« You Can’t Clean Up a Rotten Barrel by Removing Sixteen Apples » — Alain Babineau’s Op-ed on the SPVM and Station 39

From 1965 to 2026, the author retraces forty years of documented institutional racism at the SPVM — and explains why sixteen suspensions at Station 39 do not amount to reform.

Alain Babineau, JD/BCL, BA Laws, BA Crim, GDCR — Director of Racial Profiling and Public Safety at the Red Coalition; Director of Advocacy at the BCA Secretariat; retired RCMP staff sergeant and jurist. Text published on LinkedIn on June 12, 2026, reproduced with his permission.

💬 Signed op-ed. Alain Babineau’s contribution to EnDroit.ca’s joint article on SPVM Station 39, reproduced in full and as written. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not engage EnDroit.ca’s editorial position or responsibility. This is a faithful English translation of the French original; the signed French document (downloadable below) remains the version of record.

What is happening at neighbourhood Station 39 in Montreal North shocks some people. Not us. For decades, the Black and racialized communities of Montreal as a whole — and not only the neighbourhood the police themselves nicknamed « Black Montreal » — have documented, denounced and endured the racist cultural conduct of the SPVM. From the death of Anthony Griffin in 1987 to that of Abisay Cruz in March 2025, the problem was never confined to a single station, a single team, or a handful of young officers. What has just been confirmed is not an anomaly. It is a symptom.

• Sixteen officers under investigation for racist and hateful acts during stops (Radio-Canada, June 12, 2026).
• Officers allegedly collected locks of hair cut from people they had apprehended — like trophies. An act of unspeakable symbolic violence.
• Tickets were allegedly issued solely on the basis of citizens’ ethnic origin.

This is racial profiling. This is street harassment with a badge. And it has a name in law: systemic discrimination, prohibited by section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and sections 10 and 12 of Quebec’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

A problem that goes beyond Montreal North: the long history of institutional racism at the SPVM

Let us recall — for those with a convenient amnesia — that the SPVM has, for decades, carried a record that is documented, analyzed and repeatedly condemned. This is not a Station 39 problem. This is not a Montreal North problem. It is a reality experienced by Black and racialized people in every borough of the city, from RDP to NDG, from Saint-Michel to Côte-des-Neiges.

The record of findings begins in 1984, with the CRARR’s first files on profiling and police brutality against Montreal’s Black residents. The Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse (CDPDJ) documented the phenomenon as early as 2011, then again in 2019 in its report on racial profiling and systemic discrimination against racialized youth, concluding that young Black people were stopped up to four times more often than their white peers in certain parts of Montreal. The same year, the Armony, Hassaoui and Mulone report, submitted directly to the SPVM, quantified the gap: in 2017, a Black person in Montreal was 3.9 times more likely to be stopped than a white person, and a young Black man aged 15 to 34, up to 5.3 times more likely. In 2020, the Report of the working group on systemic racism at the SPVM recommended deep reforms: a ban on arbitrary stops, the deployment of body cameras with enforceable protocols, and stronger independent civilian oversight. Those recommendations were only partially implemented. « Partially » is a generous word.

The death of Anthony Griffin, 19, shot in the head by an officer in the parking lot of an NDG police station in 1987, and that of Marcellus François, 24, shot by a tactical squad in 1991 although he was not even the man being sought — coroner Harvey Yarosky would sharply blame the Service and the officer in charge, Sergeant Michel Tremblay — open this record. The Yarosky report (1992) recommended creating a special working group to draft a concrete action plan against racism within the SPCUM. The Corbo report, published the same year by the Working Group on Relations between the Black Communities and the SPCUM, recommended strengthening the initial training of future officers in cultural diversity. Thirty-four years later, Station 39 shows what became of those recommendations. Then came the death of Nicholas Gibbs in 2011 in NDG, of Pierre Coriolan in 2017 in the Plateau-Mont-Royal, of Jean-Pierre Bony in 2016 in Montreal North, of Abisay Cruz in March 2025 in Saint-Michel: these are not isolated incidents occurring in one particular neighbourhood. It is a continuum of institutional violence inflicted on Black bodies across the entire city, by an institution that has never truly been forced to account. Coroner Luc Malouin’s inquest into the death of Pierre Coriolan (2019) said so clearly. The Viens report (2019) said so in another way. The CRARR’s recommendations say so every year. No one in a position to act has been willing to listen.

Any attempt to confine the Station 39 affair to a deviant team, a problem station, or a stigmatized neighbourhood is either a profound ignorance of the SPVM’s institutional history or a deliberate strategy of narrative containment. In either case, it must be refused.

To grasp the depth of the problem, you have to go back further than 2008. In 1965, George Springate — then a Montreal police officer, future Alouettes player, future member of the National Assembly and future citizenship judge — conducted an informal survey of his colleagues on race relations. The result: about a quarter of officers felt that Black people should live in separate neighbourhoods. This finding was never treated as a scandal by the institution. It was received as a data point — troubling, perhaps, but calling nothing into question structurally. That survey did not measure individual deviance. It measured a collective consciousness. And a collective consciousness is not corrected by a disciplinary measure: it requires an institutional transformation, a far costlier and far more threatening project for the police establishment.

