Mayor Valérie Plante and Montreal police chief Sylvain Caron made an appearance in Rivière-des-Prairies (RDP) Thursday morning, where they reassured the public and shared details of a new anti-gun squad set to launch later this month.
The announcement came after a recent increase in gun violence in the north east part of the city, which most recently took the life of a 15-year-old girl in a drive-by shooting earlier this week.
“People right now, they’re afraid just to walk. They’re saying, ‘If I go to this area, I could be shot'” said McKayla Cherenfant, a 17-year-old student at École secondaire Jean-Grou in RDP.
Cherenfant said she lives near where the drive-by shooting took place.
“We know that the violence seems to have increased,” said Fallon Memettre, who works with teens on a daily basis at Action RDP, a community organization that helps youth and families.
“Some of the teenagers were saying, ‘I’m afraid, I work at Tim Hortons, and when my shift ends, I’m afraid to go home,’ because of the shootings, you know, you don’t know where it’s going to end up,” she told Global News
It’s against that backdrop that Plante and Caron set foot in the north east.
“Events like we like we’ve witnessed the past week are unacceptable,” said Insp. David Shane with the Montreal police, who was the force’s English-speaking spokesperson at the press conference on Thursday.
“It’s touched everybody, every one of us and the Montreal police force. As you know, before being police officers, most of us are parents.“
Caron said he had personally spoken with the family of the girl killed in the drive-by.
Police said a new 22-person anti-gun squad announced in December will be active as of Feb. 22. It will encompass investigators from various specialties, and all will come together to battle illegal guns in Montreal.
“We’re not telling you we’re going to have 100 per cent on our report card, but we will put all the efforts needed to combat this phenomenon,” said Shane.
At the community level, however, there is not much belief that throwing more and more police at the violence problem will solve the systemic issues that contribute to it.
“As a young person, I really do not have much confidence in the police,” said a teen at Action RDP who did not want to be named. She said she had bad experiences with police.
“When we are investing only in repression, you won’t do anything to work the problems from the source of the problem,” said Pierreson Vaval, Action RDP’s executive director.
Plante has pledged to offer more money to community organizations like Action RDP, where they try to keep youth out of crime in the first place.
Vaval said if governments invested in community organizations like they invest in police, he believes it would have a lasting effect on the violence.
“If we don’t do that, five years from here, we’re going to have another crisis. The problem is that we’re letting kids getting away slowly from us,” he said.
This week, Plante also asked the federal government to restrict handguns like it did with assault weapons. Joel Lightbound, the parliamentary secretary to the Public Safety Minister, told Global News new legislation is on the way that will give municipalities more power to restrict handguns within their borders.
“Our plan will also include additional resources and introduce stronger penalties for law enforcement and border services officers to help stop the flow of weapons over our borders and target the illegal trafficking of firearms through criminal diversion. We will also introduce stricter secure storage laws to help prevent the theft of firearms,” Lightbound said.
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