Fo Niemi

By Dan Laxer
The Suburban

Nigel Berkley decided he had had enough.

The resident of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce had been pulled over by police without cause one too many times. At the urging of a friend, he approached the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR).

As a Black man, Berkley told The Suburban, when you’re being pulled over and you know you haven’t done anything wrong, your first thought is “what is my next move? Who will be my rescue?”

It’s something that happens all too often, Berkley says. This year alone he says he’s been pulled over four times, or more, while driving a Dodge Caravan registered to his mother. That’s a common pattern, says CRARR’s Fo Niemi.

“One time I had a BMW,” Berkley continues, “and I was pulled over because it had a blue light in the front of the car.” Tinted windows are also a bigger problem for Black drivers than it is for white drivers, says Berkley.

Fighting racial profiling finally became a priority in 2003, says Niemi, under Jean Charest’s Liberal government. However, now, two decades later, despite several court cases proving the existence of both racial profiling and systemic racism, the current government under François Legault continues to dig in its heels, insisting otherwise. That’s why, says Niemi, “we’re encouraging people like Mr. Berkley…to really stand up, to report and complain. Because often people don’t believe in the justice system. They have a crisis of confidence towards the police, and they also have no faith in the justice system. Everything that we do is not only to ensure the full respect of their civil and constitutional rights, but also to restore their faith in our institutions.”

That sense of mistrust, Berkley says, gets passed down. He says his 19-year-old son tenses up just seeing a police car pass by. Berkley says he understand that police have the right to pull a driver over for an infraction. But random stops, even just for identity verification, which has been proven in the courts to disproportionately affect Black drivers, are the problem. In the most recent incident Berkley was pulled over because, the police officer explained, the car he was driving was registered to a woman. That is not an infraction, he says, but Black people are still being stopped for that. “We are all human beings, we all have the time rights,” Berkley says. “But in the eyes of the system it doesn’t work like that.”

CRARR is helping Berkley file a complaint with the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission, as well as with the police ethics commissioner. n