Ethics panel cites two Montreal cops

Two Montreal police officers are to appear before the Quebec Police Ethics Committee after a university student complained that she was illegally arrested and detained by the officers last winter while sitting on a bench outside the Alexis Nihon Plaza.

Amal Asmar had been studying at Concordia’s downtown library until the early hours of the morning and was walking to a friend’s house when she sat down on a bench outside the Alexis Nihon Plaza at 2:30 a.m. to rest and retrieve gloves from her bag.

Asmar, 34, said two police officers pulled up beside her and one of the them asked her: “Is there a problem? What are you doing in this area?”

When Asmar refused to identify herself, she said the officers grabbed her, placed her on the hood of the car and handcuffed her. She was searched and placed in the police car. The officers, constables Michael McIntyre and Sébastien Champoux, wrote her two tickets, a $620 fine for misuse of municipal property for putting her bag on the bench, and a $420 fine for making too much noise. Several months after the she received the tickets, the city of Montreal wrote to Asmar saying she did not have to pay them. Asmar also said that, after releasing her, the officers threw her belongings against a wall.

After investigating Asmar’s complaint, a Quebec police ethics commissioner has ordered the officers to appear before the police ethics committee, which acts as a tribunal to ensure that the Quebec police code of ethics is upheld.

McIntyre and Champoux were cited for use of illegal force and for “failing to respect the authority of the law … by arresting, searching and detaining the complainant.”

Commissioner Claude Simard dismissed a complaint by Asmar that she was the subject of racial profiling because she is of Palestinian origin and was wearing a keffieh (a Palestinian scarf). “Nothing in the evidence allows us to conclude that the (officers) discriminated against the complainant,” Simard wrote in his decision.

He said the officers couldn’t be cited for failing to identify themselves because their names appeared on the tickets they had handed out. He also ruled that the officers were justified in asking Asmar if everything was all right, since she was sitting on a bench in the middle of a winter’s night.

When they stopped Asmar, the officers had been responding to a 911 call about a woman having been killed in an apartment building on Sherbrooke St. The call was placed from a telephone not far from where Asmar was sitting.

Asmar said yesterday that she is “relieved that some of my complaints have been acknowledged.” She said she hopes that the officers’ citations serve as a warning to other police officers “to think twice before they decide to abuse their power and disrespect people’s human rights.

A date for the officers’ hearing before the police ethics committee has not been set. Montreal police said yesterday they had no comment on the case.