WORKING THE POLICE BEAT
With news reports last week about continuing police probes and the possibility of a memorial mural for slain youth Fredy Villanueva, I was reminded of my ambivalent feelings over the years about those who are supposed to protect us.
As a young street artist in Quebec City, I was arrested several times and beaten, quite gleefully, by officers. I was young, my body bounced back and I learned from it, but stories about suspicious police activities always grabbed my attention from that point on.
Mind you, I never painted all police officers with the same brush. My friend John Westlake, a Montreal policeman, once held the record for most drug busts in Canada. I took my wife to John’s retirement party in 1999. It wasn’t a world my gentle Mary was used to. Seated upstairs in a Ville LaSalle restaurant were many of John’s undercover associates, sketchylooking characters in leather jackets and dark glasses. Mary quietly asked: “These are the good guys?”
The Sûreté du Québec’s handling of the 1990 Oka crisis was not its finest hour. When the mayor of Oka called in the SQ to remove Mohawk warriors occupying disputed land, the warriors seized four Sûreté cars, crushed them and used them as an embarrassing barricade for everyone to see on TV.
One of my cartoons on the Sûreté’s handling of the dispute — a drawing of a mad dog police officer or chien chaud — drew outrage from the force. The SQ issued a fax in the dead of night, accusing the English media and the Gazette in particular of disseminating Mohawk propaganda and harbouring an anti-police bias because the Meech Lake constitutional deal had fallen through!
I for one was very grateful for the Montreal police dressing in protest camouflage or “camo” outfits, making them far more cartoonable than other police forces. The protest began in 2014.
Nevertheless, things have changed and my attitude today towards the police is somewhat more positive. In general, Montreal’s streets are as safe as any in North America; in 2014, we had the lowest homicide rate among Canada’s five major cities. The city’s police force seems more controlled and efficient than in the past, better able to handle situations like the rowdy 2012 “red square” demonstrations by students that dragged on for months.