Suddenly the female resident, who, yes... happens to be black, was stopped by Westmount’s Public Security Unit. A female officer politely asked her if “they could help her.” The implication was that she didn’t belong there. When the resident explained that she actually lived in the area, did not need any assistance and inquired as to why she had been stopped, the officer gave her what constitutes a flimsy excuse at best (they had received a call about a woman matching her description peering into windows.) There was no report filed and they went their separate ways. The Roslyn teacher (who requested to remain anonymous, but was quite shaken by the incident) told The Examiner that she had never been so insulted in her entire life.
Last week, the Montreal Police Service disputed the findings of an internal report that said that racial profiling within the city’s police force is “alarming.” The report was conducted by a criminologist who found that random stops of black citizens had more than doubled between 2001 and 2007. Predictably police called the report “flawed”, “inaccurate”, “incomplete” and promptly rejected it.
What’s truly alarming is when you see the men and women who’ve sworn to protect and serve us casually and flippantly dismiss accusations of systemic racial profiling, because they’re too busy wishing it away. But, what isn’t acknowledged can never be changed.
Joel Debellefeuille, a black man from St. Constant is currently seeking $30,000 in damages from the police for racial profiling. He was pulled over four times in one week alone! It’s become so commonplace that many of my black friends jokingly call the fictitious infraction committed a DBW (Driving While Black.) My Arab friends have also coined a new one; FWA (Flying While Arab.) There’s bitterness in the humour.
One of the police reports in Debellefeuille’s case questioned the fact that he was a black man with a… Quebecois name. So now police are in the business of assessing whether your name fits your face? Debellefeuille has since filed complaints with the Quebec Human Rights Commission and the police ethics commissioner. The Longueuil police have, so far, refused to comment.
What’s truly alarming is when you see the men and women who’ve sworn to protect and serve us casually and flippantly dismiss accusations of systemic racial profiling, because they’re too busy wishing it away. -
As a journalist, I’ve worked closely with many community officers over the years. I know them to be hard-working, conscientious, kind and fair. But something somewhere is rotten in Denmark and sweeping it under the carpet won’t get rid of the smell.
We live in a world with no institutionalized racism. But what we have instead is much more subtle and often harder to pinpoint. It may offend our sensibilities and our steadfast belief that we, here in Montreal, we, here in highly educated, progressive, and affluent Westmount, live in a society that has evolved to the point that racism is no longer an issue, but is that really the case?
People are still being judged by the colour of their skin. Case in point: a mild-mannered, sophisticated, well-dressed teacher (probably much better dressed in her days off than I am on mine) can still be accosted by a police officer while doing nothing more than walking in her neighbourhood. Why? Because the colour of her skin raised suspicions. Not her actions, not her attire, not her suspicious behaviour, but simply having the wrong colour of skin for that part of town.
No one wants to prevent police officers from doing their jobs, and no one’s advocating that they second-guess their every move, but they should second-guess their subconscious racial-biased policing and how often they use race as the key factor in deciding whether or not to stop someone.
You can go ahead and accuse the Westmount resident in question (and me, as well) of being overly sensitive, making a damning generalization out of one isolated incident, but how many isolated incidents have to take place for them to amount to something worth acknowledging?
