In Defence of Police Officers — by Alain Babineau

For a police force held to the standard of its own mandate — the guarantee of social peace

Declaring oneself in favour of the police is not the same thing as supporting the police unconditionally, no matter how serious its failures. This text defends the first proposition and categorically rejects the second. To be pro-police, in a sense worth defending publicly, is to be pro-good police: a force that is competent, disciplined, respectful of fundamental rights, and aware that every one of its actions engages the collective trust placed in the profession as a whole.

I write from three vantage points that, most of the time, do not coexist in a single career. I wore the uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for more than twenty-eight years, several of them as a staff sergeant responsible for the direct supervision of operational teams — a role that taught me that a conduct problem is never resolved by after-the-fact sanction alone, but through the continuous management of each team member’s judgment. I was also an interviewer and recruiter, tasked with assessing the temperament and discernment of candidates before they were entrusted with a badge and a firearm.

Since retiring, I have been active on racial profiling files, which has put me in direct and repeated contact with how targeted communities experience — and judge — police work day to day.

These three angles of observation converge on a single conclusion, and it is that conclusion this text defends.

I. Racial profiling and « anti-police profiling » : the same mechanics of generalization

Racial profiling rests on a faulty line of reasoning that Quebec and Canadian case law has now clearly circumscribed: a person’s membership in a racialized group serves as the basis, explicit or latent, for a presumption of dangerousness or criminality, independent of any behaviour actually observed in that specific person. From R. v. Le (2019 SCC 34) to Luamba v. Attorney General of Quebec (2022 QCCS 3866, substantially upheld in 2024 QCCA 1387, currently under reserve before the Supreme Court), the courts have documented how this abusive generalization undermines trust in police institutions and produces real, measurable harm to those it targets.

There exists a structurally related — though legally distinct — line of reasoning that might be called « anti-police profiling »: attributing to all members of a police service a presumption of dishonesty, brutality or bad faith, on the basis of the conduct of a subset of its officers. In both cases the logical error is the same: generalizing the « badness » attributed to an individual outward to an entire group of belonging.

One must nonetheless guard against treating the two phenomena as fully equivalent, and intellectual rigour demands as much. Racial profiling targets a protected and immutable ground within the meaning of section 10 of the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms (CQLR c. C-12) — a person chooses neither their race nor their ethnic origin.

Membership in a police service, by contrast, is a chosen occupation, accompanied by professional status, remuneration, training, and a duty to account before the Police Ethics Commissioner and the disciplinary tribunals. This distinction does not dissolve the parallel; it clarifies its scope.

Anti-police profiling remains an error of collective reasoning — but it is an error the profession itself has the power, and the duty, to prevent, by refusing to let the behaviours that feed it take root.

II. Three illuminations of a single dynamic

A. The dismantling of neighbourhood station 39 (SPVM, Montréal-Nord, June 2026)

The file concerning the night patrol team at Station 39, disbanded in June 2026, belongs to an institutional arc that reaches back to the Springate report (1965) and runs through the Anthony Griffin case (1987), the Marcellus François case (coroner Yarosky’s report, 1992), and the findings of the Armony-Hassaoui-Mulone report (2019) and the Gaudreault report (2020).

Whether one regards the June 2026 dismantling as a belated corrective measure or an insufficient one, it illustrates a truth this text seeks to bring into focus: when a police unit develops interception or profiling practices that eventually require structural intervention, it is the entire police service — including officers who, elsewhere in that same service, do their work with rigour and restraint — that inherits the discredit.

B. The Ville de Mercier police officer and the Black motorist

On 16 July 2026, TVA Nouvelles reported that an officer of the Ville de Mercier police service had invited a Black motorist, during a traffic stop, to « leave » Canada if he was not satisfied with it.

Such a comment, if it occurred as reported, falls under no legal provision, no legitimate exercise of discretion, and has strictly nothing to do with the road safety that justified the stop.

It is a personal value judgment, delivered with the authority and the uniform of the state, directed at a person whose national belonging has never been and will never be within the intercepting officer’s purview.

C. The officer insulted during an intervention over non-compliant tinted windows (SPVM)

In June 2025, an officer of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) stopped a motorist whose windows did not meet the standards set out in the Highway Safety Code (CQLR c. C-24.2) and issued him a $186 ticket.

The man filmed himself bombarding her with sexual and misogynistic insults — remarks the SPVM itself would later describe as « misogynistic and degrading ». The officer completed her intervention without reacting. Left online, the video went viral in March 2026; SPVM chief Fady Dagher called it repugnant and linked it to the masculinist movement, while publicly commending the officer’s professional restraint.

This episode illuminates, in the negative, the same terrain as anti-police profiling. The motorist in question — a repeat offender before several municipal courts in the Montreal region — publicly claims to be a victim of « racial and social profiling » to justify his conduct, turning against the institution a vocabulary this text seeks precisely to reserve for cases where it genuinely applies.

