Montreal police ordered to pay $60,000

Like that will ever happen.

Gemma Raeburn's black friends no longer willingly help her clean out her garage after a couple of recruits were mistaken by police for robbers.

"I had to get a couple of white friends to do it," the Dollard des Ormeaux woman said, only half-joking.

Six white police officers roared up to Raeburn's home on a Saturday morning in November 2004, and accused her, Peter Charles and Frederick Peters - all black - of robbing the place.

"It was so, so humiliating," Raeburn, 57, recalled yesterday. "We're the only black family that lives on this street.

"I had to go to all my neighbours and tell them that it wasn't a drug bust."...

...Last year, the Police Ethics Committee found that during the November 2004 incident, Constable Roger Carbonneau insulted and scared Raeburn when he told her that "bullets don't see colour" after she asked him whether the officers would have come as quick if it were white people cleaning out the garage.

He might not have intended the remark to be racist, the committee said, but it was an indirect reference to Raeburn's skin colour and unacceptable coming from an officer with 18 years' experience.

Constable Isabelle Nault overstepped the bounds of proper police behaviour even more severely when in the heat of an argument with 60-year-old Peters, she told him: "If you don't like it here, why are you here? Why don't you go back to your country?"

Nault's statements were offensive and inappropriate, the committee said.

It's good to see that the present police are keeping alive traditions Montreal police have had for decades.

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