Since then, the SPVM — under its successive names, the SPCUM in 1972, then the SPVM in 2002 — has adopted a succession of unifying slogans: « Together to serve better, » the « neighbourhood policing » of the 1990s, and today the Local Development and Reconciliation Plan (PLDR). Each time, the rhetoric advances. Each time, practice on the ground remains essentially unchanged. This is what scholars of critical race theory call a rhetoric of reform deployed to manage political pressure without transforming the structure.

The most damning proof of this practice comes from the SPVM’s own data. In 2008, researcher Mathieu Charest analyzed the Service’s stop register for the 2001–2007 period. The result: 10,000 people were listed there as gang members or sympathizers — while the SPVM itself estimated the real number of gang members on its territory at 500. A twentyfold gap between administrative fiction and operational reality. Those 9,500 excess people were neither arrested nor charged. They were simply recorded, permanently, in a police database, on the basis of criteria — the neighbourhood frequented, a « profile » officers are trained to recognize — that disproportionately strike racialized youth. Such a gap cannot be explained by occasional errors committed by a few isolated officers. It requires a systematic practice, repeated by hundreds of officers over several years, in an institutional environment where racialized youth are presumed suspect by default.

And what the data show, Black officers said out loud, from the inside, for fifty years. In 2006, the National Film Board released « Tolérance Zéro, » in which Édouard Anglade — the first Black officer in Montreal and Quebec, who had nonetheless won a racial-harassment suit against the Service as early as 1988 — testified alongside other Black officers, Florence Darius, Robert Milord and Jean-Ernest Célestin, about the institutional racism experienced within the ranks. In June 2020, nine Black SPVM officers — « the SPVM 9 » — wrote to their union, through the CRARR, to demand recognition of systemic racism and denounce a « culture of silence »; the Fraternité disputed the terminology and declined interviews. In September 2024, Commander Patrice Vilcéus, with thirty years of service, resigned in a four-page letter describing racism as « a cancer eating away at the organization, » citing the research commissioned by the SPVM itself and Judge Dominique Poulin’s conclusion on the « systemic » nature of profiling. The Minister of Public Security’s response? Acknowledging that Vilcéus had « seen certain situations, » while maintaining that he had never believed in the existence of systemic racism at the SPVM. Fifty years, four generations of internal witnesses, and the same response: absorb the criticism, dispute the words, decline the interview, and carry on.

And what we are talking about, since 2008, is not even new for Montreal. The CRARR, founded in 1983, did not merely document individual files: from that era, the racial profile of complaints already pointed to specific patrol sectors. Between 1989 and 1993, two notoriously brutal and racist officers — whom residents of Little Burgundy had nicknamed « Batman and Robin, » and whose colleagues referred to their patrol sector by a word insulting to Black people — waged a campaign of terror and violence against the Black residents of that neighbourhood. Only one complaint, among the many filed, led to a sanction: a five-day suspension. In 2020, the Livingstone, Meudec and Harim report on racial profiling in Montreal confirmed what the preceding decades had already suggested: this profiling is not the mere product of individual prejudice, but the result of the SPVM’s own organizational policies. Forty years, almost to the year, between the CRARR’s first file and Station 39.

And this is where the loop closes with Station 39. The work of Victor Armony and his colleagues, conducted with SPVM officers themselves, revealed the exact mechanism by which racism becomes institutionalized without conscious recognition: about 85% of the officers surveyed did not consider racism a significant problem within the organization. The remaining 15% acknowledged the existence of deep and widespread discrimination. That majority is not lying: it sincerely perceives its work as neutral, because it has been trained to define racism so narrowly — an explicit, verbalized racist intent — that systemic discrimination, which operates through patterns, training and normalized practices, becomes invisible by definition. One officer put it bluntly: « It’s a racist institution, the Montreal police. We shouldn’t hide it. » Another: « I think nine out of ten officers I meet make racist remarks. » There, in fifteen per cent, is the contingent that finally spoke up at Station 39. The ratio is, structurally, nothing exceptional: it has been the institution’s statistical norm for years. What was exceptional, on June 12, is that for once, the hierarchy listened to the minority rather than siding with the majority. And while a team is being dismantled in Montreal North, the City of Montreal is pleading, in April 2026, before the Quebec Court of Appeal in the Lamontagne case, to overturn a 2024 judgment that had recognized racial profiling through stops as a « systemic problem » at the SPVM and held the City liable for damages. The right hand dismantles a team. The left hand contests, before the courts, the very existence of the problem that team has just illustrated.

