Profiling the Future: The Long Struggle against Police Racial Profiling in Montreal

ABSTRACT

Racial profiling is an increasingly well-studied problem in Quebec. Efforts to combat this problem, in contrast, are virtually non-existent. Seeking to address this gap, this article examines the long struggle to combat racial profiling in Montreal. This struggle began in earnest in 1979. It saw its most significant achievements between 1984 and 1991 and it saw most of these achievements watered down and rolled back between 1992 and 1997. The struggle was finally reborn in 2008, with an activist-led movement that led to a new strategic plan on racial profiling in 2018. Tracing the history of this struggle serves two purposes. First, it reveals the divergence between the narrow range of measures adopted by the City of Montreal and the wider range demanded by Black, anti-racist, and other progressive actors. Second, it shows that the current strategic plan, while touted as “the most ambitious and far-reaching” effort in the city’s history, is actually a diluted version of the actions taken between 1984 and 1991, actions that did little, if anything, to reduce racial profiling. The present strategic plan signals a failure to learn from the past and points toward a pair of possible futures: one in which the status quo endures and racial profiling continues unabated, and one in which social forces are transformed, driven by the actions of people and organizations that have demanded more from the City, and that proposes a new political vision and a wider set of actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• racial profiling
• race
• urban policy
• Montreal

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Christopher Kirkey, the late Jarrett Rudy, and Délice Mugabo for comments on earlier drafts of this article and to Ronald Rose-Antoinette, Anthony Mclachlin, Leona Siaw, Ricardo Lamour, and Kiley Goyette for their assistance with the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, a SSHRC Insight Grant, and a Fulbright Canada fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Ted Rutland

Ted Rutland is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Concordia University. An urban social and cultural geographer, his work focuses on the racial politics of planning, policing, and political struggle in Canadian cities. He is the author of Displacing Blackness: Planning, Power, and Race in Twentieth-Century Halifax (University of Toronto Press, 2018) and is currently working on a book on the war on street gangs in Montreal.