Local Activist says Anti-Racism Trainings Might Not Improve the Montreal Police

The City of Montreal has provided the Montreal police force, also known as the SPVM, received the second highest increase towards their budget ever, by $45 million. In Montreal's 2022 Budget the SPVM will receive $724 million.

Ted Rutland, associate professor at Concordia University, who has written various articles on police budgets in Canada and the movement to defund the police, says this is the biggest increase to the police budget anywhere in Canada.

Rutland says this may not be the only money the SPVM will receive this year. He stated that last month the SPVM revealed it went over budget in 2021 by $51 million. The City of Montreal has agreed to pay this, but what will stop them from doing this in 2022?

Police say they still experience budgetary challenges, and as a result, have proposed to close neighbourhood police stations, known as Poste de Quartier or PDQs. 

Rutland says closing PDQs won’t make a difference in public safety, as he believes politicians want to save PDQs because they like the bike patrols and cops in our community.

He believes the closure of the PDQ will be a prolonged debate all of this year.

He says there is one good thing Projet Montreal is doing regarding the police, as they are looking to expand a pilot project in Ville-Marie addressing mental illness and homelessness with non-police intervention. This is something that is being introduced city-wide in Toronto.

What are other ways we are seeing increased policing in Montreal?

Rutland noted the provincial regulations of sanitary measures. He says the CAQ government has blamed the pandemic on anti-vaxxers to minoritize and dehumanize them in order to offload the blame on the provincial government for underfunding our long-term care homes and hospitals – sectors that have both been hit hard by COVID.

He says most anti-vaxxers think the government is authoritarian, so how will punitive measures encouraged them to get the vaccine?

Rutland suggests the government could employ people to go door-to-door, encouraging people to be vaccinated through money and incentivisation. He says this would cost the government less money and be less divisive.

Rutland also spoke to Local 514 considering the French language police, known as the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF).

He says the CAQ needs to do things beyond punish a service worker who didn’t speak French in that moment or wasn’t able to learn French, stating the elite within the CAQ want to police working class Anglophones.

So can we improve the SPVM to reduce racism and racial profiling through more intensive anti-racism and multicultural trainings?

Rutland thinks not.

He said that in 1986 and 1988, the SPVM had the best multicultural trainings on colonialism slavery, however, following this the police killed more Black people than any other year in Montreal. Rutland said the current police force were trained by people who were trained in multicultural trainings and that these trainings don’t work.

This interview was used for an upcoming episode of Local 514.

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