‘I saw myself in his place’
Floyd killing triggers memories for Quebec man
MONTREAL — When Hèzu Kpowbié saw a picture of George Floyd on the ground with a police officer’s knee on his neck, it would take four days before he summoned the courage to watch the Minneapolis man take his last few breaths.
The headlines and video showing another black man being killed by police in the United States brought back terrible memories of Kpowbié’s own violent encounter with police in a Repentigny park last fall.
“When I saw Mr. Floyd, I saw myself in his place — it could have been me,” Kpowbié recalled in an interview.
“It was just terrible. They were abusing someone they’re supposed to be protecting. Every time they’re facing a black man, their behaviour changes.”
Kpowbié, 43, feared for his own life last September when three police officers pointed guns at him and ordered him to the ground.
As he was being handcuffed, one of the officers pressed his knee into Kpowbié’s back for about 30 seconds.
“I told him he was hurting me and he said I was resisting arrest,” said Kpowbié, a digital analyst from the African country of Togo.
The confrontation came out of the blue one Sunday afternoon after he took his eightyear-old son and two friends to a local park.
Along the way, one of the friends dropped a letter opener the boys had been using to repair a broken toy car.
Kpowbié picked up the letter opener and fiddled with it, putting it in and out of his pocket while he kept an eye on the children and watched a softball game.
A short time later, someone in the park called 911 saying a black man was in the park holding “a long knife.”
When Kpowbié heard a noise behind him, he turned to see a police officer pointing his gun at him and shouting: “Drop your knife.”
He said he threw the letter opener on the ground while the young boys screamed: “It’s not a knife, it’s a letter opener.”
Two other police officers then showed up and circled Kpowbié. All three had their weapons pointed at him.
His son’s two friends fled the park, leaving the terrified boy alone as his father was placed in a police car.
Before being handcuffed, Kpowbié managed to record a 20-second video that shows the officers training their guns on him, telling him to kneel down.
“Once I saw the gun on me, I was scared he was going to shoot me,” he recalled. “I felt like I had to record it in case something happened to me.”
Kpowbié was eventually released and handed a $150 ticket for carrying a weapon in a park. He is contesting the ticket, but hasn’t had his day in court.
He also filed a complaint with Quebec’s police ethics commission, but the complaint was dismissed.
In the decision, the commissioners determined the “methods used by the police were proportional to the threat they were confronted with.”
They said the officers did not know Kpowbié’s intentions, adding that they had not abused their authority. Kpowbié disagrees.
He said the commission’s refusal to investigate and punish abusive police practices has resulted in the mistreatment of too many black men.
“It’s not normal that just because you have a police uniform on, you can treat people badly,” he said. “This is not just happening in the U.S. It happens in Canada every day — in Montreal, Laval and in Repentigny.”
He said his white friends have told him they don’t believe police would treat them the way he was treated.
“I received apologies from my white friends, but not from the police,” he said.
Several men in Repentigny, who allege they have been mistreated by local police, participated in a Zoom call on Friday to discuss the trauma they have felt since watching Floyd’s death, said Fo Niemi, the director of the Center for Research-action on Race Relations.
Too many police officers respond aggressively when they get a call about a black man, he said.
“Any kind of description or mention of the word ‘black’ can become a code word that can trigger a very negative and disproportionate response,” he said.