Laval police action plan to end racial discrimination falls short, activists say
Calls for more accountability, concrete actions to earn back trust of Black people, people of colour
The Laval police service (SPL) says it's trying to improve relations with visible minorities and eliminate discrimination among its ranks by revamping the service's community interaction, training and recruitment policies.
The SPVL commissioned a survey in 2020 asking more than 2,800 people for their opinions on policing in Quebec's third largest city. About 27 per cent of respondents identified as a visible minority, and their perceptions of police were different than those of white respondents.
"What we understand now ... is that [visible minorities] have a less positive perception than white people," said Laval police Chief Pierre Brochet.
That echoes the perception of police in other municipalities, where Black people and people of colour have brought forward complaints about unfair or racist treatment and have raised concerns about the lack of representation of their communities in police services.
End to carding, police chief vows
The SPVL has responded with a seven-point action plan aimed at ensuring the fair and equal treatment of all citizens.
Among other commitments, Laval police say they will offer staff training to intervene with different communities, develop outreach strategies in these communities and increase diversity in the police service.
The practice of carding — the random stopping of people to request their personal information when there are no reasonable grounds to do so — will also be eliminated.
WATCH | Resident explains how Laval police have profiled him:
"Now police officers, their framework is that they need a reason [...] to do carding. That's a big change," said Brochet.
But Laval resident Pradel Content, who is no stranger to unjustified police stops, says he doesn't think eliminating carding will change anything at all.
"It's very condescending the way that [officers] act and the way that they do things — it's not about carding me," he said.
Content, a Black man who walks with a cane and suffers from chronic back pain, said he's been repeatedly hassled by police.
In 2014, he was wrongly detained by police for a robbery, and in 2021, Quebec's police ethics committee upheld six of his 12 complaints against a Laval police officer, including racial profiling, discrimination and filing a false police report, for an incident at a gas station in 2017.
Content estimates he's been subject to around 30 baseless interceptions by Laval officers since he moved to the city in 2014.
He said unless police are held to account for their actions, he's not optimistic the SPVL's policing strategies will improve.
"The only thing I want in my life is to be able to step outside like I used to," he said. "I won't be able to do that until [police] have cameras in their cars."
Action plan is 'superficial,' says lawyer and activist
In Repentigny, just northeast of Montreal, police unveiled a five-year action plan last year to build better relations between local police and the city's Black community, after a report found that Black people were about three times more likely than whites to be stopped by police officers there.
Marie-Livia Beaugé, a Montreal criminal defence lawyer and activist, said her clients paint a similar picture of being singled out by police, no matter what municipality they come from.
"I've accompanied people that were victims of racial profiling that were in Laval, Repentigny, Montreal and even Brossard, and stories are mostly the same: they're targeted because of the colour of their skin," she said.
Beaugé represented Samuel Bunche in his case against the City of Laval in 2020. The young Black man was pulled out of a car by his hair by Laval police officers and roughed up, after being stopped for what police described as erratic driving.
Beaugé said she's helped several other people who say they were racially profiled and traumatized by Laval police.
She calls the SPVL action plan "pretty superficial" and the study "a waste of money," saying police didn't have to spend money to find out many visible minorities don't trust them.
"To gain back the trust of the communities, it's really through accountability. And this is something that has been asked and is still being asked, for multiple years right now," said Beaugé.
She said in order to make sincere changes, the SPVL must analyze altercations between police officers and people of colour that have occurred in recent years, and take these people seriously when they lodge complaints.
"Take responsibility for the lives that were traumatized, the families that were traumatized," Beaugé said.
Based on reporting by Jay Turnbull