Public consultations were held Tuesday on the Montreal police service’s new street check policy, unveiled in early July.
It was supposed to give the public a chance to better understand the new policy and to grill members of the city’s Public Security Commission and representatives of the Montreal police about the new protocols.
The guide was produced months after an independent report found that racial bias was linked to people who police choose to stop. Among the concerns raised at Tuesday’s virtual meeting was the exclusion of guidelines in the new policy for stopping drivers.
“(Stopping drivers) represents the bulk of the problem of racial profiling,” said Fo Niemi, executive director of the Centre for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR), after the meeting.
“That’s a huge oversight.”
But according to Chief Inspector Vincent Richer of the Montreal police, intercepting a car is not the same thing as doing street checks, because whereas a pedestrian has the right to walk the streets, driving is a privilege.
“The (pedestrian) that is stopped on a regular street check doesn’t have the legal obligation to identify himself,” he pointed out. “What we ask our officers is, if you’re going to a street check, you have to do it on observable facts.”
He said that a driver, though, can be stopped and be asked for identification.
“For three reasons,” explained Richer. “To make sure the driver’s licence, proof of insurance and registration are valid, to ensure that he condition of the car is adequate and to verify if the driver is sober. That’s why the driver has the obligation to identify himself to a police officer.”
Even so, Richer stressed, police officers are told that drivers must only be stopped for a reason.
“It has to be regarding an infraction,” he said, “and not regarding the obligation of the person to identify himself.”
Still, he said that any guideline for stopping drivers that requires changes to the highway safety code, is the responsibility of the Quebec government. Public Security Commission chair Alex Norris said that doesn’t mean the amendments can’t be made.
“Nothing prevents our standing committee from making recommendations that are under provincial jurisdiction,” he explained in an interview following the meeting.
Niemi also took issue with the omission of the word “race” in the policy, that has been replaced by “ethno-cultural identity.”
“Race is a ground of non-discrimination in the Quebec and Canadian Charts of Rights and Freedoms,” he stressed after the meeting.
But Richer claimed the decision was made to include the word after consulting with sociologists who maintained that the word is potentially offensive.
“They told us there’s one human race with different ethno-cultural origins,” he noted.
One of the biggest complaints from the public, though, was that they didn’t feel there was enough time for questions, and that people didn’t get the answers they were looking for.
“The answers are not satisfactory, they are not clear, they are not comprehensive, they are not as detailed as some of these questions,” Niemi complained.
Norris pointed out that the policy isn’t set in stone and that there is still time for the public to get involved.
“People still have a month to submit briefs, recommendations, comments on the policy,” he said.
According to police leadership, an independent group will study the effects of the implementation of the new street check policy and issue a report by the end of 2021.