Police accused of racial profiling in Villeray
A Montreal lawyer is planning to file an ethics complaint against the city's police force after his client was stopped because of the coat he was wearing.
That's the reason police gave Andy Basora when they said they'd be questioning him outside of his home in Villeray on Sunday, in an exchange documented on a video posted to Instagram that has gone viral.
“You're wearing a coat that someone has had stolen,” the officer says, tugging on it to pull Basora off of his porch and over to the police car. The exchange was filmed by Basora's brother.
In a statement posted on Twitter (and copy-pasted in an email to the Montreal Gazette), the Service de police de la ville de Montréal (SPVM) said the intervention was linked to a theft of a red North Face coat that occurred on Dec. 19, during which the suspect used cayenne pepper.
“While patrolling the streets of the area (Sunday), the same police officers who took the initial statement of the robbery saw a resemblance to the victim's red coat and turned around to ask the man questions,” the statement reads.
But Basora's lawyer, Fernando Belton, isn't buying it.
“Did they intercept every person in Villeray who has a red North Face coat, which by the way is a very popular coat among young people?”
Belton is calling what happened to Basora a case of racial profiling by the police, which is all too common for young men like Basora.
“When we talk about racial profiling files, there are never racist statements or gestures that can be qualified as discriminatory,” he said, adding that instead, it's a series of covert elements that when added together, point to nothing else.
“Does it smell like profiling or not? In a case like this, well, it smells strong,” he said.
Incidents of racial profiling are well-documented within the SPVM, and in July 2020, the force released a new policy on street checks that aimed to put an end to disparities in who is stopped — though critics were quick to voice their dissatisfaction with it. The policy came almost a year after a 2019 report found that people of colour are far more likely to be stopped by SPVM officers than white people.
The interaction between the SPVM and Basora on Sunday was problematic for a few reasons, Belton said — the first being that it took place at all.
“The reason given by that police officer in particular, but also by the force later, seems, to me, to be an oblique reason,” Belton said.
“Which means they were trying to find a reason to stop him, when the real reason is that they were profiling a young man who, in that moment, did absolutely nothing wrong and who was in front of his home.”
Another issue is that the crime they were investigating wasn't recent, so without an arrest warrant, the officers had no reason to hold Basora for questioning and to run his information through the system, Belton said.
“The police had no valid reason to be able to detain the man. If he thought the man was a suspect in the case, you need a warrant on the basis of reasonable grounds to suspect that this is the person who stole the coat.”
Belton also pointed out that — as seen in the video — the officer pulled Basora down from the porch by the arm of his coat when he asked what he was being approached for.
“Why did they have to pull him like that, like he was a criminal, if they just wanted to ask him some questions? If it had been a young white man with the same red coat, would they have acted the same way?”
Both Belton and people who interacted with the video online took issue with the fact that one of the two officers questioning Basora wasn't wearing a mask, which, due to COVID-19, is mandatory when within two metres of another person.
In its statement, the SPVM said it asks its officers to respect public health guidelines, “however, in some situations that require quick and immediate intervention, this may not always be possible.”
“He wasn't agitated, he wasn't angry, he wasn't dangerous, he's just a young man coming home, and they're saying they couldn't put on a mask to do the intervention,” Belton said.
In addition to filing an ethics complaint against the police, Belton said they will be filing one with Quebec's human rights commission.
“If Andy had not been a young man who was calm, how would this situation have degenerated? If his brother hadn't decided to film the scene, we would never have known that it happened,” Belton said. “But I'll tell you that for every event filmed, there are nine others that aren't filmed, but play out exactly the same way — or even worse.”