Police chief defends actions during protests
At the height of Montreal’s 2012 student crisis, police chief Marc Parent feared he’d wake up one day and find out someone was killed during a protest.
That’s what Parent told reporters Wednesday after testifying before the Ménard Commission — a public inquiry into the social unrest that surrounded the resistance movement against university tuition increases in the spring and summer of 2012. The police chief went to great lengths to detail the shattered and often caustic relationship between riot cops and the thousands of protesters that took to Montreal’s streets almost every night in the spring of 2012.
“During the student demonstrations, we saw a variety of techniques used: some peaceful, some violent, some extremely violent,” Parent told commissioner Serge Ménard, who was public security minister when Jacques Parizeau was premier. “There were sit-ins, smoke bombs on the métro, not to mention the blockade of the Jacques Cartier Bridge. … It was unlike anything we’d ever witnessed.”
The police chief acknowledged that some of his officers crossed the line and got “heated” during some of the most intense demonstrations. But, on the whole, Parent said he was proud of the way the department handled a difficult situation.
Oddly enough, Parent seemed to echo the claims of student leaders that the passage of the Liberal government’s Bill 78 was a catalyst for further violence during the resistance. The law was designed to return social order by applying severe restrictions on Quebecers’ right to protest and imposing heavy fines on activist student unions.
But Parent described the days after Bill 78’s passing as the most violent, most chaotic during the student uprising. “Bill 78 widened and intensified the struggle,” Parent said. “Different social groups joined the students. There were massive fires downtown, really bad rioting for days. When the fire department came to extinguish the flames, they were attacked.”
After an uneventful first hour of testimony, Ménard pressed Parent on the controversial “kettling” technique used by the city’s police — a tactic in which the riot squad would surround hundreds of people and arrest all of them regardless of whether or not they committed a crime. One evening in May 2012 saw about 500 rounded up and detained after a relatively calm demonstration through downtown.
Kettling, Parent said, was a last resort only used if police were concerned about violence.
“You have to admit that, in this crowd, there are going to be people who haven’t done a thing wrong, there will be people arrested simply for exercising a democratic right,” Ménard said.
At first Parent argued that any person participating in an illegal demonstration was breaking the law. But, eventually, he conceded that it was possible certain people were just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“We tried to isolate the troublemakers and only arrest them,” Par- ent said. “Sometimes they hid in the crowd and sometimes they tried to lead it. … It was hard. It is clear, however, that the troublemakers were only a minority and that most demonstrators were peaceful.”
Ménard grilled the police chief about the conditions protesters were subjected to during mass arrests. “You had people who couldn’t use the bathroom for hours, people handcuffed in the back of a crowded bus in the heat, with no water to drink,” Ménard said. “These are inadmissible conditions in an organized society.”
The police tried and will continue trying to learn from their mistakes, Parent said.
As time unfolded, he continued, officers found ways to expedite arrest and detention time. He also spoke of some officers who took it upon themselves to escort detained protesters to the washroom of a nearby restaurant or fast-food chain.
Ménard asked Parent to detail the level of training and preparedness his officers had in crowd control.
Co-commissioner Claudette Charbonneau spoke of the images she’d seen of crowds of people being targeted by riot police as they ran away, wondering what possible threat they could have posed to police.
“Not all of our officers had much, if any experience in crowd control before 2012,” Parent said. “Some had just learned the basics at (police academy), but we placed them among veterans ... As for the use of force, if police feel they’re in grave danger, if they see pieces of asphalt flying at them or other serious threats, they react.”
After his testimony, Parent emphasized that 71 officers were injured during the student crisis, including several who were hospitalized with concussions.