A Black former RCMP officer is filing racial profiling complaints against two Quebec police services.
Maurice Carvery, alongside the Montreal advocacy group Red Coalition, is filing complaints to the province’s police ethics and human rights commissions over the alleged actions of Quebec provincial police and Longueuil police. They are also asking the province’s domestic security minister to investigate.
The event at the heart of the complaint is an altercation that took place while Carvery was on a visit to Montreal on July 24.
Carvery says he was smoking outside a restaurant in Longueuil, on the south shore of the city, when an officer walked up to him and asked him for identification.
“He walked in a very deliberate manner straight towards me, ignoring anything that may have may or may not have been going around in his peripheral or his periphery,” said Carvery.
At first, the officer did not give a reason for the request, and Carvery refused to identify himself, he said. More officers approached.
“They were coming from all angles … I was starting to be flanked,” he said.
Another officer told him he was violating a municipal smoking bylaw by smoking too close to the restaurant. Yet the area he was smoking in was littered with cigarette butts, and Carvery had often seen people gather to smoke there, he said.
He continued questioning the officers on why they had asked for his identity, remaining courteous and trying to leave, he said. More officers approached from both the Longueuil municipal police force and the Quebec provincial force, until there were eleven officers around him, he said.
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“In my mind, I took a mental note: this is going sideways very fast, and they’re not de-escalating at all, despite the fact that I made every effort within my ability to de-escalate,” he said.
At this point, he said an officer pointed a taser at him.
“She pointed a weapon at me when I offered no resistance. I was not being combative. I was not being threatening,” he said.
He said he continued calmly pushing back against the officers’ requests and trying to leave, as they had not put him under arrest.
“(I said) ‘Please, have a good night.’ In other words, ‘Please, leave me alone,’” he recalled.
But shortly after, he alleges the officers jumped on him, handcuffed him, and threw him to the ground.
It was only when Carvery’s friend, who was with him that night, told the officers they were former RCMP officers that they let him go, he said.
But during that time, one officer took Carvery’s phone and deleted parts of the videos he had taken of the interaction, he alleged.
A video taken by Carvery’s friend, which The Canadian Press has viewed, shows Carvery calmly speaking to police as they have him in handcuffs. After they have led him to their car, he can be heard raising his voice, telling them he is a former RCMP officer.
The video does not show the start of the incident.
Carvery said the officers eventually let him go without getting into the police car. He said he was never told he was under arrest and has not been charged with anything.
The two police forces declined to comment on Carvery’s allegations, but Longueuil police confirmed an intervention had happened.
“The Longueuil police service takes seriously any concerns expressed regarding the police interventions of its members,” wrote the spokesperson.
This was not a first for Carvery. About five years ago, he said an officer had asked him for identification outside that same Longueuil restaurant.
At the time, he said he met with then-Longueuil police chief Fady Dagher, who apologized for what happened.
“I was under the impression that it wouldn’t happen again,” he said.
Alain Babineau, director of racial profiling and public safety for the group filing the complaints with Carvery, said they want to make sure the police forces address their concerns.
“It’s not a unique case. I mean, twice the same person? You can imagine that he’s not the only one that’s being harassed,” he said.
To him, the claim that Carvery was violating a smoking bylaw doesn’t hold water.
“Police cannot simply ask people to identify themselves for no reason. That doesn’t work. And so there’s no legal requirement for people to reply to that, to comply. That’s number 1,” he said.
“Then they pulled out this idea of a bylaw violation — they used that as a pretext to get his identification.”
Carvery believes the incidents were racially biased, and said he hopes to see real sanctions and accountability within police to fight this type of racial profiling.
“There’s no amount of training that can fix that type of mentality, because (the officers) did not see me as an intelligent man who spoke to the law and perhaps knew it, obviously, better than they did,” he said.