Montreal suburb asked to pay $12K in racial profiling case

MONTREAL—Quebec’s humanrights tribunal has found that a Black man who was stopped by police while dropping his son off at daycare was racially profiled. The tribunal has ordered the Montreal suburb of Longueuil, a Longueuil police officer and a former police officer to pay Joel DeBellefeuille $10,000 in damages.

Dominic Polidoro, who remains a police officer, has also been ordered to pay an additional $2,000 in punitive damages. DeBellefeuille was stopped by police outside his son’s daycare in March 2012 after police followed his car for more than a kilometre.

According to the decision, Polidoro testified that he followed DeBellefeuille’s vehicle because he thought DeBellefeuille was looking at him, gestured towards him and said something to him while the two vehicles were stopped at a stop sign.

In his decision, Judge Christian Brunelle found that Polidoro’s explanation didn’t justify his stop of DeBellefeuille.

“It is highly improbably that a white man (or woman) who, while driving their vehicle observed a police officer while continuing to talk with the other passengers and gesticulating — as many people do incidentally while expressing themselves — would be considered a suspect for that sole reason,” Brunelle wrote.

Brunelle found that Polidoro’s actions could only be “rationally explained by the prejudices he maintained, whether consciously or not, towards a Black man driving a luxury car.”

DeBellefeuille, who was driving a BMW at the time, told the tribunal that he has been stopped “numerous times” by police.

The other officer who stopped DeBellefeuille, Jean-Claude Bleu Voua, was not ordered to pay punitive damages because he is no longer a police officer and could not be found by the tribunal.

The Longueuil police service has also been ordered to improve its training around racial profiling and to evaluate its effectiveness. It will also be required to collect racial data on people stopped by its officers.