Five officers suspended following violent arrest of Black teen; family says lawsuit coming
Posted November 30, 2021 4:46 pm.
Last Updated November 30, 2021 7:43 pm.
Five Quebec City police officers have been suspended, five days after the violent arrest of a Black teenager was caught on video.
In a video widely shared on social media, Pacifique Niyokwizera, 18, can be seen pinned down to the ground by a police officer during the Nov. 27 arrest. The video shows the officer using his boot to kick snow in the young man’s face.
“How fast everything escalated, the violence that was used to actually arrest him, these are all clear facts of racial profiling,” said Fernando Belton, the teen’s lawyer. “People don’t get arrested like that in Quebec. We have a charter of rights. There’s a way to treat people. His human rights were violated clearly in front of everyone.
“We use that much force to arrest someone, which means he must’ve done something really bad, but we don’t charge him, we don’t give him a ticket.”
Niyokwizera’s lawyer says a civil suit against Quebec City is on the way.
“A lot of the young people that were there, leaving the bar,” said Belton. “Because of something that actually happened, which was not involving my client, and at one point police officers came up to them too. There was a conversation. One of the police officers took his pepper spray and started spraying everyone.”
#INTERVENTION | À la suite des événements survenus dans la nuit du 26 au 27 novembre 2021 et dans le cadre de notre enquête évolutive, la direction du SPVQ tient à communiquer la décision de suspendre 5 policiers impliqués dans les événements.
— Service de police de la Ville de Québec (@SPVQ_police) November 30, 2021
Niyokwizera, an amateur boxer, was left with a swollen face and a bloodshot eye from the incident.
“He doesn’t understand why this happened to him,” said activist Renzel Dashington. “You have to take this from the perspective of a good kid – he’s really a good kid. And from his version of his story, he was trying to help that day because some people were a little more riled up.
“He himself is traumatized. He’s 18-years-old. Once they had handcuffed him, brutalized him, put him in the car, drove him 10 minutes away… No wallet, no phone.”
Niyokwizera and his family are from Uganda and came to Quebec as refugees in 2013.
“The mother was telling me she was actually brutalized by police officers in her own country, so to see her child in that particular case being beat down by police, it brings back a lot of things that they were actually running away from,” said Belton. “They thought in Quebec they could be safe, and clearly that’s not the case.”
WARNING: Video contains sensitive content.
Genevieve Guilbault, Quebec’s deputy premier and public security minister, asked the police ethics commissioner to look into the event.
Premier Francois Legault says if necessary, the province will go further.
“What I want to say to Quebecers is we will get to the bottom of it,” he said. “And if I’m not satisfied with the answers and it’s not clear – I want to know yes or no, is there a problem with certain police officers.”
Quebec City police say they will cooperate with the police ethics commissioner and have launched a second internal investigation.
Meanwhile, Niyokwizera’s lawyer is looking to get the names of the police officers involved and file a lawsuit against Quebec City, which may take months, he says.
“There’s a lot of prejudice suffered by him: physical prejudice, psychological prejudice,” said Belton.
