MONTREAL – Appropriate. Proportional. Professional. Warranted.
Those were just some of the words Sûreté du Québec spokesperson Jean Finet used Thursday to describe the provincial police force’s response to a violent riot last Friday in Victoriaville.
Addressing the media in a slow, measured tone for nearly 20 minutes, Finet outlined the timeline of events that night, the escalating police response, the injuries suffered and the arrests made.
In terms of the three most seriously injured protesters, Finet said police have consulted with pathologists after legally obtaining the medical records of those patients, and have concluded that two of them could not have been hit by plastic bullets deployed by the SQ.
The first person to be seriously hurt – a woman with a shattered jaw – was hit before the order was given around 7 p.m. to start using the plastic projectiles, Finet said. The woman, by her own admission, was 200-300 metres from the police line when she was hit.
“The range of those (plastic bullet) firearms is 100 metres,” Finet said.
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The second injury – a serious blow to the head suffered by 20-year-old Maxence Valade that nearly cost the CEGEP St. Laurent student his life and did rob him of an eye – also occurred before the order to begin firing plastic bullets was issued, police allege, and pathologists say the sheer size of the trauma could not have been caused by a single police projectile.
The third serious injury, a blow to the head suffered by student Alexandre Allard, is the only injury that might have been caused by a plastic bullet, Finet said. The investigation into that incident continues.
The SQ has spent the last six days defending its actions on Friday, when over 1,000 mostly-peaceful protesters turned up outside the Victoriaville hotel and conference centre, where the Quebec Liberal Party was holding a three-day meeting. The event degenerated into a riot within minutes.
Seven people were taken to hospital and 110 were arrested, a number that police say will rise.
On Wednesday, protest organizers accused the police of heavy-handed tactics, relentless use of tear gas and preventing ambulances from reaching the most seriously injured during the two hours of chaos.
The bottom line, Finet said, is that the police responded with force “proportional to what they were facing.”
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