The patrols, focused on downtown, Westmount and Dorval, are meant to reassure members of the Inuit community and elicit co-operation.
Gangs of illegal drug and alcohol traffickers who prey on villages in Northern Quebec have been assaulting, threatening and intimidating members of the Inuit community in Montreal to pressure them into silence and recruit couriers, the police forces of Nunavik and Montreal declared on Monday.
In response, the Montreal police department and the Nunavik Police Service (NPS) announced they’re deploying a joint patrol in several sectors of Montreal over the next two weeks.
“It worries us a lot,” Jean-Pierre Larose, director of the NPS, said at a news conference at Montreal police headquarters. A slew of raids, seizures of drug and contraband alcohol and arrests in Northern Quebec in recent months have destabilized the criminal gangs, which has had reverberations in Montreal, he said.
Larose said he couldn’t provide details because of the ongoing investigations, however it’s known that criminalized gangs based in southern Quebec “intimidate, threaten and attack” Inuit people who are in Montreal to remain silent and not identify the members of the gangs, he said.
The goal of the patrols is to reassure members of the community and encourage victims and witnesses to report incidents that compromise their safety or the safety of others, said Mohamed Aziz Bouhdid, a chief inspector with the Montreal police who heads the western section of its community services division.
“Two weeks is a beginning,” said Alain Vaillancourt, a Montreal city councillor and the city executive committee member responsible for public safety who attended the news conference. The joint police patrols are the first of its kind in Quebec, he said. As well, Montreal city hall and the Montreal police are preparing for a mission to northern Quebec in the coming weeks, he said.
Hilda Snowball, chairperson of the Kativik Regional Government, said the joint patrols are “another layer of protection.”