SPVM chief takes the stand in racial profiling lawsuit against City of Montreal

The new chief Montreal police service (SPVM) was called to testify on Thursday in Superior Court as part of a racial profiling class-action lawsuit led by the Ligue des Noirs du Québec (Black Coalition of Quebec). 

Fady Dagher acknowledged before Judge Dominique Poulin the existence of racial profiling within his police force, whose culture he aspires to change: "It's a very insidious, very subtle, very underhanded problem, and we don't realize that we're doing it," he said.

When asked afterwards in a press scrum whether his words might serve the interests of the applicants, Dagher simply replied, without any hesitation: "You have to tell the truth."

Applicant Alexandre Lamontagne was stopped while leaving a bar in August 2014. The young man was pinned to the ground, handcuffed and taken to the station to finally end up with three statements of offence and two charges — one of obstructing police work and another of assaulting a police officer — which were later dropped.

The Black Coalition of Quebec is seeking damages of $5,000 per racialized person stopped without cause between August 2017 and January 2019.

One of the reasons behind the hiring of Fady Dagher by the City of Montreal is precisely related to his long-standing fight against this problem within police forces and the success he has achieved in this regard with the Service de police de l'agglomération de Longueuil (SPAL), of which he was the director from 2016 to last December.

Prior to that, he was an SPVM officer for nearly 25 years, where he rose through the ranks to become deputy chief. During his testimony, he gave a long list of awareness efforts and training to counter racial profiling within the SPVM, spanning more than 20 years.

"How can I make my police officers realize that they have unconscious and even sometimes conscious prejudices?" he asked aloud to the court.

Because even today, "we have racist police officers but the vast majority are not," he said, arguing that the phenomenon tends to fade not only through training but also through evolution.

"The more we progressed, the more the recruits grew up with diversity in daycare, in schools."

Although random stops were ruled unconstitutional by Judge Michel Yergeau last October precisely because he said they are a source of racial profiling — a decision that has been appealed by Quebec — Dagher remains convinced of their usefulness.

"It is still necessary. We just have to do it right, we have to do it with the right guidelines. And that's what's at stake. The issue is that it has sometimes been done on the wrong markers," he argued.

But during his testimony and in interviews afterwards, he insisted on the systemic nature of this profiling: "We must review the system because, in 20 years, we will be talking again if we only look at individuals," he said.

"Out of 6,800 employees, are there people who have racist behaviours or events that are racist? There are some. But for me, if I focus on each person every time, I will never move forward. If I change the system, then I expect that there will be a profound change in culture," Dagher said.

He also told reporters that profiling attributed to police officers often originates from the citizens themselves.

"The number of 911 calls we receive from citizens who are already profiling the call, who are telling us that there are young people doing this or that, which are already calls full of prejudice and discrimination, we answer these calls, and when we arrive on the scene, all of a sudden, we are the people who instigated the event. But it's not us, it's the 9-1-1 call," he added.

"Racial profiling is an issue with the police. It needs to be addressed. We have a lot to do. We have done it. We must continue to do so, but it is a societal problem."

Mayor Valerie Plante is also scheduled to testify in court next Tuesday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Feb. 9, 2023.