MONTREAL -- A Montreal woman says police brushed off her complaint after a man told her to “go back to Jamaica” and threatened to hit her car for parking “too close” to him.

Because the situation doesn’t fall under the Montreal police force’s definition of a “hate crime” but rather a “hate incident,” Amanda Williams says she was told there wasn’t much they could do.

On May 26, Williams was waiting in line at a store in Montreal's LaSalle borough when a man came outside and began to yell at her.

“I was on the phone with my boyfriend,” Williams said. “(He) literally came up to my face and was like, ‘You couldn’t have parked any closer to me, you f****** b****?’.”

Williams said the man then repeatedly threatened to hit her car. In a weird coincidence, earlier that day, Williams had seen a widely shared video of a Black man being yelled at by a white woman after he asked her to put her dog on a leash in Central Park.

“Immediately, my first instinct was ‘Amanda, film this’ especially because I thought he was going to hit my car,” she said.

As she was preparing to film the encounter, Williams said the man told her to “go back to Jamaica.”

“My first gut reaction was shock, and then I was shaken up, because this has never happened to me before,” Williams said.

The video – which depicts the man standing between both cars – begins with Williams asking him to repeat what he said.

“He was like, ‘Yeah, go back to Jamaica,’ and that’s what I was able to catch on film,” she recalled. “Obviously, if you could fit between our cars, open your trunk and load your purchases in, I’m not close to your car.”

NEVER EXPERIENCED ANYTHING LIKE THIS

Williams, who has lived in Montreal all her life, said she’s never experienced anything like this. She decided to call the police to file a complaint.

It was three phone calls, one unsuccessful trip to a closed police precinct and an hour and a half later when the police showed up outside of Williams’ home, where she had decided to wait instead of the store. 

“I told them what happened – I said ‘look, he threatened to damage my property, he was literally screaming right in my face without a mask, and he screamed at me and told me to go back to Jamaica’,” Williams said.

“Basically, the cop was like, ‘I’m sorry that happened to you but there’s nothing we can do’.”

Line Lemay, a lieutenant-detective responsible for urban prevention and security with the Montreal police, explained that officers are expected to file a report even when a situation isn't criminal. 

“For hate incidents, we still encourage our officers to make a specific report… Either to write a hate incident report or to direct the person online to write their own,” Lemay said.

Williams is under the impression that no report was filed by the police, but Montreal police say they always are – they just take time to process.

In 2016, the hate crimes unit of the Montreal police began taking more responsibility to support people who felt like their safety had been threatened, Lemay said. Officers are now expected to point citizens toward helpful resources.

"Before, we would have said 'There's no hate crime, there's nothing we can do,'" Lemay said. "(Then) we decided, no, that's not an adequate response to provide people."

Hate incidents can eventually lead to hate crimes, Lemay explained. In the past, Montreal police have been able to charge people with harassment when they bothered a member of a minority community consistently enough, even if they didn’t commit any crimes during individual interactions.

“It’s important for us to have that information so we can maybe identify the person,” Lemay continued, but added they don’t have the same abilities as they do when it’s a hate crime situation. “We really have to work within the limit of what we’re able to do.”

Williams said when she asked if the police could use the man’s licence plate number to check on him and possibly give him a warning – anything, really – they said they couldn’t say for sure if the car was registered to him.

“I’m pretty sure if I get pulled over, they’re going to be like, ‘You’re Amanda Williams, this is the car that we see in the system that is registered to you,’” she said. “This is how you find people. I don’t understand.”

'I WAS SHOCKED, I WAS ANGRY, I WAS SAD'

“I was shocked, I was angry, I was sad… I felt dismissed by the police,” Williams added.

In the absence of an adequate follow through from the police, the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR) stepped in to help Williams with her case.

“It’s not only about whether you could be prosecuted under the criminal code,” said CRARR’s executive director, Fo Niemi. “This is not how police with hate crime expertise should respond to a complaint of a hate incident.”

Niemi said it’s clear from how the officers reacted “they were not trained or didn’t have the competency required to deal with a hate incident or a hate-motivated crime.”

They should have at least looked at the evidence and made Williams aware of how they were going to proceed, Niemi added.

“Do we really have a hate crimes unit, or we just have one or two individuals that are just assigned without any kind of coordinated approach to deal with hate crimes?” Niemi asked. “Hates crimes aren’t only about receiving a complaint and investigating, it’s also outreach and information for people.”

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, several Asian Montrealers have been the target of hate incidents as well as hate crimes, and many of them are still waiting for information from the police, Niemi said.

“He doesn’t even have a business card for the police officer,” Niemi said of a man who was attacked on the metro. “The feeling of leaving someone in the dark without any information, that’s a terrible thing that police should avoid.”

If these experiences aren’t collected, it affects statistics about hate crimes in the country, Niemi added.

Lemay isn’t sure what exactly happened for the officers not to react the way she explained they normally do.

“Did he perceive it like a parking fight, based on what you’re telling me, and he didn’t notice the hate element?" Lemay asked. "That’s possible – I don’t know what was perceived in that moment.”