Saint-Michel

• A damning new report on racial profiling in Montréal suggests the city and its police force have given up on fighting the problem.
• The problem of racial profiling can be traced to the beginnings of policing in North America, but it has nevertheless acquired more public attention in the last 10 to 15 years.

Montréal’s history of racial profiling

• A lengthy and damning report on racial profiling by the Québec Human Rights Commission followed in 2011, while a series of shorter reports appeared over the next five years.
• The city’s first major response to the increasing criticism of the SPVM was to hold a major public consultation on racial profiling in 2017.
• The city balked at these demands, but took the unprecedented step of calling on the SPVM to produce an analysis of police stops by racial group, a key indicator of racial profiling.

Action soon?

• Concrete action, Montréalers were told, would await a more detailed assessment of the problem, but there would be action soon.
• Rather than listening to community demands, however, the Projet Montréal administration invested its hopes in a new police stops policy.
• Many (including myself) also observed that police could always find “observable facts” to justify a stop motivated by other, discriminatory criteria.

Backing the police

• Since 2020, Plante’s administration has repeatedly touted the police stops policy as a strong antidote to racial profiling.
• Her colleague Alain Vaillancourt, the city Executive Committee member responsible for the police, simply said he supports the city’s police director and feels “comfortable” with his plan to change the “culture” of the SPVM.
• After delaying action in 2017 and implementing a toothless new policy in 2019, the city seems content to leave the problem in the hands of the police director and abdicate its role in overseeing the police on behalf of the population.