A disconnect exists between the justice system and the ability of citizens to effectively claim their rights when they are victims of racial profiling. Thus, few people who are victims of racial profiling manage to obtain justice in court, despite an increase in sensitivity regarding this issue in recent years, deplores the lawyer, lecturer and director general of the Clinique juridique de Saint- Michael Fernando Belton.
“It is certain that there is an evolution on the subject of racial profiling, affirms from the outset Me Belton, in an interview with Metro. From [the death of] George Floyd, a collective conscience has been kindled all over North America, where people are looking at this issue and saying to themselves “we should do something because it’s not working”. But the judicial system takes a long time to react,” laments the expert.
Thus, although racial profiling has been recognized for several decades and the majority of people are against this practice, the courts still have difficulty determining what profiling is or is not, which leads to significant delays in the processing of these cases through the court system,” says Belton.
One of the important issues is simply understanding profiling. What is profiling? There are people, for example, who are victims of racial discrimination who associate this with profiling, or people who do not understand that profiling takes place regardless of a person’s intentions. There may be police officers who mean well, but engage in the practice of profiling unconsciously. This concept is not very well understood by the courts.
“Here is a classic case, gives the lawyer as an example, in order to illustrate the problems of interpretation which can emerge during a case of profiling. I am a young black man driving a luxury car and a policeman sees me and turns around to follow me for two miles. He intercepts me and the first question he asks me is: “Who owns the vehicle?” In this situation, there are at least five indicators pointing to a racial profiling file, but if we are not sensitive to the issue and how it manifests itself, we will not see it.
Significant inconsistencies
Although the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) recognizes the existence of racial profiling among its troops, the police forces of the City of Québec do not recognize this practice among their officers, which creates gaps in the ability of victims to obtain redress in court. Added to this is the lack of recognition of systemic racism by the Quebec government, which generates its share of complications for a victim of profiling, believes Mr. Belton.
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“At the end, where everything blocks is when a person wants to assert their rights when they are profiled because they have to fight on several fronts. For example, police ethics complaints; if we look at the last two years, 438 complaints have been filed in matters of racial profiling and that has not resulted in any citation of a police officer before an ethics committee. And if we look at the 160 complaints filed with the Human Rights Commission, we are talking about two judgments rendered by the courts.”
Mr. Belton says that a reform of the Police Act could improve the ethics complaints process and would establish more accountability, in addition to increasing the number of cases handled by the ethics committee. “For the moment, there are five administrative judges who deal with ethical requests throughout Quebec. I raise this as a potential reason why the commissioner brings so few cases before the committee, because there are not enough members.”
The lawyer also maintains that structural funding for organizations such as his legal clinic would make it possible to tackle the problem as a whole since legal aid for victims of profiling would be carried out in parallel with actions to limit cases of profiling carried out by police forces.
The more aware succession
Despite this bleak picture, Ms Belton remains optimistic since he considers that there is a better understanding of profiling on the part of the judiciary and judges, in addition to the political class.
This also applies to law students who are taking or have taken his course on racial profiling at the University of Ottawa, McGill University, UQAM and now the University of Montreal, and who display a high degree of interest in this issue, from a legal point of view. Moreover, his course on racial profiling is the first taught in a Canadian university.
“I started teaching the course in June 2021 and it has been a phenomenal success ever since. The interest is really there and we feel the desire of law students to learn more about the subject. They see these issues on social media and want to understand how to argue these cases in court. It’s a very topical course,” concludes Mr. Belton.
