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How police regulate not just people or places but an entire season by JACQUIE CHARLTON
The people in Parc Émilie-Gamelin (formerly Berri Square) know all about it. Police officers patrol the small square regularly, checking up on any small grouping of people they see fit to check up on. I talked with a group who had just been approached by two officers: they had been smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and the police had decided this required investigation. After seeing they were indeed cigarettes they moved on to a pair with a boom box. "They judge you on your appearance--that's it," said the smoker of the cigarettes, a large tattooed man who goes by the name Bic Ban. "They never go up to people like that," he added, pointing out a neatly dressed couple 50 feet away. He says police are constantly coming up to people in the park, searching them and checking up on their ID in the police car computers. "They'll question you sometimes for 30 or 45 minutes. If you're rolling a cigarette they'll come and talk to you. I sold a guy two cigarettes for a loonie the other day. They came up to me and checked out my papers for 15 minutes with their files on the computer. It's discrimination, pure and simple." "And they're so sarcastic when they do it," adds his friend Pat. "They'll say ever so politely, 'And how's everything going with you today? Do you have a moment to talk to us?' But underneath they're making it very clear who's boss. You can't say anything back to them or they'll ticket you for non-cooperation." What do the police have to say about holding people for questioning about rolled cigarettes? It all comes back to Parc Émilie-Gamelin's brief and turbulent history. Last year, the park's status was changed on city books from "place publique" to park: now it must be vacated by midnight. John Dalzell, Assistant Director of the Uniform Branch of MUC Police, says that often police will interpret the law in a way that finds "some viable solution to all parties concerned," and cites the example of certain police officers who will not only refrain from giving squeegee-ers tickets, but attempt to refer them to places where they can find other employment. So the police aim to control the summer with a balance between society's more staid elements and its wilder ones, and if keeping this balance means people must be investigated for selling cigarettes in the park, so it must be. But there's something wrong with this picture, and you only have to go to one of Montreal's prime summer institutions, the Tam-Tams in Mont-Royal Park, to see it. Basically, there is no available means of regulating the Tam-Tams and the police don't even try. There was a small police presence last Sunday, but it was so subdued and polite as to be nearly nonexistent. And the Tam-Tam participants interviewed had nothing but praise for the police. Sonja, a vendor who sells hash pipes, rolling papers and extra-slim cigarette cases emblazoned with pictures of the Freak Brothers, says emphatically, "I have a lot to say about the police: they have been completely professional here. They're more interested in investigating theft than harassing people. Even if I get one of my pipes stolen, they'll go get it back for me!" Her positive perception of the police is unanimously corroborated by all other interviewees. One vendor says it almost kills him to say so--"I feel like I'm going to turn into a pillar of salt for saying this"--but the police are nothing but cool, civil and helpful at the Tam-Tams. The implication is clear. The Tam-Tams are simply so massive that the police are humbled by it. In Parc Émilie-Gamelin, on the other hand, the police keep their bullying sort of order because they can. Back this summer: graffiti!
The painting of the mural was organized by Open City Productions, which has amassed a $500,000 grant from various sources to paint 60 exterior and interior murals around the city. According to Lucie Potvin of the Action St-Henri Éco-quartier programme, responses to the mural were overwhelmingly positive, except for two elderly St-Henri residents who said they hated it. |
For both makers and officers of the law, summer in the city holds its own particular terrors. The heat and all the fertility, crowds and naked bellybuttons that come with it can work heavily on a person. Some lawmakers will lash out against the power of summer in a crazed and oblique way, like Vision Montreal councillor Robert Coté last week in his call for a crackdown on garage sales. But others are more direct: they'll regulate the summer, undesirable element by undesirable element, wherever it can be regulated.
Artists and local kids covered the walls of a once dank and depressing tunnel in St-Henri two weeks ago with a riot of tulip-coloured and distinctly graffiti-flavoured art. Ironically enough, says graffiti artist Gerard Cleal, the regulations the Bourque administration laid down last year against graffiti in the city have brought about a sort of renaissance in the graffiti community. "The artists are doing graffiti jams, they're making themselves more visible. They're getting more legal contracts than ever before. Bourque's campaign brought graffiti out of the closet."