5 years after George Floyd: How has the Montreal police changed?

Five years after the police killing of George Floyd in the U.S., when officers knelt on his neck, how has the Montreal police force updated its practices?

CityNews sat down with SPVM Chief-Inspector David Shane to talk about this.

How would you say officers here have updated their approach to situations?

DS: “First off, everybody was shocked and appalled by the situation and we need to recall that a police officer responsible for the death was convicted of murder. So obviously, at the Montreal police we reacted very vigorously to that and we listened very carefully to all the concerns that were raised by the population especially through protests and to all the social movement that went on and we turned around pretty fast to try and implement many actions to fight against racial and discriminatory bias.

So, for example, we put forward the first policy on police checks to give a framework to police officers to work these types of interventions but exempt of any type of bias or profiling. We created internal support groups, for example, a group that represents Black and Afro-descendant employees and for respect of all differences inside the police force and these groups have been very, very helpful to us. They’ve provided a lot of advice to senior management to continue putting forward policies and practices that fight against racial profiling and bias.”

Would you say with those concrete measures that you’ve seen a difference since May 2020?

DS: “We’re always improving — that’s for sure — nothing is perfect. We don’t have 100 percent on our scorecard, for sure, but we’ve made a lot of progress and a lot of these measures have been put forward — for example, we reduced the impact of racial bias through 9-1-1 calls. That’s one of the measures that we talk about a lot. Some people call 9-1-1, they transfer their own racial biases and it reflects on a call and we don’t want officers to be influenced by that, so we worked ways to eliminate that. We also worked a lot on inclusion. So, 25 per cent of our recruits last year are from visible minorities and ethnic minorities to increase representation, but we’re still continuing to work — we’re working on making promotions more accessible to to people from visible minorities and so on.”

When it comes to the knee-on-neck method, can it still be used and are there ways to replace this approach?

DS: “The answer is no. The knee-on-neck method is not authorized and is not taught by the the Quebec police school police school and Montreal police does not authorize — it does not teach it and we do not use it. Although in certain situations, sometimes videos are shared with us — momentarily during an altercation, it might happen that a knee will be on the neck momentarily until the police officer can reposition. But what we teach our police officers is that they need to control an individual on the ground for their safety and the safety of that person to be able to proceed with handcuffing and they need to immobilize one of the two accesses of rotation. So there’s one that’s created by the the hip line and the other one by the shoulder blade line and that’s where they can actually press their knee to put pressure to maintain that person.”

What kind of work would you say still needs to be done when it comes to approaching racialized communities and as well with the use of force?

DS: “We feel that it’s all about relationships and being able to acknowledge and share on each other’s realities. For example, a few weeks ago we launched a new initiative — the program by the name ‘Adopt a Cop’ — and so Montreal police is going in with that type of program, so we matched a police officer with youth. About 15 to 20 matches and we’ll be working forward to to better understand each other. The police needs to understand better the communities but also the communities need to understand the police and what we’re trying to do and what our mission is, we’re continuing to work inside and also being better at working with the community and especially fighting against bias.”