By confirming on Monday the holding of the Montreal Forum for the Fight Against Gun Violencethe mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante, declared that the young people she met upstream all spoke, without exception, of the control of firearms and their too great accessibility.
Young people will also be at the heart of the process carried out by the city and the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) in collaboration with a number of community organizations.
“This year, we were all upset, shocked, by the death of young people from our neighborhoods,” said the mayor at a press briefing Monday morning at City Hall. The past few months have been clouded by the violent deaths of two 16-year-olds, Jannai Dopwell-Bailey and Thomas Trudel, among others.
“This is unacceptable,” dropped M.me Plant.
This is why the forum will bring together all the actors who can contribute to the possible solutions: the police, of course, but also the community organizations present on the ground, the young people from the neighborhoods affected by these armed attacks and the Institut du Nouveau Monde, in order to to create “a Montreal model” to fight against violence, promises the mayor. The Forum was scheduled to take place at the end of January, but had been postponed due to the virulence of COVID-19 at that time.
We must understand “why young people have firearms in their hands,” insists Ms. Plante.
And for that, we must take an interest in the issue of the circulation of guns and revolvers, in crime, but also in the socio-economic conditions of these young people and the neighborhoods where they live.
In a video accompanying the presentation of the forum, where we see the mayor discussing with young women and men, we hear one of them asking these questions: “Why does the young man want to kill? Why is it in Saint-Michel and not in Westmount? »
They have provided very specific solutions to prevent their friends from ending up in this violence and in criminal groups, underlined the mayor. In particular, she went to meet a group made up of close friends of Thomas Trudel and also of the Youth Forum of Saint-Michel, a neighborhood in eastern Montreal.
“They all told me about gun control. They all told me that it didn’t make sense that the weapons were so easily accessible and circulating”.
They want to mobilize and ask the provincial and federal government to take their responsibilities, she reports: “Me, it touches me a lot. »
The mayor says she supports them, and hopes that Ottawa will have the “courage to legislate”, because this control is not just the responsibility of the City of Montreal. She also intends to invite the federal Minister of Security to the Forum. public, Marco Mendicino.
Given its role in the field, the SPVM will obviously be a stakeholder in this forum. We must fight against the “culture of trivialization of violence among young people” declared in a press briefing Vincent Richer, deputy director of the Corporate Services Department of the Montreal police force.
In the meantime, the prevention and repression components are very active, he continued, reporting 300 arrests for gun violence in the past year and more than 700 weapons seized since inception, in December 2020, of the SPVM’s ELTA (Weapons Trafficking Team) unit.
Mr. Richer also wants to tackle this problem that has already been identified: the confidentiality requirements that make it difficult for a worker who sees a young person in difficulty, and who could turn to violence, to share this information with others who could intervene — and who are not necessarily police officers. “You have to break down walls” and not work in silos, he says.
The Forum will be held over three days. February 24 will be an opportunity for community and research organizations to discuss and share their knowledge, the week of March 14 will be dedicated to ideas from young people and on March 31, conclusions will be drawn on the best ways to fight against violence.
The City of Montreal ensures that it does not remain idle while awaiting the conclusions of this process and recalls that it has doubled its budget dedicated to the prevention of violence among young people and urban security, increasing it to 5 million dollars per year from 2022.
For the official opposition, holding this forum is “too little, too late”.
“We’ve been talking about violence in Montreal for over a year. Five young people died of it and it is only now that the administration decides to bring the partners together? “, launched Abdelhaq Sari, the spokesman of the official Opposition in terms of public security.
In an e-mail, he denounces that the administration of Montreal is pleased to have included young people in the Forum, while “the reality is that it has turned its back” on the young people of Montreal North – a neighborhood affected by the armed violence — by relegating to the bottom of her list of priorities the sports center she had promised them, and which would have allowed them to flourish.
He also notes that nothing has been proposed to address the “crisis of confidence” that exists between young people and the SPVM, which poses several challenges in the fight against armed violence.
The city of Montreal invites parents, teachers and young people from all over the city to share their proposals and ideas at the following address: [email protected]