The Montreal police logo is seen on a police car in Montreal on Wednesday, July 8, 2020. A Montreal anti-racism group says the city’s police should apologize to a black man they handcuffed on Thursday after officers suspected he was trying to to steal his own car. Montreal police said they have launched an administrative investigation into an incident in which a black man was handcuffed after officers suspected he was stealing his own car. The force said the officers involved were unable to free the man immediately after establishing the car was his because they did not have a handcuff key. “We are sensitive to the anguish and emotion that this citizen went through and the reactions that this incident caused,” the police service wrote in a post Saturday afternoon on Twitter. Civil rights groups called on police to apologize to the man and raised concerns that the incident marks a case of racial profiling. A video of the incident circulating on social media shows the man, still in handcuffs, angrily asking officers why he was handcuffed before they verified the vehicle belonged to him and asked if he was being handcuffed because he is Black. Quebec Public Safety Minister Francois Bonnardel said Saturday morning he would look into what happened, and Alain Vaillancourt, a member of the city’s executive committee in charge of public safety, said he had asked police to investigate the incident and ensure that the same thing happens again. “A situation like the one this citizen is experiencing affects the sense of trust between the police and our communities in Montreal,” he tweeted. “This bond of trust is essential, not only to police work, but also to the pleasant character of our city.” The video, which appears to have been filmed in the parking lot of the Marché Central shopping complex, shows six minutes of the man’s interaction with the officers. As it opens, the man complains about his treatment. “Are you injured? You’re not hurt,” one of the officers replied. “It hurts,” the man said, slightly raising his handcuffed hands behind his back. “I didn’t even hit you,” the officer replies. “It’s my car, why did you brutalize me when I arrived, that’s my question,” the man said. One of the officers tells the man he will explain the situation. The man then asks the officers to remove the handcuffs before he speaks to them, but the officers soon realize they don’t have a key to the handcuffs. As they wait for other officers to come and unlock the cuffs, the man asks if he is being treated this way because he is Black. “Not at all,” said one of the officers. On Friday, Montreal police said two auto theft investigators found a comfortable Honda SUV in a mall parking lot that had damage around one of its locks, consistent with an attempted theft. The department said that before officers could determine if it was stolen, a citizen came forward to take possession of the vehicle. “It was at this time that he was temporarily detained for investigative purposes by the two officers. The citizen was released unconditionally and without charge once the checks were completed. The investigation is complete,” the department said in a tweet. Alain Babineau, director of racial profiling and public safety at the anti-racist profiling group Red Coalition and a 27-year veteran of the RCMP, said while police can handcuff someone who poses a threat, that escalates the interaction into an arrest. “The pretrial detention should be very short, and the person should be allowed to leave. So, once the person is in handcuffs, it is no longer a pretrial detention, but an arrest. And then, as an arrest, it triggers the right to counsel and so on,” said Babineau, who became a lawyer after leaving the federal police. He said he was concerned that officers handcuffed the man because they perceived him to be potentially violent. One element of racial profiling, he said, is the perception that black men are “viewed as inherently violent and that’s why the question of racial profiling has to be raised.” Babineau said police should apologize to the man and police chiefs should sit down with the officers in the video to review their powers and responsibilities. “There’s something in the culture of policing that says, ‘we’re never wrong,’ and that’s what’s wrong with our culture and that needs to change,” Babineau said in an interview Saturday. Fo Niemi, executive director of the Montreal-based civil rights group Center for Action Research on Race Relations, said he hopes the man will file a complaint with the police ethics commissioner so an investigation can be conducted into what happened before from the interactions captured on film. And he said the police department should apologize to the man. “This incident shows once again that black drivers in Montreal cannot feel safe and free to drive their own car without being subject to some sort of police control and profiling,” he said. “That’s what all the people who came to us for help told us: it’s the violation of that sense of freedom and security that makes them lose confidence in the police.” The union representing Montreal police officers said the politicians’ comments risked fueling a “police disengagement.” “In a society governed by the rule of law, elected officials should refrain from sharing their impressions of the nature of a police operation until all the facts are known,” the Fraternité des policiers et polières said in a tweet. de Montréal.
