying that “there is not a policeman who gets up in the morning saying to himself: today I am going to have fun with an Arab or a Black. On the other hand, some are not aware that their behavior is inappropriate. He tries to convince them to focus on the signs of criminal behavior and not on the appearance of people.
Witnesses to the lawsuit, he was however questioned much longer by the lawyers of the City of Montreal who made him detail at length all that has been undertaken by the SPVM over the past 20 years to tackle this problem: committees, reports , police training, etc.
But these efforts had also been put in evidence in a recent case of racial profiling of motorists. In rendering his decision which invalidated the police practice of “random roadside checks”, Judge Michel Yergeau wrote last October that no proof had been made that the means deployed within the police to defeat racial profiling “have produced results”.
The police chief knows this, but insists: “I want to go further” than what has been done so far, he told reporters after his testimony.
He points to the difficulty that 911 has become a catch-all for multiple issues, many of them mental health. Barely 20% of calls concern crimes. However, the police do not have all the skills to intervene with people in crisis, he warns.
The president of the Montreal Police Brotherhood, Yves Francoeur, is due to testify on Friday and the mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante is expected to take the stand next week.
Recently, two other class actions were filed for the benefit of motorists who were victims of racial profiling in several municipalities.