A video making the rounds online seems to show a pair of Montreal police officers violently detaining a woman.
At one point, one of the officers appears to slam her head into the back of their squad car.
The video was taken by Jeremiah Hayes, who just happened to be passing by the corner of Berri and Ontario on his bicycle.
“I could hear the woman screaming, so I stopped and got my phone out,” he told Global News.
In the video Hayes posted online, the woman can be heard screaming about pain in her arms as the officers hold her arms behind her back.
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“At that moment, one of the cops slammed her head against the back hood and then seemed to slam his fist into the back of her head,” he recounted. “It’s horrible. It’s shocking. It’s ugly, and should never happen to anyone.”
Police spokesman Jonathan Martel told Global News the woman had been consuming drugs in public, and when the officers approached her, she got aggressive.
In the video, one of the officers can be seen checking his arm. Martel told Global News the woman bit the officer, and he had to hit her to get her to let go. To the man who shot the video, that’s no justification.
“Even though he might have been bitten — maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t — that’s no excuse for the way she was treated. I imagine these cops would’ve been training on the first day of police academy how to arrest somebody, and they didn’t do their job,” said Hayes.
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George Ohana of the Old Brewery Mission said the video is a clear indicator police need more training to deal with vulnerable members of society.
“The Mission has been working closely with the police to sensitize and train, but we can see this is a long process,” Ohana told Global News.
To the police, this is not a clear case of excessive force. Martel told Global News the officers will write up a report on what happened, and an analysis will be done to determine whether they used excessive force. Their commander will then decide if any disciplinary measures are taken.
To Hayes, the incident shows the power of the smartphone.
“Looking through the Facebook comments, people are really identifying with it, saying, ‘It happened to me,'” he said. “If you don’t have a video, they don’t exist, so I think it’s important we have our phones out.”
The woman is facing charges of assaulting a police officer, and other drug-related charges. She was released shortly after the incident.
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