Montreal police on horseback (2012) | xddorox / CC BY 2.0
The evolution of criminological research on gangs in Quebec mirrors events elsewhere. It began in the late 1980s with a media frenzy that attracted the attention of political elites and became the object of government policy and research. Just as the US was starting to be gripped by a moral panic over gangs, francophone journalists began alleging that Caribbean immigrant youths were following their counterparts in the US and bringing about a new and more violent wave of urban gangs. Journalists leaned on sensationalist images of Black and Latino gangs from the US to proclaim that Montreal was experiencing an “invasion” and “epidemic” of so-called Jamaican and Haitian gangs. Well-known academics lent their voices to the moral panic and warned that gangs would escalate if authorities did not immediately act. One commentator opined, “It is now that we must intervene if we do not want Montreal to witness the same escalation of violence committed by gangs of adolescent criminals in New York and Los Angeles” (Décary-Secours 2020, 302).
Throughout the moral panic, journalists and academics alike kept urging authorities to take anticipatory measures to prevent an epidemic of American-style gangs. Initially, the police department appeared surprisingly at odds with the journalistic coverage and maintained that street gangs were neither a threat nor on the rise. Within two years, however, the department abruptly changed its tone and agreed to take “preventive” action. In 1989 a police director said, “If you ask me if Montreal is experiencing street gangs, my answer is no.” Then he added, “It will become [an issue] if we do not deal with it” (304).
The moral panic about street gangs was less indicative of crime than of rising racial tensions stemming from an increase in Black immigration. During the 1970s and 1980s, Montreal experienced the first significant wave of Haitian immigrants after Quebec elected its first francophone nationalist government in 1976 and recruited French-speaking workers from abroad to fill its growing public sector (Mills 2016). Until then, most Caribbean immigrants were English-speaking and settled in the western enclaves of the city. Haitian nationals were the first immigrants of color to settle in lily-white francophone neighborhoods on the city’s east end. Upon arrival, they encountered an angry and violent backlash from White residents and the police (Aurélien and Rutland 2023; Rutland 2021). A climax of the escalating racial tensions occurred in 1979 when police officers summarily arrested and jailed several Haitian youths who had gathered in a park and were viciously attacked by a group of older White males. Instead of apprehending the White assailants, the police forcibly removed the Haitian youths. The event became a flashpoint for Black mobilization against police racism (Rutland 2020).
In 1987, just as the moral panic began swirling, Montreal’s Black community was devastated by the police killing of Anthony Griffin, a 19-year-old Black male who was stopped for allegedly failing to pay a taxi fare and was then shot while standing still. The killing sparked the largest protests against police racism in the city’s history. Throughout the ensuing debate, the police department repeatedly denied it had a problem with racism.
Rather than heed the concerns of the Black community, the police department veered in the opposite direction and in 1996 declared street gangs a strategic priority (Symons 2002). The city has been in the grip of a racially inflammatory discourse about delinquency ever since (Aurélien and Rutland 2023; Sallée and Décary-Secours 2020). Given that the department had denied street gangs were a problem only a few years earlier, it is doubtful the situation had changed dramatically. The more likely explanation is that the department was concerned about its failing legitimacy. Just between 1987 and 1996, seven people of color were either killed in a police shooting or died in police custody, five of them Black males (Feith 2020). Ted Rutland (2021) contends that the crackdown on “gangs” was part of a two-pronged counter offensive strategy against Black resistance to police racism that included “community policing.” By directing blame for insecurity onto Black youths and “street gangs,” the department was attempting to deflect attention from its tarnished record and pit conservative-leaning Black leaders against their more radical peers. Through “community policing” the department also hoped to shore up its legitimacy by appearing to heal community relations.
In 2005 the police’s racialized campaign against gangs received a significant boost from the federal government when it released a multimillion-dollar budget for the provinces to ostensibly combat “youth gangs” and the illegal distribution of firearms. Based on a few isolated incidents of gun violence in Montreal, the provincial government created the multiyear “Street Gang Intervention” in 2005 (Livingstone 2024). Over 90 percent of the C$42 million budget went into new and aggressive police squads that were deployed in neighborhoods with high percentages of Black, Latino, and North African immigrant families. In the aftermath, the percentage of Black citizens who were randomly stopped shot up exponentially (Charest 2009). Reports of police harassment and violence toward Black and other racialized youth also escalated (Courcy 2008).
Whether in 1996 or 2005, no sound empirical proof existed of street gangs in Montreal.
From the beginning, the stated rationale for acting on street gangs has always been to “prevent” the phenomenon from spreading, rather than address actual incidents (Livingstone 2024). The myth that law enforcement can prevent crime is consistent with neoliberal notions of actuarial prediction, by which entire “at-risk groups” must be controlled to ensure public security (Mary 2001). In 2010 a police director admitted the crackdown on gangs had little or nothing to do with crime because the groups allegedly commit less than 1–2 percent of infractions across Montreal (Le Devoir 2010). The goal, he explained, is to address feelings about public safety because street gangs receive a disproportionate amount of media attention.
Excerpted from an essay first published in Social Research: An International Quarterly, a John Hopkins University Press publication, in its Winter 2024 edition. Reprinted with permission.
