Montreal police will now tell people they’re free to leave during street checks

Montreal police will now have to clearly tell people they are allowed to leave during police checks as part of a new policy.

Montreal police (SPVM) will now have to clearly tell people they are allowed to leave during police checks and a “watch committee” will be in place to detect problematic behaviour by officers.

Police chief Fady Dagher said the police check policy has been updated to improve communication with the public, rebuild trust, and to prevent racial profiling.

Officers can carry out a stop based on “observable facts,” he said, though these differ from interventions that could lead to an arrest.

The SPVM says these stops are meant to assist people in need, identify a wanted person, obtain information on suspicious activities or for intelligence purposes in relation to people “reasonably suspected” of being involved in illegal activities.

Individuals do not have to identify themselves during these checks, though police must inform them why they were stopped. Officers must now clearly state that the person can leave at any time.

“We do not want to give people the impression that they are trapped,” whether it be “physically or psychologically,” Dagher said at a news conference Monday.

That change goes into effect immediately and officers will have to document each interaction.

In 2019, a report commissioned by the SPVM revealed “systemic bias” in the police force with Black, Indigenous and Arab Montrealers being more likely to be stopped than white people.

Dagher says the force reviewed its practices in 2020, making sure its officers were stopping people based on “observable facts.”

Another report published in 2023 showed police checks still disproportionately targeted racialized people and recommended a moratorium on police checks.

Over 100 community organizations signed a petition asking for the moratorium to be implemented.

Dagher rejected the experts’ only recommendation but says the force has done more to push back against racial profiling, like creating internal committees, banning the thin blue line badge on officers’ uniforms, and having more visible minorities on the force.

The Ligue des droits et libertés (LDL) said the SPVM is taking “half-measures” that sound good on paper but “there’s a world of difference between policy on paper and reality on the street.”

The LDL says the policy’s wording is too vague, based on “observable facts” rather than the legal standard of “reasonable suspicion” recognized by the courts.

“This new obligation, if respected, will contribute to reducing the number of stops in Montreal. Mobilization is producing results, but the fight for a complete ban on stop-and-frisk is not over. Faced with a practice that is arbitrary and violates rights, we must do more than just reduce the number of stops. We must put an end to it, period,” said the LDL’s Lynda Khelil in a news release.

It remains unclear, however, how the new policy will be enforced among officers.

Police stops have become an increasingly contentious issue, especially random traffic checks.

Quebec’s Superior Court struck down an article of the province’s Highway Safety Code that allows police to stop drivers without reasonable suspicion that an offence has been committed in 2022.

The provincial government has appealed, and now the case is before the Supreme Court of Canada.