Indigenous people face police violence in Montreal

Unhoused Indigenous people and community workers say that the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) is regularly violent and abusive towards Indigenous people. While the SPVM has added new training to their program, advocates say it's not working. 

La Converse met with Steven Martin and Diane, two unhoused First Nations people who have had interactions with the SPVM where they felt "belittled" and "racially profiled." They have rooms at a shelter that serves Indigenous people in the Plateau-Mont-Royal, where they say police violence is a regular occurrence. 

"I had never been racially profiled before"

Diane is Cree-Métis woman in her fifties from Buffalo Lake, a Métis settlement in Alberta. She moved from Edmonton to Montreal two years ago to be closer to her daughter, who lives with her father, Diane's ex-husband. Unable to live with her ex, Diane ended up on the streets and was referred to a shelter. She has light eyes, olive skin, and a soft voice. Diane uses her education to help her community at the shelter where she stays, doing their taxes and helping them with Sixties Scoop claims. While she says she does not resist police, Diane says she knows her rights and will question police if she feels they are being unreasonable.

In May 2024, she was sitting on a bench in the Plateau-Mont-Royal with a friend when two SPVM officers approached them. While Diane's friend was drunk, neither of them were consuming alcohol in public. Diane says the officers began to belittle her friend and told them they had to vacate the area, as it was private property. 

"I wasn't drunk and I was not being aggressive or anything like that. I just said, 'It's a public easement [area]. Show me the signage that says that you're not allowed to sit here,'" Diane says, speaking quickly as the memory comes back to her.

The officers were speaking to her in French - Diane's friend translated what they were saying to her so she could understand what was happening.

"I'm like, 'Hey, you guys have no cultural sensitivity training. You guys obviously need it.' And they were like, 'One more word, and we're going to put you in cuffs and put you in a car,'" she recalls. 

Diane recounts the officers cuffed her and put her in the back of the police vehicle, but didn't take her down to the police station.

"I thought, 'For sure, I'm going to jail.' But they drove me a block and let me out by the Saint-Laurent metro. I was pleasantly surprised, but I was baffled," said Diane.

According to residents and workers at the shelter, that’s a spot where known drug dealers hang out. Steven Martin suspects that's why the officers let her out there, along with trying to embarrass her with people witnessing her leaving a police car in cuffs.

"Say a drug dealer goes by and they see her getting out of the back of that car would just be even more shameful, they're like 'Hey, should we trust her now?' The first thing they'll think is 'Maybe she's ratting us out,'" explains Martin.

After they uncuffed her, Diane says the officers gave her a notice written entirely in French. When she asked them what it was, she said they told her to "Figure it out" - this time speaking English.

Four months later, she received a second notice, this time in French and English, indicating that she was being fined $757 - $500 for the initial charge, plus a $257 late fee - for "having participated in a fight or another act of physical violence on public property or in an area adjacent to public property."

When she got someone from the shelter to translate the charges - the only part of the notice not translated to English - she was even more upset.

"I wasn't being violent, but it made it sound like I was assaulting people or something," Diane says, distressed. 

Diane has had run-ins with police officers back when she lived in Edmonton. In all her dealings with police, including being arrested, she says she hadn't felt disrespected until dealing with SPVM officers. "I had never been racially profiled until then, and it was very demeaning," Diane.

Martin suggests Diane take her story to court. 

"The judge will rule in your favour anyways. I mean, you didn't do nothing wrong," he advises, then begins to tell me about his own recent interactions with the SPVM.

"Let me go. Let me up. I can't breathe."

Steven Martin is Mi'kmaq from Burnt Church New Brunswick and has lived in Montreal on and off for about ten years. He's well-travelled, open about his drug use, adventurous, and outspoken.

"Racial profiling happens. I guess it's the Montreal police, they will not speak English to me. Me, I get upset. I'm not like Diane. Me, I will tell them to fuck off, talk to me in English, and if you don't talk to me in English, I have no understanding," he says. 

Martin has also faced an instance where he was sitting on public property and officers made him move. In early 2024, Martin was sitting at Peace Park on Saint-Laurent Boulevard with a group of Indigenous people. SPVM officers approached his group and told them they were not allowed to sit there, even though there was another group of non-Indigenous people sitting in the same park.

He says he told the officers, "'I don't see no goddamn sign here [saying we can't sit here]. I only speak English. I don't speak French and you guys are talking amongst each other. So how do I know what you guys are going to do to me?"

An officer asked Martin for his ID, which he explained he left at the shelter. The officer said they would arrest him for not having his ID on him. Martin replied:

"Arrest me. I don't care. I'm not doing no wrong. I'm just sitting here. Why do you guys want to arrest me?' 'Because you have no ID', [they replied]. So I was like, 'arrest me because I have no ID.'"

