Hanes: There are at least two major flaws with Montreal police's new street check policy

Montreal Gazette

6 days ago

In decision after recent decision, the courts in Quebec have been crystal clear: The police practice of random interceptions runs the risk of racial profiling and must be halted.
This month, Quebec Superior Court authorized a class-action lawsuit against police forces in the province, including Montreal's. It was filed by Papa Ndianko Gueye, who was pulled over in his white Audi in Longueuil in 2021, on behalf of 'any racialized person who has been the victim of racial profiling during a traffic stop without reason to suspect the commission of an offence.'
That suit is in its preliminary stages, but last month, the Quebec Court of Appeal refused most of the provincial government's request to extend a six-month grace period for banning random spot checks after two earlier judgments found them discriminatory.
For anyone keeping score, both the appeals court and Superior Court sided with Joseph-Christopher Luamba, a Black Montrealer, who sought a legal remedy after being stopped numerous times by various police forces without apparent cause. But after two strikes, Quebec is now hoping for a final kick at defending the tactic before the Supreme Court of Canada.
Meanwhile, the City of Montreal is appealing a landmark ruling in which the court held it liable for thousands of cases of racial profiling by its police force. Mayor Valérie Plante's administration says it's ready to pay compensation to those targeted by the interventions. But it's challenging the ruling on technical grounds — including the finding that the city is responsible for the actions of its officers.
As these judgments pile up, it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify interceptions that research irrefutably demonstrates zero in on Quebecers of diverse origins. It's also becoming increasingly expensive to pay reparations to victims of a practice that the courts have repeatedly tried to curtail.
Yet the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal continues to cling to street checks as an essential law enforcement tool.
This week, Montreal police Chief Fady Dagher unveiled a new and improved framework for random interceptions. Those pulled aside will be told why they are being stopped and that they are free to go, so they don't feel intimidated. Dagher said he believes the overwhelming majority of the public wants police to have discretion to stop and question people in suspicious circumstances, even if officers don't have the legal grounds to detain them. But he wants the new protocol to 'build trust, one intervention at a time.'
Dagher, to his credit, has spent his career constructing bridges between cops and the community, pioneering a kinder, gentler approach to policing during his time in Longueuil without compromising the combatting of criminality. But trying to introduce a kinder, gentler approach to controversial street checks is doomed to fail.
It's all well and good to want to clarify the obligations of officers and the rights of citizens. But there are at least two major flaws.
Telling Montrealers they're free to go does little or nothing to prevent people from racialized backgrounds from being profiled in the first place. The SPVM's own data shows Black, Arab, Latino and Indigenous Montrealers are much more likely to be pulled over during these random checks. Those trends persisted or worsened even as the force tracked its interventions, trained its rank and file, and set more rigorous rules for the interceptions.
Discretionary checks that begin innocuously enough also have an alarming tendency to escalate dramatically whether or not the person being intercepted dares question the officers or actually does try to leave — as they are supposedly, according to Dagher and the SPVM's framework, free to do.
Lamine Sale Nkouendji was pepper-sprayed, dragged from his car and handcuffed in Outremont after two officers did a U-turn and followed him on the dubious suspicion he'd run a yellow light. Alexandre Lamontagne was thrown in jail overnight after two police officers outside the Old Montreal bar he'd just left stopped him and asked if he needed help because he apparently looked in their direction.
These are more than isolated incidents. The court decision that held the city accountable for racial profiling by police estimated as many as 40,000 Montrealers could be entitled to compensation totalling $170 million. Now extrapolate to include all the police forces in the province.
The writing should be on the wall for the SPVM and all other Quebec police agencies: No amount of tinkering can make this discredited and inherently problematic practice acceptable.