No moratorium on street checks, says Montreal police chief

Despite an "extremely critical" report on persistent systemic biases in street checks, Montreal police Chief Fady Dagher says the police service won't implement the report's main recommendation of a moratorium on random police stops.

Speaking to reporters Thursday, Dagher said doing so would only be a symbolic gesture and that his goal is to change the SPVM's culture as a whole to get to the root of racial profiling in the police service. 

Dagher, who was born to Lebanese parents in Ivory Coast, says he has "personally experienced" racial profiling by police and that "repeatedly, constantly and insidiously, it slowly undermines your self-esteem, destroys your sense of belonging and makes you believe and, even worse, makes you accept that you are only a second-class of citizen." 

The report on street checks, commissioned by the SPVM, was a followup to a previous report published in 2019, which found that Indigenous, Black, Asian and Arab people disproportionately experienced random police checks. 

The second report, published Thursday, by some of the same researchers as the first, concluded that there was no decrease in profiling after Montreal police created a policy on street checks in 2020 aimed at reducing officers' power to stop people at random. 

The report's four authors found that, between 2014 and 2021, Indigenous people were six times more likely to be stopped than white people; Black people were 3.5 times more likely to be stopped and Arab people, 2.6 times. 

They also found that racialized people were more often stopped for information or investigation, while white people tended to be intercepted by police for "prevention and assistance" aims. 

The recently hired police chief, whose progressive approach to community policing has been welcomed by several advocates, acknowledged the biases in street checks haven't improved, but said he wanted to work on more significant changes at the SPVM. 

"There's no doubt we need to move faster," Dagher said, later adding that progress at the police service would take years. 

"Was I going to announce a moratorium on arrests today? The answer is no. I don't want to announce a token measure, I want to solve the problem," he said, noting he knew the decision would be disappointing to some. "My police officers in the field are not racist. However, I recognize that there is systemic racism. There is still work to do and we will do it."

Victor Armony, one of the report's authors and a sociology professor at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), said he was indeed disappointed by the announcement. 

"We think that [would have been] a true way of showing there's an institutional change in culture," Armony said. "It's not just symbolic, it's a concrete change."

Alain Babineau, a former RCMP officer and a member of the Red Coalition, an organization that advocates against anti-Black racism in policing, said his group was supportive of Dagher's approach but that he'd still like to see a review of the police service's street checks policy. 

Babineau said officers should only be allowed to randomly stop people if they have a reasonable suspicion a crime was committed. 

"If they do that, then they restrict police officers' discretion, which is really at the heart of the whole thing in my opinion," he said.

Dagher was, until recently, the chief of police in Longueuil, where he implemented several programs to immerse officers in the community.

Hiring criteria, meeting communities

Dagher said he instead wants to focus on reviewing hiring criteria for police officer to improve recruiting people from diverse communities. 

The chief has also been vocal about wanting police recruits to immerse themselves in the communities they police before starting the job. This spring, he spent four nights in four of the city's homeless shelters. He also spent five days meeting with community groups and outreach workers. 

"Those are the people carrying the city on their shoulders, not the cops," Dagher said at the news conference Thursday, recounting some of his experiences during those five days, which were also documented in a La Presse feature story. Dagher said he wants police recruits to undergo a similar regimen and that that's why he did it himself.