Fady Dagher officially entered his new role as director of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) during his swearing-in ceremony on Thursday. From the outset, the new police chief declared that he would tackle three issues as a priority, the difficult recruitment of police officers, the rapprochement between the police and the population, as well as the fight against armed violence.
Fady Dagher appealed to future police officers, inviting them to join the ranks of the SPVM. Life is more expensive in Montreal, the work there is more intense and more complex than elsewhere and the actions of the police are more publicized, he underlined before inviting them to remember the reasons for which they had enrolled in police technology.
In his speech after his swearing in, the new leader stressed the importance of focusing on both prevention and repression. “The more you do one, the more you can do the other,” he said. On the subject of firearms that are “too many” in Montreal, he spoke of the need to devote more resources to this fight.
Fady Dagher therefore became the 42e Chief of Police of the SPVM and the first police officer born outside of Canada to hold this position.
The repression-prevention balance
When announcing his appointment last November, Fady Dagher said he wanted to favor a more inclusive police service, capable of finding a balance between repression and prevention. The new chief of police will have a lot to do to establish a new culture at the SPVM in a metropolis which, in the past year, has experienced a wave of violent armed events.
For Fady Dagher, this is a homecoming, since he worked for 25 years at the SPVM before agreeing to take the helm of the Longueuil agglomeration police department (SPAL), in 2017. When he was appointed, he admitted that he was taking a “huge risk” by accepting his new role, he who, a few months earlier, had renewed his contract at SPAL for a period of eight years.
Fady Dagher takes over from Sophie Roy, who had assumed the interim management of the SPVM following the retirement of Sylvain Caron in April 2022.
Born in the Ivory Coast to parents of Lebanese origin, Fady Dagher arrived in Montreal in 1985 with his family. Recognized for his qualities as a communicator, he implemented a prevention-based approach at the SPAL, notably by setting up the RESO project (Social and Organizational Mutual Assistance Network), which aimed to bring police officers closer to the reality experienced by certain clienteles more vulnerable, such as people struggling with addictions or homeless people.