The officers put him in handcuffs and put him in the back of the police vehicle, and did the same thing they did to Diane: dropped him off about a block away, near where drug dealers were known to operate, and passersby could see him getting out of the car in cuffs.

"I'm yelling in the back of the car, everybody's looking at me. And I call them all a bunch of fucking asshole cocksuckers who fucking racially profile me. And they're laughing at me," explains Martin, agitated at the memory. 

"Them saying I needed my ID or I was going to get arrested, that's why I flipped out, because I know I'm not breaking no laws," says Martin.

In August 2024, Martin got into a fight with someone in the Plateau-Mont-Royal. Injured and limping away, he made it to the corner of Sherbrooke and Saint-Urbain. He said he was concussed and had injured ribs. Someone who saw him called the police.

He says the cops threw him to the ground and cuffed his hands behind his back. Lying prone on his back, with an officer sitting on his legs, he recounts that the cops begin to put pressure on his injuries.

"One cop puts his knee in my chest where my ribs are fucked up," he puts his arm on his left ribcage, "the other cop puts his knee in my head where I have a concussion" he presses his other hand against the side of his head, stretching and twisting his body. "I'm yelling, and I'm screaming and all of a sudden I pass out," Martin re-enacts the scene, going limp in his chair and closing his eyes.

He says he was awoken by someone putting pressure on a point in his upper back.

"I start freaking out again. I said 'What the fuck are you guys doing! I got bad ribs, I got a concussion, what the fuck are you doing!' All of a sudden, again, cop puts his knee in my chest, the other one puts his knee in my fucking head. And I collapse again. I pass out from the pain," he says.

This cycle repeated again, and Martin told the officers, "Let me go. Let me up. I can't breathe."

"Now I'm delusional because of the pain and because I don't know what the hell is going on. I look up and the cop goes, 'Want me to do that again?' I said, 'You guys are putting me through so much shit now. I don't give a fuck anymore. Just do it again. I don't care.' All of a sudden the ambulance comes. So now everybody backs away from me to make it look good. I tell the ambulance driver, I say, 'They just fucked me up.'"

There was no follow-up to this incident.

Without an event number, exact date or a direct witness, the SPVM precinct involved said they could not offer confirmation that there was a police response involving Steven Martin at that location in August 2024. La Converse is in the process of investigating this incident further. 

About a month later, Martin had another interaction with SPVM officers in a Plateau alleyway, where they accused him of urinating in public, something he denies. They told him they would fine him for public urination and told him "to sit right down" where they thought he urinated.

"You want to belittle me and make me sit somewhere where you think I pissed? I said, 'You can all go fuck yourselves,'" says Martin. 

An intervention worker from the shelter confirmed this incident.

The police did not end up fining him. 

"I'd rather get hit in the face than have to call the police"

Marie*, an intervention worker who works at a shelter serving Indigenous clients in Montreal, says she's heard and witnessed many stories like Steven's and Diane's: police refusing to speak English, using excessive force, putting Indigenous people in cuffs and dropping them off nearby, and issuing seemingly irrelevant fines. 

Where Marie* works, calling the police is a measure of last resort when the safety of the workers and other residents is seriously at risk. Marie* would prefer to call Urgences psycho-social, but if the individual experiencing a mental health crisis is deemed "aggressive" then they are told to call the police.

"I'd rather get hit in the face, straight up, than have to call the police," she says.

"Anytime you have to call the officers, you'll see people get dragged on the ground, not a response you should have at any point. If you're two big men who can carry somebody, you can put them in the car properly. I've seen people get kicked, tasered… Why is it that police go to violence and lethal means so quickly when it comes to [these] community members?" says Marie*, upset.

She says many of the shelters residents' violence stems from trauma and addictions, and require mental health intervention, not police violence. While Marie* says she has encountered some "good police officers", she says it's impossible to know what kind of response they'll get, leading to the Indigenous residents being wary of police uniforms.

"Here, they're on the defensive, they're going to try to protect their own. They're going to try to make sure that whatever happened to the people that got killed that got assaulted doesn't happen with them," says Marie.*

In an email to La Converse, the SPVM stated that they do not usually comment on specific police interventions to 'prevent any influence on an eventual legal, ethical or disciplinary process' (translated from French). They did note that police officers are expected to have a 'functional level' of spoken English. When told that there were multiple testimonies of Indigenous people being spoken to exclusively in French and being cuffed and let out blocks away in front of known drug dealers, the SPVM stated: "After verifying, no incident of this nature was reported to us."

Why do we use the tasers, why are we using the guns, why are we not trying dialogue ?