And when an institution is forced to investigate itself, the result illustrates the same architecture. In 2021, Judge Louis Dionne, mandated by Quebec to examine the wrongful arrest of Mamadi Camara — falsely accused of attempting to kill an SPVM officer, detained for nearly a week before being fully exonerated — concluded that Mr. Camara had not been a victim of racial profiling, while issuing eighteen recommendations on the practices of the SPVM and the École nationale de police. Mr. Camara’s lawyers, for their part, refused to take part in an inquiry they considered too closed to allow a genuine cross-examination of the officers involved, and Mr. Camara maintains, in the civil suit he has filed, that he was a victim of racial profiling. An administrative inquiry, commissioned by the state, conducted by a former senior DPCP official, that clears the institution on the racial question while confirming eighteen dysfunctions: this is, once again, the very definition of Level 2 and Level 3 denial — acknowledging procedural failures the better to close the door on the larger question.

What Dagher achieved where his predecessors failed

I must give credit where it is due here, and I do so without reservation. Fady Dagher has achieved something that, to my knowledge, no SPVM director — nor any police chief of Quebec’s major cities — had managed before him: to demonstrate, through his actions and his words, before the cameras, with the visible backing of his command staff, that the hierarchy would support officers who denounce the racism of their colleagues.

The « code of silence » — the « blue wall of silence » — is one of the most stubborn and best-documented pathologies of police culture. It does not rest on individual cowardice. It is the product of a structure of perverse incentives in which reporting a colleague exposes one to ostracism, reprisals, and career blockage. In such a system, rational silence becomes the norm. It is not a secret. It is a mechanism.

What sets this affair apart — and herein lies its true internal significance — is that officers spoke. Not to a journalist. Not to a community organization. To their hierarchy. And the hierarchy acted. Quickly. And visibly. By holding an evening news conference, by naming things, by publicly owning the scale of the situation, Dagher sent an unambiguous message to his troops: if you see something unacceptable, speak up. You will be protected. That message — energetically and visibly backed by the command staff — had never, to my knowledge, been sent so clearly in the SPVM’s recent history.

Let us applaud that. But let us not stop the analysis there. A cultural signal, however powerful, is not structural reform. It can vanish with the next director, or erode under corporate pressure. Culture changes by example; it is consolidated by law.

Elected officials outraged… but how far?

We heard a great deal from elected officials, at every level — municipal, provincial, federal — vigorously condemning what has just been revealed at Station 39. The statements poured out, the words were strong, the tones indignant. That is good. And it is not enough.

These same officials condemned with equal vigour the events in Shawinigan: a clear-cut act of racism and white supremacy that had, in turn, sent a shockwave. The outrage had been unanimous. Then: on to the next call. Institutional memory lasted the length of a news cycle. The expected structural measures did not come.

We therefore ask the question, today, with all the gravity the situation demands: will the Station 39 affair be one more occasion to condemn for the sake of condemning? Or will it at last be the moment when elected officials begin — not with yet another inquiry, not with one more statement of principle — but by officially recognizing, in a text with the force of law, the existence of systemic racism in our institutions?

Because the reports exist. Numerous, rigorous, convergent, and accumulated over forty years. The CRARR, from 1984. Coroner Yarosky’s report on the death of Marcellus François and the Corbo report, both in 1992. The Charest report for the SPVM (2008–2009). The CDPDJ’s reports on racial profiling (2011, 2019). The Armony, Hassaoui and Mulone report submitted to the SPVM (2019). The Livingstone, Meudec and Harim report (2020). The report of the working group on systemic racism at the SPVM, known as the Gaudreault report (2020). The Viens report (2019). The coroners’ conclusions in the Griffin, François, Villanueva, Coriolan and Bony cases. None has been fully implemented. Several have barely been read by those to whom they were addressed.

The time for reports is over. The time has come to act on them. And if action does not follow, the Black and racialized communities of Montreal — and of Quebec — will draw the conclusions that follow about the nature of the commitment of those who govern us.

Some see in the internal complaint a glimmer of hope — officers who broke the omertà. Fine. But let us be clear: reporting among colleagues is not a reform strategy. It is, at best, a crack in a wall that should never have existed.

The Black and racialized communities, researchers, and civil society have been repeating it for years: random stops must be banned, as recommended by community organizations, the CDPDJ, and many researchers across Quebec and Canada.

The Quebec Court of Appeal has already confirmed it in the Luamba ruling (Procureur général du Québec v. Luamba, 2024 QCCA 1387): random traffic stops violate the rights of Black drivers under sections 9 and 15 of the Canadian Charter. The legislative and political response remains markedly insufficient.

The communities have been demanding it for decades. The devil has always been in the details. The details are now on the front page.

The fire next time

James Baldwin told us more than sixty years ago, and his words have lost none of their burn. In The Fire Next Time (1963), he invoked the old slaves’ spiritual of the Old Testament:

The flood of reports, commissions, statements of principle and broken promises has happened. It has happened more than once. If institutions still refuse to listen — if the Shawinigan cycle repeats itself with the Station 39 affair, if the recommendations are once again shelved — then we should not be surprised by what comes next. The anger of communities that have been waiting for decades is not bottomless. And patience is not an infinite resource.

EnDroit.ca — Independent legal journalism

📄 The factual context of this affair — the timeline of the dismantling, the figures and the legal markers — is presented in our news article: Racism at the SPVM: sixteen Station 39 officers under scrutiny, a team dismantled →