She is Montreal’s version of Officer Bubbles, the stone-faced Toronto officer who threatened assault charges against a bubble-blowing G20 protester in 2010.
Now Trudeau is under the microscope: suspended, disarmed and the subject of an internal police probe that is looking at her conduct and reviewing criminal charges that has resulted from her work.
But the officer has also become a lightning rod for a city that has emerged from months of turbulent clashes this spring between student protesters and riot police, and its confidence in the police force has been violently shaken.
“A lot of citizens have lived through Montreal this spring with police brutality, police misbehaviour, police repression,” said Amir Khadir, the MNA for the riding of Mercier. “Unfortunately all that accumulated frustration now has somehow concentrated on the head of this poor constable.”
Like so much public misconduct these days, Trudeau found her fame on YouTube last May after repeatedly pepper-spraying a group of protesters who had been heckling police on the margins of a student protest against proposed tuition hikes in downtown Montreal.
“You’re going to be a star,” one man shouts from off camera while wiping the spray from his eyes.
Little did he know that Officer 728 was already notorious among those who have crossed her path. There have been two formal complaints filed against Trudeau over the last decade. In one, she was rebuked for bullying staff at a Montreal children’s hospital and carelessly revealing the identity of a young sexual assault victim to others on the ward.
It was not until shortly after Rudi Occhietti and a group of friends had a run-in with Trudeau on the evening of Oct. 2 that the outrage peaked.
“We can prove the conduct of the officer with the film,” Occhietti said in an interview Wednesday. “In all the other cases, the people who were victims didn’t have the proof that we have.”
About 9:30 p.m. Simon Pagé was walking along the street carrying his upright bass when Occhietti called down to him from the window of his studio. He ran down the stairs, beer in hand, to let Pagé in. Trudeau spotted the relatively minor infraction of carrying open alcohol in public and approached.
What followed is now freely available on the web. Viewers can see Serge Lavoie, another friend who was in the apartment, smothered and held in a headlock by Trudeau. Outside, 20 cruisers’ worth of reinforcements are arriving on the scene. One of the phones that were seized later catches an unwitting Trudeau talking to a superior, recounting the incident.
She refers to those arrested as “rats,” “guitar pluckers,” “sh-- eaters,” and “carrés rouges”—a reference to the square red felt patch worn by student protesters this spring.
“Clearly what happened is a kind of condensed version of the clashes between protesters and police this spring,” Occhietti said. “There are links that can be made.”
Montreal police are doing their best to play down any associations to this spring’s turbulence, but they are also distancing themselves from Trudeau’s actions. The evidence against Occhietti, Pagé and Lavoie is being closely reviewed before the case either proceeds or is abandoned.
Meanwhile, a witness to the Oct. 2 incident came forward to Radio-Canada saying that heard Trudeau urging other officers to change the notes of an incident to ensure she didn’t get in trouble.
“I heard her very well saying ‘Don’t write it like that, because if it goes to court I don’t want to be hassled,’ ” Catia Moreau said.
Commander Ian Lafrenière, a Montreal Police spokesman, chalks the problems up to a situation in which one bad apple sours the entire basket.
“It doesn’t look good,” he admitted. “I’m not going to try and convince you that it was very helpful for us.”
But he denied any wider malaise that the citizens of Montreal have toward those assigned to protect them. He also noted new measures that Chief Marc Parent intends to put in place to encourage police whistleblowers to come forward when they witness improper conduct.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Allan Woods
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