On 20 July 2026, the SPVM arrested him and laid three counts of defamatory libel against two officers and one female officer.

One notable point: unlike cities such as Québec City or Longueuil, no municipal by-law in Montreal prohibits insulting police officers in the performance of their duties — a gap the Fraternité des policiers et policières de Montréal, along with the Parti Québécois, have since called on the city to close.

This case illustrates, in contrast to the two preceding ones, what the norm ought to be: irreproachable professional conduct, including under extreme provocation — and it is a reminder that the legitimacy of demanding more from the police holds only if the public, for its part, extends to the police the elementary respect owed to their function.

III. A profession that is paid, trained and vested with exceptional powers

Police officers are not ordinary citizens holding an ordinary job. They are professionals paid on the scale of the best-protected occupations in the public service, trained at the École nationale de police du Québec, subject to the Code of Ethics of Québec Police Officers (CQLR c. P-13.1, r. 1), and vested with powers no other social actor holds: the power to arrest, to detain, to use force, and — by their mere presence — to create or dispel fear.

The law recognizes this asymmetry: sections 25 and 26 of the Criminal Code grant peace officers a justification for the use of force that exists for no other citizen.

Power of that magnitude logically calls for a higher standard — the same principle that governs other professions holding fiduciary power (lawyers, physicians), with this difference: the police officer, unlike the lawyer or the physician, exercises a power of immediate physical constraint over the person.

The opposite reasoning — the one that would have a salary, a strong union and an institutional presumption of good faith lower rather than raise the threshold of accountability — inverts the very logic of the social contract on which police authority rests.

Police recruitment, as I practised it as an interviewer, does not primarily seek to measure knowledge of the Criminal Code — that is taught, and tested, at the police academy.

It seeks to measure judgment under pressure, the capacity to absorb a provocation without responding in kind, and the absence of prejudices liable to colour a decision to intervene.

These are precisely the qualities the officer in case C demonstrated under extreme provocation, and whose absence cost the officer in case B dearly.

A rigorous selection process guarantees nothing for life; it must be paired, throughout a career, with constant supervision.

As a supervisor, I learned that a unit does not develop problematic interception practices overnight: those practices settle in gradually, under the eye of a chain of command that either does not document them, or documents them without acting on them.

The dismantling of Station 39 in June 2026, whatever its merits as a corrective measure, therefore raises a management question as unavoidable as the substantive one: why did the situation have to reach that point before structural intervention was deemed necessary?

Conscientious front-line supervision — performance evaluations that are acted upon, mentorship, early flagging of patterns of disproportionate interception — generally costs far less, on every measure, than a highly publicized dismantling decades later.

IV. Social peace as the ultimate measure

The principle of policing by consent, set out as early as 1829 in the principles attributed to Sir Robert Peel, remains the cornerstone of any legitimate theory of law enforcement in a liberal democracy: the police can function effectively only to the extent that the population extends its cooperation, which depends directly on the trust it places in them.

That trust is not an optional moral bonus; it is an operational condition of police effectiveness itself. A witness who hesitates to cooperate, a complainant who gives up on filing, a young person who associates the uniform with humiliation rather than protection — that is the concrete price of eroded trust.

This is where the loop closes: every behaviour that discredits the profession — whether systemic profiling documented over several decades or a contemptuous remark thrown at a motorist because of the colour of his skin — feeds the generalizing reasoning of « anti-police profiling », to the detriment of the officers of integrity who bear its consequences collectively.

Conversely, the professional restraint shown by the officer insulted over a simple tinted-window check is a reminder that the standard set out here is neither abstract nor out of reach: it is already practised, every day, by the silent majority of police officers.

Social peace is not threatened by criticism of the police; it is threatened by the behaviours that make such criticism inevitable — and it benefits from every behaviour that, conversely, makes it undeserved.

V. What a community advocate sees, what a manager sees

My work with the Red Coalition has me hearing, week after week, accounts of how a single botched intervention can wipe out, in the eyes of an entire community, years of otherwise conscientious police work.

This observation does not contradict my experience as a manager; it mirrors it. A manager who ignores the cumulative effect of a few badly handled files on the reputation of an entire unit commits the same error of appreciation as a recruitment system that measures only individual compliance with the rules, without measuring the collective effect of their occasional violation.

In both cases the blind spot is identical — and there is nothing intractable about it. It requires only that we stop treating the collective reputation of the profession as acceptable collateral damage of tolerance toward a few individual failures.

Conclusion

It is to demand of the police the rigour that its exceptional power commands — precisely because one wishes it to earn, and to keep, the trust without which its mandate becomes impossible to carry out.

That is what the uniform I wore, the candidates I assessed, and the communities I work alongside today have each taught me, in their own way.