Community groups call on Montreal police to collect race-based data

A coalition of community groups is putting more pressure on the city to fix problems of what they say is racial profiling in the Montreal Police Service.

The members say the force’s plan to implement measures to fight discrimination among its ranks by March 2020 is a move in the right direction, but the groups want much more to be done.

At a public meeting Sunday afternoon in Côte-des-Neiges to discuss the issue, the coalition expressed a number of problems. First, they say that affected communities aren’t being consulted enough.

“We want to also be part of making sure that our concerns are addressed through that policy that they are promising,” former RCMP officer Alain Babineau told Global News before the meeting started.

He works with the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations, a group that fights for minority rights.

He also said that more data needs to be collected.

“(We need to) purposely require officers to collect race-based data from everybody who they stop,” he said, adding that it should include anyone who the police arrest, target by use of force or charge.

The organizations want police to start doing this first as a one-year pilot project in 2021.

“We want it to be part of the new policy about when police can stop someone on the street, under what conditions and what they have to say and what information they have to collect,” Coun. Marvin Rotrand said.

He pointed to Toronto, where such a policy exists. Starting this year, Toronto police will have to record the race of people they interact with.

Rotrand said the practice in Montreal will give vital information.

“We’ll know if there’s 20,000 stops and, for some reason, 12,000 of them were people who are visible minority, even though they represent a much smaller fraction of the population,” he said.  “Then we’ll know what kind of problem we have.

This discussion is one fallout from an independent report released last October suggesting visible minorities were more likely to be stopped by police than their white counterparts. Among the most stopped are Indigenous peoples.

“It’s definitely a big issue considering that Indigenous women were stopped 11 times more than non-Indigenous,” said Jessica Quijano of Montreal’s Native Women’s Shelter.

Rotrand said if data is collected regularly and systematically, the information would be more complete and give a better picture of the problem.