Repentigny Police and Police Ethics: When Every Institution Passes the Buck

Police Ethics Commissioner, Administrative Tribunal, Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes, DPCP: on paper, everything is in place to protect citizens from police abuse. In practice, each institution has a good reason to pass the ball to the next. An analysis of a structural conflict of interest — and the announcement of an investigative series into the Repentigny police.

On paper, Quebec citizens are well protected against police abuse. There is a Police Ethics Commissioner, an Administrative Police Ethics Tribunal, a Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes for serious cases, and behind them the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions. Each institution has a clear mandate and real powers. The problem is not that they exist. The problem is that they all live in the same house — a house built so that the ball can pass from hand to hand without anyone, ever, catching it.

I — The mechanism

A funnel built to filter, not to decide

Start with the mechanics. When you want to file a complaint against a police officer for an “ordinary” failing — abuse of power, contemptuous remarks, an abusive search — your complaint goes to the Commissioner, who decides whether to filter it, send it to conciliation, or investigate. The figures published by the Commissioner himself are telling: between 2016 and 2021, two out of every three complaints received were rejected, and among those deemed admissible, four out of five were sent to conciliation — a confidential meeting where the complainant sits down with the very officer they are accusing.

Very few files reach an actual citation before the Tribunal, and fewer still lead to a sanction. This is not a glitch. It is the design of the system: a funnel whose primary function is to reduce the number of files, not to resolve them.

II — The oversight

When the Tribunal has to correct the Commissioner

And when the filter lets too little through, who says so? The Tribunal itself. Columnist Alexandre Popovic, in Pivot, has documented several recent decisions in which the Administrative Police Ethics Tribunal overruled the Commissioner and ordered him to cite officers he had refused to prosecute — faulting the Commissioner, in one case, for setting aside decisive elements of his own investigation, and in another, for misunderstanding the very question he was meant to answer. In other words: the body charged with deciding who deserves to be prosecuted is regularly corrected on what it lets slide.

III — Serious cases

The BEI: a new sign on the door, the same people in the room

For the most serious cases — a citizen killed, seriously injured, or struck by a police firearm — the file moves to the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes. The BEI was created in 2016 precisely to end an untenable practice: police investigating other police. Yet half of its investigators are former police officers. In nearly all of its investigations, the BEI relies on support services from other police forces — SQ, SPVM, SPVQ. The Sûreté du Québec even takes part in the process of appointing its investigators. The sign above the door has changed; the people in the room have not.

The result is a figure every citizen should know. As reported by journalist Stéphanie Grammond in La Presse, since its creation the BEI has opened nearly 450 independent investigations. Two led to a charge by the DPCP. None resulted in the conviction of a police officer.

We will be told, rightly, that many of these investigations are triggered automatically whenever a death occurs during an intervention, even when the officer bears no responsibility. Fair enough. But two charges and zero convictions in nearly a decade eventually raises a question the Ligue des droits et libertés set down in black and white in its December 2025 report: does the closeness between the DPCP and the police world — these prosecutors and investigators who work hand in hand every day — really allow for impartial decisions when the time comes to charge one of their own?

IV — The common thread

A conflict of interest built into the structure

The common thread in all of this is the structural conflict of interest. The Commissioner, the Tribunal, and the BEI all report, in one way or another, to the Minister of Public Security — the same minister responsible for the Sûreté du Québec. The new Commissioner appointed in April 2025 is an insider who had worked within the organization for ten years. And since the 2023 reform, citizens have actually lost ground: third parties — witnesses, rights-advocacy groups — can no longer file a genuine complaint, only a “report” with no right of review, and appeals as of right to the Court of Québec have been abolished. The doors were tightened at the very moment they should have been opened.

The investigation to come

We could stop at theory. We chose to prove it.

Everything above has been heard for years, in the form of statistics and reports. What those reports never show is what it actually means in the life of a single person who knocks on all these doors. That is exactly what our next investigative series, published in several parts, will document: the story of a Repentigny citizen to whom no institution — none — delivered justice, not out of isolated malice, but because each had a good reason to pass the ball to the next.

This is a vulnerable person: neurodivergent, with autism. And the case is not about a few misplaced words. For several years, this person was targeted by the Repentigny police service. Excessive arrests, acts of harassment by officers, and even the deployment of the tactical squad and armored vehicles to their home. Yet after all those years and all those interventions, not a single arrest held up, and no charge was ever laid against them. The sheer disproportion raises a question of its own: why deploy such force against a person who, in the end, is accused of nothing?

And when this person tried, in turn, to assert their rights, they hit a wall. On three separate occasions, on three different dates, they came to the station to file a complaint — with documentation supporting physical threats made against them. On each of these three visits, the same officer refused to take the complaint, and on each the citizen recorded the exchange in order to hand it over to police ethics. It is from these recordings that the following remarks by this officer are drawn — an officer whose identity will be revealed in our investigation. The first, she let slip at the exact moment she realized she was being recorded:

That is not the only sentence the recordings preserved. In front of a witness, the same officer also made plain to the citizen, without mincing words, that she would not take the complaint:

And it is not just one officer. On another day, weeks apart, a different officer received the citizen who had come to file a complaint. Before even hearing their side, he sized them up out loud:

The officer then demanded proof of the citizen’s Tourette syndrome, and warned them that, going forward, they had better keep on hand the papers attesting to their disability if they did not want further trouble.

Repeated visits, on different dates, spread over weeks; two different officers. This is not one person’s isolated slip on a bad day: it is repeated treatment, reserved for one and the same vulnerable citizen — and captured on tape every time.

To obtain the mere right to file their complaint, this person was then forced to prove their neurodivergence with documentation and to meet with mental-health workers. Their complaint was refused again and again. When it was finally accepted, a conflict of interest arose — the targeted police force could not investigate itself — and the file sat without an investigation for months before being transferred to the Montreal DPCP.

The DPCP declined to lay charges. The reason? The Repentigny police had not conducted the investigation — precisely because of that conflict of interest. The circle had closed on itself, and the citizen was left with nothing.

And the Repentigny case is only a point of entry. Our investigation will go much further: piece by piece, it will establish the link between all these institutions across several files. The file of this neurodivergent person will be documented in full — and nothing in it will be asserted without proof.

You will see the pieces themselves, spread over a period of four years: every email exchanged between DPCP management — the director, the deputy director — and the Repentigny police investigators; the recordings made at the DPCP office and at the Joliette courthouse; the emails and recordings of the Crown prosecutors who turned the file down; the emails from police ethics; the decisions of the Quebec Ombudsman; the decisions of the Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission; the decisions of the DPCP; the decisions of the judiciary and the judgments themselves. Each ball passed from one institution to the next, each closing with the same sentence: this is not our area of expertise, there is nothing we can do. Every piece will be there, so that you can draw your own conclusions.

We will name them all, without exception, with the precise reasons each gave for doing nothing: the police services, the Sûreté du Québec, UPAC, the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions, the Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission, the Quebec Ombudsman, the Quebec Bar, the Bar syndic, the review offices, the Office des professions, the police ethics system — all the way up to the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Public Security. The failings you will see are breathtaking.