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End the silence on police shooting
The official secrecy around the death of Mohammed Anas Bennis is a stain on Montreal's police force and Quebec's justice system. The Bennis case remains an open wound in relations between the police and Muslim Montrealers, and for that matter, all visible minorities.
Unfortunately, the police union, the Montreal Police Brotherhood, is striving to block a public inquiry. The union's duty is to defend its members. But if secrecy protects one officer but worsens the climate between all police and the public, where is the real interest of the union's membership?
Some elements of the Bennis case are undisputed: Const. Yannick Bernier was in Côte-des-Neiges on Dec. 1, 2005, assisting in the serving of a warrant. Bennis, returning home from a mosque and not involved in the warrant matter, had a confrontation with Bernier. Bennis allegedly had a kitchen knife; Bernier certainly had a gun, and used it. Bennis, shot twice, was killed. To this day Quebec public security officials refuse to make the police report public. A series of investigations have been every bit as opaque.
Bennis's family persists in seeking a coroner's report, which would lay bare all the circumstances. On this fair-minded Montrealers will agree fully. Consider: Whether the shooting was justified or not, the union's determined effort to keep the facts secret, coupled with disgraceful inertia at city hall and in Quebec City, leaves the sour smell of a cover-up. Mayor Gérald Tremblay has confined himself to vague pious platitudes.
It should be obvious that police cannot be immune from the open justice that is the norm in our society. Fortunately, the Quebec Court of Appeal appears to understand that, even if the mayor and Public Security Minister Jacques Dupuis do not. In a separate case early this month, the Appeals Court threw out a similar Police Brotherhood request to quash a coroner's inquest into an unrelated 2003 death at police hands.
The closed-shop Bennis investigations all concluded that Bernier acted properly. Demonstrating this as fully as possible would bring a tremendous benefit to relations between the police and visible minorities.
The Brotherhood's eagerness to save taxpayers the cost of a full-scale coroner's inquiry is a mistake: The costs of not letting the truth be seen could potentially be far higher than the cost of an inquiry.