Montreal police have no plans to end street checks, despite concerns

One by one, citizens and groups addressed Montreal police about racial profiling at hearings the city held Friday on street checks after a report found officers are four to 11 more likely to stop visible minorities than white people. 

But SPVM officials refused to acknowledge there is racial profiling despite the findings. 

Marc Charbonneau, Montreal police's deputy director, also said the SPVM had no intention of suspending street checks, despite a unanimous city council motion calling on it to do so. 

"The researchers' findings don't address profiling, but of systemic bias," said Charbonneau, who has been charged with coming up with policies in response to the report published in October. 

Charbonneau was responding to a question by Lynda Khelil of the Ligue des droits et libertés.

Khelil had asked Charbonneau whether he would recognize that the disproportionate targeting of visible minorities by police constitutes racial profiling. 

When he demurred, Khelil said the SPVM "still won't recognize the existence of the problem."

Khelil and several other members of the public pointed out the absence of Montreal police Chief Sylvain Caron. 

There was also a presentation by Quebec's human rights commission, recommending Montreal ban police street checks permanently because they disproportionately target minority groups.

Montreal city council does not have the authorization to force the SPVM to stop conducting street checks. The province has said it is reviewing the city's position on street checks.

'It's only the tip of the iceberg'

Speaking Friday, Myrlande Pierre, the vice-president of the province's human rights commission, said the SPVM had restricted the mandate of the reports' authors.

Some of the reports passages limit the interpretation of what constitutes profiling, Pierre said. And because the SPVM doesn't have a policy for recording street checks, the data the researchers had access to could "only shed light on part of the problem," she said. 

"It's only the tip of the iceberg."

She noted the commission has been denouncing police racial profiling for 15 years.

Pierre said police must collect reliable data when officers make arrests or stop people, in order to evaluate whether systemic biases are leading to unfounded street checks.

Charbonneau said he accepts the report "with humility" and that the force will come up with a policy governing how officers make street checks by March 2020.

Many of the questions from members of the public and interest groups were accompanied by emotional accounts about the impacts of police racial profiling. 

Balarama Holness, who spearheaded the calls for hearings on systemic racism, rejected Charbonneau's statement that the report did not call Montreal police's professionalism into question. 

"When you associate criminality with the colour of the skin, that's racism," said Holness, a former Projet Montréal candidate for the borough of Montréal-Nord.

"The SPVM maintains its position as an oppressor of minorities by evading responsibility for their actions and saying it's the system. They evade apology and more importantly they evade accountability."

He called for an analysis of racial discrimination in Quebec's justice system as a whole. 

Another member of the Ligue des droits et libertés, Eve-Marie Lacasse, said whatever policies the SPVM comes up with need to be analyzed by an external and independent body. 

She said it shouldn't be trusted to come up with the policies alone, especially "since it won't even recognize there is profiling."