CITY DROPPED CHARGE AGAINST BLACK LASALLE TEACHER

Montreal, January 11, 2012 --- The City of Montreal's prosecutor dropped the penal charge against a young Black teacher who was violently dragged out of his friend's car by two Montreal Police officers in a Lasalle shopping center in 2010.

Mr. Farid Charles was waiting as a passenger in the car while his friend went into a Caribbean take-out restaurant to buy dinner. A white police officer opened the driver’s side door and ask for his driver’s license and car papers. When Mr. Charles told the officer that he had no right to open the door, the officer told him that he could do whatever he wanted. The officer insisted that Mr. Charles show his ID, without telling him why; he only told Mr. Charles to sit still and be quiet, due to break-ins in the area. The officer eventually grabbed and violently pulled him out of the car, arrested him and charged him with the penal offense of wandering without justification.

At this appearance in court this week, Mr. Charles was told by the prosecutor that the fine was withdrawn due to technical grounds: the shopping center where he was does not belong to the city and therefore, a city by-law which led to the fine, cannot be applied in his case.

CRARR is representing Mr. Charles in a racial profiling complaint before the Quebec human rights commission and assisting him in a complaint before the Police Ethics Commissioner, who has ruled in his favor and who will cite the officers before the Police Ethics Committee (a tribunal) for misconduct.