On June 19, Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada revealed her own husband was a victim of racial profiling. She said she supports a public inquiry into the SVPM. But as we have already explained, police racism is already very well documented. At best, this inquiry will add to what we already know.
But the mayor is proposing something else: a ban on police street checks. A street check is when police stop and question someone without purpose justified “by an investigation into a specific crime or by a reasonable suspicion of illegal activity.” In other words, it’s when a police officer approaches someone on the street to question them and check their ID for no particular reason. In practice, street checks are used to harass Black people and other visible minorities, particularly the youth.
It should be emphasized that the proposal is to ban random street checks—that is, those conducted without a specific reason. This means that stops based on “reasonable suspicion” would remain permitted.
But who decides what is reasonable and what isn’t? The police officer, of course. A judge might later rule otherwise. But first, the police officer must gather the necessary information about the encounter.
And even if they did, racist police officers falsify their reports. For example, a video recently surfaced showing a police officer in Montréal-Nord assaulting a young Black man for no reason. Did that officer write in his report, “Reason for arrest: ‘I hate Black people, so I hit him’”?
And that’s not even counting the fact that police racism manifests itself outside the context of street checks. For example, the police officer who killed 15 year old Nooran Rezayi in Longueuil in Sept. 2025 was responding to a 911 call.
We support any reform that can limit abuses of power by those in authority and protect the rights of individuals. But it must be acknowledged that banning street checks will not fundamentally change things. Police officers will find a way to justify their racist actions and evade oversight.
No rule can truly put an end to police racism, because it is rooted in the system itself. Capitalism needs to find scapegoats to divert attention from the system’s injustices. Racism also serves to justify why certain communities are kept in poverty, even though this is the system’s fault. Of course, the institutions responsible for upholding this order become riddled with racism. The solution is to uproot the evil by overthrowing capitalism and creating a just and equitable society for all: socialism.
