Brutality, racism allegations deepen trust gap after years of complaints in Montreal

MONTREAL — Frantz Jean-Jacques remembers feeling hopeful after coming out of a meeting more than a decade ago with the commander of a police station in a multicultural neighbourhood of Montreal. Over a dozen local residents attended, including a number of young men who shared troubling stories about their own interactions with police. They came to denounce police brutality and racial profiling and pressed the station commander to take action.

“It was a good meeting,” said Jean-Jacques, a former community support worker. “He had promised to investigate and ensure that kind of behaviour wouldn’t happen anymore, because it was unacceptable.” At the time, Jean-Jacques was the head of ÉvoluJeunes, a community organization dedicated to supporting youths who had run-ins with the law in the neighbourhood. Jean-Jacques said he recalled meeting a dozen young men in his office, reporting experiences of police brutality by a handful of officers.

“They were being told (by police) to tell their friends what happened, as a warning,” Jean-Jacques said. He said he was able to initiate the meeting in 2015 after sending police a letter, accompanied by some photos showing the wounds of a young Black man who alleged he was beaten by police behind a restaurant. Anti-racism lobby group the Red Coalition shared a copy of the letter with The Canadian Press.

More than a decade after the meeting with the police commander, questions remains as to whether Montreal police did enough to address the allegations they heard that day. The Montréal-Nord police station is mired in a scandal and facing pointed criticism about allegations of misconduct and of a failure to address long-standing community concerns about racism. The man who was featured in the photos and the letter from 2015 is now 39.

He said he attended the meeting to share his story, but he has continued to be targeted by local police, ever since then. “That tells you everything,” Jean-Jacques said in a recent interview. “That’s why young people are discouraged from filing complaints.

Sometimes, the police seem to take the complaints, but that’s as far as it goes.” The former community organizer said he has been thinking about the 2015 meeting in a new light in recent weeks after the current Montreal police chief, Fady Dagher, dropped a bombshell. Speaking at a late Friday evening news conference in mid-June, Dagher announced po…