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In January, the trial began for SPVM officer Williams Bélanger at Montreal's superior court. He was charged with assaulting Johnny Inukpak Tukaluk, a homeless Inuit man, in the Plateau in May 2022. Bélanger was charged with assault following an investigation by Quebec’s police oversight agency, the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes (BEI). Since 2018, BEI investigations are automatically triggered when the victim or the plaintiff is Indigenous.

Tukalak died of an overdose last fall before the trial began, but friends and intervention workers said he had brain damage after Bélanger allegedly pushed him and smashed his head on the concrete. 

La Converse met Sonya Gagnier of Native Para-Judicial Services of Quebec (SPAQ) at the first part of Williams Bélanger's trial, which will resume in March. A Mohawk from Kahnesatake, Gagnier and her Algonquin coworker Frank Wabbie attended the trial as part of SPAQ's mandate. Their job is to provide support to Indigenous people navigating the justice system and ensure their rights are protected. 

Gagnier said cases like Tukaluk’s are a huge setback to Indigenous-police relationships. 

"When something happens to one [Indigenous person] it affects all. They're like, 'police are evil, they killed my friend, they hurt my friend," says Gagnier.

Gagnier and Wabbie are responsible for all of SPAQ's clients in Montreal and Saint-Jerôme. Gagnier estimates they handle around 800 Indigenous clients facing legal issues between the two of them. Many of them are unhoused. When La Converse interviewed her at the Montreal SPAQ's headquarters. Gagnier's phone rang frequently, and she had to pause occasionally to take phone calls from clients who she had been trying to get ahold of for a while.

Gagnier says the disproportionate homeless Indigenous population is due to compounding factors. A lack of jobs and housing in communities draws people down south - and a history of colonialism, trauma and addictions, compounded by culture shock and a housing shortage can land them on the streets. Gagnier says many of her clients are stuck in a "revolving door" between court, prison and the streets. Often release conditions involve not consuming alcohol, going to a treatment program, and staying out of trouble - which is difficult to do when resources are stretched. 

"The court wants them in a closed therapy, and if they can't have that, and they don't have certain securities like a stable place to stay, they end up being put in jail because they can't meet the request of the court. So we stay stuck at square one, the client goes back to jail and just sits there and waits until his trial," explains Gagnier.

Gagnier says Montreal's limited addiction and rehabilitation services lack culturally appropriate treatment for First Nations and Inuit people, and the ones that have space are not comprehensive enough. 

"If they've been drinking since they were 16 years old and now they're 45, six weeks is not cutting the mustard. We all know that that's just to appease the court to an extent, and is it really helping the person at the end of the day?" says Gagnier.

This year, local organizations reported an increase in the number of Indigenous individuals without safe shelter, says Gagnier. According to SPAQ's data, the homeless population in Montreal went from 3,000 people to 5,000 between 2016-2025. In 2022, Indigenous people made up 13 percent of Montreal's homeless population, despite constituting only about 2.5 percent of Quebec's population. This growth in the Indigenous homeless population is putting increased pressure on services like SPAQ and First Peoples' Justice Centre of Montreal - and frontline intervention workers.

"Everybody's burning out because they're stretched to the max… We hear people's life stories and their traumas, we're absorbing it and we have no debriefing," she says. 

Gagnier has tried to find a compromise with the courts to detain clients until they have a spot open at a treatment facility. She's also asked lawyers to ensure they fully understand the conditions of their release, which are recited to them in French, often to no avail.  

"I've broken down in tears in front of the judge a few times trying to express how much of a frustration it all is to fix," laments Gagnier.

Gagnier says homeless Indigenous people are more likely to have interactions with police and the justice system - and they often get volatile, quickly. 

"Yes, our clients do lose their temper. But there are ways to deal with that without having to resort to forceful tactics. The police officers are trained well enough, you hear them bragging about knowing how to do pressure points [to submit someone], so why don't you use it then? Why do we use the tasers, why are we using the guns, why are we not trying dialogue, why are we not saying 'Calm down, this is why I'm arresting you,'" says Gagnier.

No Indigenous organizations consulted

While the SPVM declined repeated interview requests, they noted via email that they offer evolving training programs for their officers. 

"Since his arrival as head of the SPVM [in December 2022], Chief Dagher has committed to fight against discrimination in all its forms… Is everything the SPVM does perfect? No. There will always be room for improvement," said SPVM communications representative Caroline Labelle in an email.

The SPVM has a counsellor in community development and an Indigenous liaison officer who act as a link between community organizations and the SPVM, and train officers. 

New recruits are getting more on-the-ground training via the SPVM's Immersion MTL program, an initiative by police chief Fady Dagher implemented in August 2022. Over five weeks, officers-in-training accompany intervention workers to learn how to handle situations with people experiencing homelessness and mental health issues. 

