“I spent my day unpacking fishing rods. » Alexandre is not happy with his day of immersion. At the Fourchettes de l’Espoir, a flagship organization in the Montreal-Nord district, SPVM recruits were sent… into the kitchen. His partner Constance, 21, was peeling potatoes and carrots. Alexandre sums up the day in three words: “A monumental catastrophe.”
Posted at 5:00 am.
In the kitchen, the two young people met customers who had already been in prison. In an organization in the heart of Montreal-North’s hot sector, next to former prisoners with a knife in hand to cut carrots, Alexandre and Constance preferred not to say they were police officers.
“We didn’t feel comfortable,” says Alexandre. Except that this lack of transparency with these one-day colleagues wiped out any exchanges they could have had with people who likely had difficult experiences. And not necessarily a positive experience with the police.
Did Alexandre and Constance really “go towards each other” that day, as the motto of the immersion project dictates? Not quite.
PHOTO OLIVIER JEAN, THE PRESS
For a day, the chefs prepare Arctic charr for the beneficiaries’ meal. The experience at the Southern Quebec Inuit Association did not excite recruits.
Same scenario with the Southern Quebec Inuit Association. The four recruits spent three hours preparing a meal for the beneficiaries. When they arrived, they barely interacted with them. Throughout their day on the scene, the young police officers asked very few questions of the speakers, despite providing a valuable source of information about Montreal’s 2,000-strong Inuit community.
“It wasn’t great,” summarizes Carolane, who doesn’t speak English, the only language of exchange for almost all of the organization’s beneficiaries and stakeholders.
It was the first edition of this immersion program and it showed. The fifty or so community groups that welcomed the young police officers didn’t always know who exactly they were, what they were supposed to do, or who they were supposed to meet.
Recruits sometimes wasted their time in places where there were no beneficiaries present: the timing was poorly chosen. Some ended up playing board games with the speakers, others remained completely forgotten in a room for several hours.
The attitude of the young police officers was also different. Some recruits were over-motivated, but others clearly endured the program as a necessary evil. Some didn’t open their mouths all day. Still others had a Montreal 101 course on the first day: They wasted half an hour in the car looking for a parking space in the city center. “It’s going to cost me a penny, this thing,” one recruit shouted when he saw the price of parking meters.
And then, in the very first week, came a report from Radio-Canada that threw the SPVM’s relationship with these community partners into disarray. We learned that the SPVM had assigned a security rating to each of the organizations and that six patrol officers had been assigned as lookouts to assist recruits as needed.
“It was a safety net,” pleads Sergeant Danny Richer. Because they are poorly informed of the instructions, uniformed police officers still end up in certain locations where confidentiality is essential. Following Radio-Canada’s report, organizations announced that they would refuse to participate in the show in the future.
Homelessness, beyond all stereotypes
PHOTO OLIVIER JEAN, THE PRESS
Mahomi Thibault, speaker at La Maison du Père, talks to the two young police officers in immersion mode.
The immersion experience sometimes also shows the very thin line that now separates police intervention from social intervention. Like here, at La Maison du Père. Two 22-year-old recruits talk to Mahomi Thibault, the organization’s employee.
The latter dreams of becoming a police officer. She has many years of studies in criminology and victimology. She has been working for the organization for years. However, his application to attend the rapid police training course offered by the SPVM was recently rejected.
Magalie and Carolane come straight from police technology. They have no other training. And they are asked to intervene in crisis situations on site, with a clientele that Mahomi knows well.
PHOTO OLIVIER JEAN, THE PRESS
Steve Thibault-Lévesque speaks to one of the recruits. In the background speaker Mahomi Thibault.
Meanwhile, Steve Thibault-Lévesque, 31, comes out of his room. This is the perfect opportunity for the two recruits to talk to a user. However, they don’t say a word. It’s not easy to start a conversation about such a topic. She is the reporter who gets Steve to tell his story. The young man found himself at La Maison du Père last May for gambling and lost his apartment and his job. And above all: Steve, young, well-dressed, in no way corresponds to the image we have of a homeless person.
And that’s the case everywhere, emphasizes Françoise Bouchard, deputy director of L’amour en action, a homeless shelter in the north of the island, who came to talk to the recruits.
If you came to us, you would have difficulty distinguishing the clientele from the speakers.
Françoise Bouchard, deputy director of the organization L’amour en action
PHOTO OLIVIER JEAN, THE PRESS
Jacques Roy lived in his car for several months before ending up at La Maison du Père shelter. In the garden of the Alexandre-de-Sève residence, which is reserved for elderly homeless people, he tells his story to two recruits.
Jacques Roy, 71, embodies this reality perfectly. The recruits meet the man in the garden of the Alexandre-de-Sève residence, which is reserved for elderly homeless people. Patterned shirt, cargo pants, cell phone in his pocket: Jacques looks like a golfer on vacation, not a former homeless person.
However, Jérémie and Cédric, 26 years old, discover the difficult past of the man who was rescued from the streets by one of their colleagues from Station 21. Jacques lived in his Nissan Sentra for months. A gambling addiction caused him to lose his home after his wife’s death and his Sentra became his home. Bad luck, his car was stolen. All of his possessions, including the urn of Diane, his late wife, were there. Jacques was devastated.
15 months ago he ended up at the La Maison du Père animal shelter, where they found him a place in the residence. And the miracle of all miracles happened to a citizen of Lanaudière: she found Diane’s urn next to a dumpster near her home.