a . organizer of caribbean festival Want answers from police when they say about a dozen officers came to a fundraising event on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day to complain of noise. They say the response equates to over-policing and racial profiling.
The event, at the Greenz restaurant parking lot in Lechine, Ky., was a barbecue to raise funds to support the annual Spice Island Cultural Festival, July 8–10. Gemma Raeburn-Baynes, vice president and spokeswoman for the Spice Island Cultural Day Association of Quebec (SICDAQ), said police arrived at 8:30 p.m.
“We saw police car after police car after police car coming and stopping,” she told Global News. “They all just came out of their cars, it was like a swarm of bees, there were so many of them.”
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Restaurant owner Leo Charles estimates that there may have been about a dozen officers.
“Including the RCMP,” he recalled. “What would the RCMP be doing at such a function?”
He said he asked an officer why they were there and was told they were there to complain about the noise.
Tracy Veleaux, SICDAQ artistic director who is white, said her mixed-race children were terrified.
“Basically they were asking me if they would be stabbed or shot,” she recalled, “and I said no, you’re not, just stay with me.”
He and the other organizers say they want to know why so many police officers will come to complain about the noise.
Organizers of the event say they are still waiting for an explanation from the police.
Montreal police told Global News that a special eclipse unit created to deal with violent and organized crime, which included RCMP and Sorte du Québec officers in addition to Montreal police personnel, was at the scene that day.
The department said in a statement, “As part of the Centaur strategy, police officers from the Clipse Group … make sporadic visits to various bars and restaurants in the city. The Clipse unit provides a support service to the units, gathering information and intelligence. It enhances the visibility of the police and the sense of security of the population.
“On June 24, following a complaint related to noise, members of the Clips unit appeared at an establishment on rue Saint-Jacques in support of neighborhood station 8. To inform the organizer of the event regarding ambient noise in the establishment’s parking lot. Later, the officers left the scene without issuing any statement of guilt.”
Operation Centaur was launched last year to fight gun smuggling and violence.
Some believe that the people in the incident, who were mostly black, were racially profiled – a side effect of the war on guns in the city.
“Because historically, whether it was drugs or gang warfare, you have had collateral damage,” explained the Red Coalition’s director of racial profiling and public safety, a former RCMP official and director of racial profiling and public safety.
“It’s as if this particular incident was an example of collateral damage, where black people were originally targeted because they were gathering in an open space.”
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