At the École Nationale de la Police du Québec (ENPQ), where police officers in Quebec get their initial training, they've increased the hours in training about racial profiling and Indigenous realities. Indigenous organizations like Femmes autochtones Québec and SPAQ come in to train officers at all stages of their careers.

"Over the course of their careers, it's important to have continued training and reminders, especially on social issues," Véronique Brunet, head of ENPQ's communications department, told La Converse in a phone interview.

In 2023, the ENPQ launched new training programs for current officers specifically on racial profiling and unconscious biases.

La Converse submitted an access to information request to find out more about this new training. The actual program content was protected by intellectual property law. However, we obtained the names of organizations and people who participated in the development of the program or who were consulted in its development. No Indigenous organizations were listed. 

When asked why no Indigenous organizations were listed, they said:

"The content of the training program on racism and racial and social profiling mus meet the general objectives that were established previously with partners (ENPQ, MSP, CDPDJ, Commissaire à la déontologie policière. That's the reason why there are not members of Indigenous communities listed in the collaborators who participated in the development of the capsules."

They did not indicate if any of the individuals listed were Indigenous.

The ENPQ's initial training program incorporates 11 hours of teaching on "diversity, profiling and Indigenous realities," which includes "diverse training activities, simulated scenarios, police outings and in-class reflections." 

Brunet says students practice responding to simulated conflicts to hone their skills with what she calls "active training."

"The most enriching part of that experience is not only to see the trainee in action, but also the reflection that's done afterwards to evaluate their response," said Brunet.

But that's not the same as live-on-the-ground action. After experiencing Immersion MTL, in Jesse Feith's Montreal Gazette article, a 23-year-old recruit said:

“I think we were a bit coddled in CEGEP and police school. We didn’t see the reality we’ll be working with.”

“They’re not training them properly”

The ENPQ and SPVM both said that they are open to dialogue with Indigenous people and intervention workers. However, dialogue has been stalled of late, say community advocates.

Advocates have been requesting an end to the practice of street checks, where an officer stops a citizen to ask them for information without cause for years. While Chief of SPVM Fady Dagher has acknowledged the existence of systemic racism, he still refuses to ban street checks, but implemented a policy that they would be done in a non-discriminatory way. But that's not possible by their nature, according to multiple studies. 

In 2021, Indigenous people were six times more likely to be street checked than white people, increasing the frequency of their interactions with police. 

The city of Montreal held a public assembly in December on the practice of street checks. Two groups of researchers deemed the practice racist and citizens who showed up to the assembly decried the practice. The SPVM did not have a representative at the assembly - although they had officers stationed outside. 

Gagnier says that while she sees a future of collaboration with police, she doesn't think the current training model is working.

"They have a great team at the SPVM right now that's really trying hard," she says.

While Immersion MTL seems like a step in the right direction, only new recruits are getting that five-week training.

"The training models are kind of boring and they keep coming back with the same thing," says Gagnier, who has led Indigenous sensitivity training sessions.

"Some of the officers have done this training over and over again and you can see it in their face, like 'Oh here we go, they're gonna talk about smudging…"

"Police need to do the intervention work at the shelters with the intervention workers, they should be doing hands-on training, in the field training. They need to spend time with these people. I would even go as far as maybe sending them up north for a while for a month to spend time with the Inuit and their way of life so they have a good understanding on how to help them here," says Gagnier.

Gagnier says, like intervention and frontline workers, police officers need mental health support and rest.

"They shouldn't be left on the beat too long, they should have something else to do that's not so hard and intense. They're human like anybody else. It's not going to excuse the actions that they decide to take if they're bad, but they need to be able to vocalize that they're at their breaking point," she explains.

Marie* says police culture needs to change and repercussions for excessive use of force need to go beyond paid suspension and apologies. 

"Some officers have come to me and told me that they disagree with how things went, or they heard about what happened and that they're sorry. The thing is, they're never going to go to the officer that did it and say 'That was too much you were too violent, you shouldn't have grabbed her like that, she needed mental health support and you were violent.' Nobody's speaking up," says Marie*.

Marie* also says the shelter needs more mental health and addiction support workers. If officers could come in plainclothes, accompanied by a mental health support team, that might provide a better response.

"A lot of the time, people are acting out because they're going through something so emotionally  taxing that they don't know how to express it," says Marie*. 

"My ideal would be never having to deal with the police."

The minister of public security François Bonnardel and Indigenous affairs minister and ex-police officer Ian Lafrenière declined to be interviewed for this story. 

‍If you want to share your story about the SPVM, please contact emelia@laconverse.com.