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Allison Hanes: New and disturbing questions about mistaken identity arrest

As if mistakenly arresting the wrong man for attacking an officer wasn't bad enough, the Montreal Police now must answer for how they treated Mamadi Fara Camara during the six days he was in custody.

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Mamadi Fara Camara wasn’t just wrongfully arrested on Jan. 28, he was dragged from his vehicle through the driver’s side window, thrown face first to the pavement and had an officer’s boot placed on his head.

This was the rough treatment reserved for an eyewitness to an attack on a police officer, who had called 911 and waited at the scene — a case of mistaken identity that grows more troubling by the day.

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For nearly two weeks, Montreal police have been on the defensive for falsely accusing the slight and mild-mannered doctoral student from Guinea, nearly committing an egregious miscarriage of justice, and letting the culprit who actually hit, disarmed, chased and fired on their colleague get away. But the more new details that emerge about the handling of the case, the more the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal has to answer for.

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Camara’s appearance alongside his lawyer on the talk show Tout le monde en parle Sunday marked the first time the victim of this injustice spoke about his harrowing ordeal. And his account raises new and urgent questions.

While he was being interrogated for over four hours, for instance, Montreal police ransacked his apartment while executing a search warrant. And for good measure, they turned his neighbours’ units inside out while the occupants, including many small children, were forced to wait aboard a bus. Will Prosper, a community organizer and activist who also appeared on TLMEP, said some of the little kids wet themselves during the long and terrifying period of confinement.

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At the Rivière-des-Prairies detention centre where he was held for six days with hardened criminals, Camara was regarded with cold contempt by guards for his supposed violence toward a fellow law-enforcement official. During his incarceration, he was never allowed to call home to speak to his wife, who is pregnant with twins.

In his own words, Camara said he was treated like a “monster.” In the terminology of his lawyers, Virginie Dufresne Lemire and Cédric Materne, he was denied the presumption of innocence that is the bedrock of our justice system.

All these indignities are salt in the wound of being falsely accused in the first place.

There were questions about the SPVM investigation from the get-go, which seemingly took a wounded police officer’s word at face value, ignored the accounts of eyewitnesses that the true assailant had fled and took six days to review traffic camera footage that confirmed Camara was not behind the attack.

And let’s not forget, neither the stolen service firearm nor the assailant have yet been found. The biases and faulty assumptions that led to Camara’s mistaken arrest may have allowed the trail of the actual attacker to grow cold.

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The government appointed Quebec Superior Court Justice Louis Dionne to get to the bottom of the affair — lamentably, behind closed doors. And Camara will no doubt seek justice in the civil courts.

But neither of these outlets will address the numerous serious concerns that have been voiced about Montreal Police over the years — concerns which echo through Camara’s calamity. These include: evidence of racial profiling; concerns about police brutality, particularly in cases that involve Black, Indigenous and racialized Montrealers; and double standards in how police patrol diverse communities in some of the city’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

Even in the heat of the moment, it’s difficult to imagine the innocent neighbours of a suspect from Westmount or Outremont — or Rosemont or the Plateau, for that matter — being subjected to the same humiliation as Camara’s were, as if police were punishing them for guilt by association.

The slowness of the apology from Montreal Police Chief Sylvain Caron once the error was apparent is another sore point. It was proffered under pressure from an outraged public and appalled political leaders — and only after DNA tests confirmed what prosecutors had realized in dropping the charges.

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Despite recognition of systemic racism in this city, attempts to improve community relations and a new policy on street checks, Montrealers have been reeling from tensions between police and racialized minorities for decades now. In 1987, unarmed Black teenager Anthony Griffin was shot by a cop outside a precinct in Notre-Dame-de-Grace. In 2008, 18-year-old Fredy Villaneuva was killed by a police bullet after an intervention to break up a dice game a Montreal North park degenerated into a fatal tussle.

Given this tragic history and the nature of the crime he was incorrectly accused of, Camara should count himself lucky to have emerged from his kafkaesque nightmare with only psychological scars.

ahanes@postmedia.com

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