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City has a duty to press province to come clean on police shooting

Dauphin is sidestepping his responsibility as an overseer of cop action

by Henry Aubin
Source: Montreal Gazette August 7, 2007

Claude Dauphin, the Montreal executive-committee member in charge of overseeing the Montreal police, is one sleepy watchdog.

Responding to a Gazette editorial that said the Tremblay administration needed to help demystify why and how the police shot and killed Mohamed Anas Bennis, Dauphin wrote in a letter to the editor: "We maintain that we cannot do anything more without transgressing into the jurisdiction of (Quebec's) Public Security Ministry."

Heaven forbid that shedding light on a police killing should ruffle anyone's feathers in Quebec City.

Until now, the blame for the secrecy in the Bennis case has not been on the Tremblay administration but, rather, on the provincial government. After all, it's Quebec that enacted the ludicrous rules that govern probes into police shootings.

You know the drill. To lend a veneer of impartiality to the procedure, investigators from another police force look into a police shooting, almost always concluding it was justified. Yet, as a rule of thumb, the public will never be told why this conclusion was reached. Only in the extremely unlikely event that prosecutors charge an officer will the investigators' report become public.

But Dauphin's letter inadvertently shows Quebec does not deserve all the blame. City hall, too, is complicit.

Dauphin, who is also borough mayor of Lachine, said because the Quebec prosecutors who saw the police report on the 2005 shooting saw no grounds to charge the officers involved, his hands were tied. He wrote resignedly, "We can only note this decision made by the appropriate provincial authority."

Well, no. A Montreal official who actually takes seriously the job of watching over Montreal police can do a lot more than "only note" a wrong. Such an official can do three things.

The first is to insist on receiving a copy of the investigators' report. Dauphin's letter to The Gazette conspicuously omits mentioning this obvious step.

Even if that report, made by Quebec City police, should prove to be a whitewash, it would at least be worth examining. It might offer insights into why the 25-year-old Bennis, who had no police record and no known record of violence, should have attacked the officers with a knife on a Côte des Neiges sidewalk - or so Montreal police have claimed. The report might shed some light on why police shot him in the torso, not once but twice. Given the pathologist's sketch of where the bullets struck, you can't help thinking that one bullet would have stopped him.

A key part of the police overseer's job is to maintain public confidence in the police - and in those that oversee the police. For that reason, the second thing a proper overseer should do is place that same report out in the public. If the privacy law requires it, edit out the officers' names. And if Jacques Dupuis, the public security minister, objects, ask him why such secrecy is in public interest. There's no good answer.

The final thing to do is to press for a change in the law so openness is not discretionary but obligatory. Society entrusts firearms to police on the condition they use them only to protect lives and, even then, only as a last resort. When police use guns, the public needs to know if these conditions have been respected.

The Bennis case is not isolated. It illustrates a trend. To wit:

An officer last month killed a 51-year-old man, Vianney Charest, outside a north-end motel he had robbed. Did the suspect have a weapon and, if so, what kind? Did the officer shoot in legitimate self-defence? And was it really necessary for the officer to shoot him twice?

Two weeks earlier, an officer in Point St. Charles shot in the back a man who, after being stopped for impaired driving, had seized the other partner's nightstick and attacked her with it. The man has survived, but the question remains: Could the officer have used a less drastic measure than a bullet?

The point here is not that cops are necessarily wrong. The public has no basis for knowing if they are.

The problem, rather, is with politicians like Dauphin and Dupuis who have no interest in letting us find out.