A black man driving a Mercedes says he was pulled over and handcuffed, then detained in the back of a Montreal police squad car while a video recording of the incident was erased. \u00a0“They willfully, and wrongly, arrested me,” Kenrick McRae told a news conference on Sunday alongside Fo Niemi, the executive director of the Center on Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR). \u00a0In a news release issued Sunday, Niemi called the incident “one of the most egregious cases of racial profiling we’ve seen.”<\/p>\n
The release goes on to detail what allegedly happened to the 45-year-old father of two, who works at Trudeau airport and has no criminal record.<\/p>\n
McRae said he was waiting for his female companion to withdraw money from an RBC branch on Westminster Street in Montreal West on March 3 when a police car stopped parallel to his car on the other side of the road.\u200bThe squad car then made a U-turn and stopped directly behind him, and an officer asked for his licence and registration.<\/p>\n
McRae said that, after checking his papers, the officer told him his lights weren’t working. \u00a0He got out of the car with a video camera to record that the lights were, in fact, fully functional.<\/p>\n
At that point, one officer asked him to hand over the recorder and, when McRae asked why, he was arrested for what the officer called “disturbance,” he said.<\/p>\n
Montreal police force still falls short on diversity, anti-racism activist says McRae was then placed in the back of the police car while his camera was seized and the video erased, he said.<\/p>\n
He was released after the two arresting officers told him they did not find anything to charge him with, he said. The incident ended up involving a total of four police cars and up to eight officers, according to CRARR.<\/p>\n
McRae said he tried to bring up the issue with a supervisor at the scene, who ignored his complaint. It was only after he later called 911 and was able to speak to a different supervisor that he was able to file his complaint.<\/p>\n
McRae said he keeps the camera in the car because he is stopped by police every month or two and wants to ensure any wrongdoing is documented. \u00a0“I’ve been stopped so often as a black man driving a Mercedes, and getting a cam recorder is one way for me to protect myself from the police,” McRae said in the news release.<\/p>\n
“But never in my life did I imagine the police would arrest me for filing what I consider to be evidence of racial profiling, seize my cam recorder and erase my recordings.”<\/p>\n
Montreal police did not immediately return a request for comment Sunday. \u00a0The police force has been dogged by accusations of racial discrimination for years.<\/p>\n
A 2011 report by Quebec Human Rights Commission found that ethnic minorities in Quebec are subject to “police surveillance that is targeted and disproportionate.”<\/p>\n
Former chief Marc Parent acknowledged in 2014 that racial profiling was an ongoing issue within his department. \u00a0“We do have a racial profiling problem\u2026 It’s not the majority, but we have to work on that every day,” Parent told Daybreak at the time.<\/p>\n
By: Benjamin Shingler, Matt D’Amours<\/p>\n
Source:\u00a0cbc.ca<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"