Montréal – The Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) is concerned by Montréal’s announcement of a new police powers package today.
The package introduces new fines for anyone who insults police officers, more delays before concrete action by the City on the Montreal Police Service (SPVM)’s street checks program, and significant funding for body worn cameras and controversial surveillance tools.
“By announcing new police powers and surveillance capabilities while refusing to act on well-documented problems of systemic racism and racial profiling within the SPVM, the City is compounding existing problems,” said Anaïs Bussières McNicoll, Québec Spokesperson and Fundamental Freedoms Director at the CCLA.
Police officers and other municipal employees, like everyone else in Québec, should be able to perform their duties in an environment where they are not threatened. That is why the Criminal Code already prohibits uttering threats, intimidation and criminal harassment.
The concept of an insult, however, is much broader than that of a threat. It can encompass a wide range of expressions that, while rude or in poor taste, are non-threatening and constitutionally protected.
“Allowing police officers to fine people for insulting yet non-threatening expression greatly exacerbates the power imbalance between law enforcement and the public,” Bussières McNicoll added. “This new power risks leading to arbitrary, even discriminatory, enforcement against racialized groups that are already subjected to over policing, particularly Black, Indigenous, and Arab communities.”
The City also announced today that, instead of finally taking a stand against the discriminatory practice of street checks, it will task the Public Safety Commission with assessing the implementation of the SPVM’s latest policies on the practice. But independent researchers have already concluded that only a complete moratorium on street checks would be an adequate response to the issues of systemic racism and racial profiling that persist within this institution.
“Researchers commissioned by the SPVM itself have already spoken out—not once, but three times—against street checks,” Bussières McNicoll continued. “Once again, the City is failing to take decisive action.”
The City also announced it will be equipping its police officers with body worn cameras as an accountability measure and its police cars with controversial automated surveillance tools. Both of these proposals present hazards if not accompanied with strict external rules governing their use.
Just weeks after removing a controversial automated license plate reader camera from a public road, the City will be equipping all Montréal police cars with the problematic AI cameras. The technology is facing for leading to inappropriate traffic stops and even arrests after misreading license plates.
“Binding rules and independent scrutiny governing the adoption and use of AI surveillance tools is urgently needed to ensure these tools are operated in a way that is proportionate and effectively shields people from being subjected to the criminal justice system based on unreliable AI”, said Tamir Israel, Director of CCLA’s Privacy, Surveillance & Technology program.
Body worn cameras are intended to be a police accountability tool, but that the technology’s impact on accountability is limited in the absence of rigorous independent controls governing when cameras must be activated, how footage is controlled, and how it becomes integrated with other police accountability measures. At the same time, police are increasingly transforming these accountability measures into another surveillance tool with live facial recognition and other AI tools already being tested on body worn cameras by police forces in Canada.
“Without concrete and effective restrictions in place, body worn cameras will not only fail to live up to their promise of accountability, but could become yet another vector for heightened surveillance and automated policing”, Israel concluded.
