Montreal police pressed to act on training after damning report into fatal shooting of man in distress

When community activist Will Prosper heard about the findings of the Quebec coroner in the 2017 police shooting death of Pierre Coriolan, his thoughts turned immediately to others who were in mental distress who have also died at the hands of Montreal police.

"I'm thinking about the cases of Nicholas Gibbs. I'm thinking about the case of Alain Magloire. I'm thinking about the case of Sheffield Matthews," said Prosper, a documentary filmmaker, former police officer and former Projet Montréal municipal candidate in Montréal-Nord.

"They were all in a similar situation," he said. Like 58-year-old Coriolan, all three were Black men with mental health struggles.

In his report released Wednesday, Coroner Luc Malouin found that, in a matter of minutes, police provoked "a chain reaction" by the way they responded to 911 calls about Coriolan, who had been yelling and breaking things inside his own apartment.

Malouin found police were relying on "obsolete and outdated" techniques more suited to dealing with an active shooter than with a person in a mental health crisis, and he said police require better training to be able to de-escalate such situations.

Prosper has heard it all before.

"We've seen many coroner's reports indicating the same kind of recommendations over the years, and we are still seeing the same kind of deaths," he said. 

In fact, Malouin himself made similar recommendations in 2016, following the death of Alain Magloire, a 41-year-old man who was shot dead by Montreal police during a tense confrontation near the bus terminal on Berri Street.

The coroner acknowledges that there have been some improvements since then: Quebec's police academy, the École nationale de police du Québec (ENPQ), has enhanced its training for police cadets. 

In a statement, the Montreal police service (SPVM) said it welcomed the coroner's report and underlined that the service started rolling out a new de-escalation training program in 2018. 

But Malouin notes it's expected to take five years to get all SPVM officers trained. He's also recommending that police undergo periodic recertification to keep their skills up to date. 

The city of Montreal also points to the launch of a pilot project last year in the Ville-Marie borough: a specialized team called L'équipe mobile de médiation et d'intervention sociale (ÉMMIS), which includes social intervention workers who assist the SPVM on mental health calls downtown.

According to Malouin, the SPVM fields 1,000 calls a week regarding people in mental distress. 

But advocates for people with mental health issues say police don't always call on specialized intervention teams when responding to these situations.

Jean-François Plouffe, spokesperson for Action Autonomie, a group that defends the rights of those with mental illness, says all too often, police still react to people with mental health issues primarily as threats, rather than as citizens who are in crisis. 

"They [treated] that problem as if it's a robber in a bank or something. And [it] wasn't that," said Plouffe.

"Mr. Coriolan was in his own world, so he cannot obey to the orders of the police officers," Plouffe said. "He doesn't understand them. And that is something police officers may have some trouble to understand."

'Talk calmly, ask for his name'

Coriolan's family, who are suing the city of Montreal in the man's death, say they are satisfied with the report. 

While the role of the coroner is not to assign blame, the family's lawyer, Virginie Dufresne-Lemire, says the report did establish some key facts about how the police communicated with Coriolan.

"Two people screaming at someone, it's not a way ... to initiate a dialogue," she said.

"They should talk calmly, ask for his name, [ask,] 'What's wrong? What's the problem.' And they did not do that."

Dufresne-Lemire welcomed the coroner's recommendation that police receive enhanced training in de-escalation techniques, however, she questions why this training was not already in place in 2017, particularly since by then, Malouin had already cited a lack of police training as contributing to the death of Alain Magloire. 

She also noted that the coroner does not have the power to force the government or police forces to implement the recommendations.

A spokesperson for Public Security Minister Geneviève Guilbault said the minister would take time to analyze the recommendations in depth.

Prosper believes that for things to actually change, the public needs to take notice. 

"Not too many people care about these people. That's the truth and the sad factor, unfortunately," he said. "Because they are people that are from poor neighbourhoods, people that are racialized, people that have mental health issues."

Plouffe, for his part, hopes that the mindset of younger officers is shifting, to better acknowledge the social aspects of their work.

"Maybe we can have some hope that in the future, that the culture of the police might change to consider people as citizens," he said.

For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out Being Black in Canada, a CBC project Black Canadians can be proud of. You can read more stories here.