Racial profiling is a systemic problem in the Montreal police force, a Quebec judge has ruled, as she awarded damages in a class action lawsuit that advocates call a “decision that meets with reality”.
Justice Dominique Poulin found that the city bore responsibility for racial profiling committed by its police officers and was obliged to compensate those affected.
The class action suit, filed in 2019, stems from a 2017 incident in which resident Alexandre Lamontagne was stopped by police after leaving a bar.
Lamontagne, who worked as a security guard at the time and was out for a drink with his brother, was pinned to the ground, handcuffed and taken to the station. He was charged with obstructing police work and assaulting a police officer.
Those charges were eventually dropped, but he was then issued with three tickets for making noise, continuing to do so and for not walking on a sidewalk. After viewing video footage of the encounter, Poulin sided with Lamontagne’s telling of events, rejecting claims by officers they were courteous in their interaction with Lamontagne.
The Black Coalition of Quebec initially sought C$17m in damages – or $5,000 per person – for residents racially profiled between mid-August 2017 and January 2019. In her decision, Poulin narrowed the scope to a six-month period running between 11 July 2018 and 11 January 2019.
With Tuesday’s decision, Lamontagne is owed C$5,000 and Poulin ordered the city to also pay out C$5,000 to people who were racially profiled and arrested without justification, including those unfairly profiled by a police task force that investigated members of street gangs.
Another group, “physically racialized people” whose rights were violated by police but the evidence wasn’t recorded, was awarded C$2,500.
“It is a decision that meets with reality,” Max Stanley Bazin, president of the Black Coalition, told the Montreal Gazette. “It truthfully addresses the reality of discrimination – that is to say, systemic racial profiling.”
While the city acknowledged both systemic biases and racial profiling in the police, senior officials insisted profiling was not a widespread tactic.
Poulin’s ruling found that members of racialized groups are over-represented in police stop and the “the plausible explanation for this disparity is the racial profiling that characterizes many arrests”.
It is unclear how many people will be entited to compensation. In a statement, the city staff were “currently analyzing the decision” and would not comment “out of respect for the legal process”.
Poulin’s judgement also reflects growing acknowledgement of widespread discrimination in the province.
In 2021, a Quebec coroner concluded that an Indigenous woman who was taunted by nursing staff as she lay dying in a Quebec hospital would probably be alive today if she were white, calling her treatment an an “undeniable” example of systemic racism.
