Montreal police officers may have some discretion about when to turn on their new body cams, but they can’t control what bystanders may catch them doing on camera.
On Wednesday, a pedestrian filmed two police officers apparently harassing a man in a wheelchair, after he was caught in the middle of a downtown intersection with the light about to change.
According to Kate Marie, who witnessed the incident and posted the video on Facebook, one officer confronted the man in the wheelchair and started pushing him “aggressively” to the sidewalk, despite the man’s repeated requests for him to stop.
Once on the sidewalk, the man was told in no uncertain terms he would be given a ticket:
“You think you can do whatever you want just because you’re in a chair?” Marie quotes the officer saying to the man. “Yeah? I’m going to give you a f—— ticket. You asked for it.”
When the man told the officer and his colleague he had no identification on him, they began to rifle through his backpack, slung over the back of his wheelchair, looking for some identification. They found a prescription pill bottle with his name on it.
By 11:30 a.m. Thursday, 24 hours after the incident, the video had been viewed 66,000 times and shared 2,276 times.
The Montreal police were not available to comment Thursday on what rights police have to push disabled people across the street against their will, or search for identification without their permission.
The incident happened on the same day a Sûreté du Québec officer was cited by the Police Ethics Committee for insulting a man of Algerian descent who was recording the exchange from the back of the officer’s patrol car.
Kate Marie filmed the incident on the sidewalk at the intersection of Sherbrooke and McGill College Sts., where police officers volunteering to work overtime are directing traffic around major roadwork on Sherbrooke.
When she asked police if she could then cross the street, she said they told her that they would give her a ticket if she did — not the other pedestrians already crossing against the light, just her.
