SPVM officers testify at hearing for students who say they were unjustly detained for jaywalking

Montreal police officers who arrested and fined two graduate students from Concordia University for allegedly interfering with a police operation in July 2023 testified at a hearing on Wednesday.

BACKGROUND: Students claim police mistreatment after being arrested, handcuffed and fined for jaywalking

The officers searched, handcuffed and detained Amaechi Okafor, an international student from Nigeria, and Wade Paul, a member of a New Brunswick First Nation, during the incident in the early hours of July 22, 2023.

The students have maintained they were subjected to abusive and violent police treatment – and they still don’t know why.

Okafor and Paul say they were walking home from a club on Saint-Jacques Street in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce around 3 a.m. when they witnessed a police operation in progress and decided to walk around the scene – into the street – to avoid interfering.

The men say within moments, a police car drove onto the sidewalk in front of them, cutting them off. They allege they were then violently searched and handcuffed before being put into a police cruiser.

“I felt abused. I felt less of a human,” Okafor told CityNews in the weeks following the incident.

The men say they were eventually released from the cruisers and ended up with two $548 fines for obstruction of justice and jaywalking.

The pair was in municipal court Wednesday for the hearing, in which they are contesting their fines.

For most of Wednesday, the officer that proceeded with Okafor’s arrest testified at the municipal courthouse saying she called out police to them several times — to which she says they did not respond.

She said she was trying to give Okafor a ticket for his infraction of crossing where he shouldn’t have — but he refused her request for an ID. She said she then arrested him for obstruction of justice.

“It’s not about just the fact that each of them got a $550 fine, but because of the fact that they felt that the incident was a ‘Walking While Black’ case,” said Fo Niemi, the executive director for the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR), while at the municipal courthouse on Wednesday.

“That excessive use of force, the heightening of the tension and of the intervention tactics, I think those are the elements that should be increasingly denounced. We believe it could have been handled differently if one of them were not Black and also the fact that the police should de-escalate instead of escalating it,” he added.

Montreal Police told CityNews they will not comment on specific police interventions but said anyone that feels wrong during a police intervention can file a complaint with the SPVM or an independent organization. 

Complaints filed on their behalf by CRARR with the Québec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission and the Police Ethics Commissioner have been accepted and sent for investigation.

By end of day Wednesday, two SPVM officers testified for the prosecution and were cross-examined by the defence. Another officer was called to testify at a later date.

The next hearing is scheduled for Feb. 21 with the defendants expected to testify the same day.