I did not know depth of Lagacé surveillance: police chief
Montreal police Chief Philippe Pichet says his underlings did not give him key information nor did he seek it out during the surveillance of La Presse reporter Patrick Lagacé.
Pichet confirmed on Tuesday that he was in on the decision to start spying on Lagacé’s phone in January 2016.
But on Wednesday, he testified he was not told that followup warrants in the case were increasingly intrusive — to the point where police had permission to track the location of Lagacé’s phone.
In addition, Pichet said he was not told that La Presse already knew about the surveillance when the force dispatched two internal affairs officers to “advise” Lagacé that his phone had been surveilled.
Pichet made the comments during his second day before the Chamberland Commission, an inquiry launched after the disclosure last fall that Montreal police and the Sûreté du Québec had the phones of several journalists under surveillance.
The revelations caused an uproar, with news and journalist organizations condemning the spying on reporters and some politicians calling for Pichet to be suspended or fired.
Pichet was responding to questions from Christian Leblanc, a lawyer representing several news organizations at the inquiry, including the Montreal Gazette and Postmedia.
Lagacé was under scrutiny as part of an internal affairs investigation into the alleged criminal behaviour of officer Faycal Djelidi, who in July 2016 was charged with perjury, attempting to obstruct justice and breach of trust by a public officer.
Suspicions about Djelidi arose after a police informant reported he had heard a rumour that an officer named Faycal was “putting heroine in the pockets of drug dealers to obtain information,” the inquiry heard Wednesday.
Montreal police internal affairs at the time was led by Costa Labos, who was transferred out of that job a day after La Presse learned of the surveillance.
Labos had made headlines before. In 1998, he was suspended for four days after Quebec’s police-ethics committee found he had used foul language, threats and pointed his firearm without justification.
The first warrant to track Lagacé’s phone, obtained on Jan. 19, 2016, mentioned leaks to the news media and referred to five newspaper articles. But Leblanc pointed out that none of them was written by Lagacé — and some were published in a rival newspaper, Le Journal de Montréal.
Asked about this apparent discrepancy, Pichet said that police knew that Djelidi was in contact with Lagacé, and that “certain journalists were speaking amongst themselves.”
He said he wasn’t given other details at a meeting a week before the first warrant was issued. “My title is chief — it’s not me who conducts investigations,” Pichet said.
At several points in his testimony, Pichet has noted that he relies on his assistant chiefs when it comes to investigations because “my expertise is not in investigations.”
Police later obtained other warrants related to Lagacé in 2016.
In a March 2016 warrant, police added that they wanted “names in real-time” of the people Lagacé was in contact with. Two months later, in another warrant, police added another element — now they wanted to track the location of Lagacé’s phone.
Pichet confirmed that as part of the same investigation, police obtained a warrant that gave investigators permission to listen to the calls of its police officers. But he said police did not seek permission to listen to calls the officer was exchanging with Lagacé.
Pichet said he wasn’t informed of the intensifying surveillance of Lagacé.
When he learned later about the warrant that referred to phone locations, Pichet said he asked why that was requested. He said he was told that such information could be collected as part of all warrants. He said he did not realize that previous warrants made no mention of locations.
He said he was told that the location data was not collected. But Pichet said he did not ask why the phone’s location was not tracked.
In hindsight, Pichet said he should have been better informed about the Lagacé surveillance. He said he has now told underlings that he wants to be kept in the loop if reporters are being tracked.
La Presse learned of the surveillance on Oct. 27 and a reporter from the paper called Montreal police for an explanation.
A day later, two internal-affairs investigators met with Lagacé to tell him about the surveillance.
Pichet said he was in the meeting with Labos and the investigators at which it was decided that Lagacé would be advised. “I thought it was a good idea to be transparent and to advise him,” Pichet said. But he said he did not know why they met Lagacé on that particular day (Oct. 28); he had not been told La Presse already knew the information at the time.
The inquiry heard on Tuesday that Lagacé’s phone data was not stored on a USB stick with “military-grade encryption” until Oct. 27, 2016. That was news to Pichet, who had been assured soon after the surveillance that the data would be secured that way.