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Reporto cop >> Gaétan Rivest quit the force because of its brutal methods. Now he writes about it every month by JACQUIE CHARLTON
"The police are like a big gang--they're like a gang of bikers. Denouncing their illegal actions is just not done, " Rivest told the Mirror. "We decided that the only way to sensitize people to police abuses was to have a newspaper that will denounce these things: a newspaper that isn't afraid of the repercussions and that is linked to no one." Rivest says the allegations in Le Juste Milieu are based on internal documents the OSAPP has obtained from working police officers who sympathize with the cause, but who are afraid, for the sake of their jobs and pensions, to publicly denounce them on their own. "There's nothing in the paper that isn't true," Rivest says. The November edition, 32-pages long and bearing a strong resemblance to tabloids such as Allô Police, features provincial Health Minister Jean Rochon on the cover, with an accompanying article about the alleged web of sordid intrigue that surrounds him; a report on how a journalist who covered police abuses was supposedly intimidated by two members of the Wolverine squad into backing off the story; an account of the alleged 1976 execution of a robbery suspect and police cover-up that ensued; and a description of the overly intimate links between crown prosecutors and the police. Rivest's campaign against police abuses was launched after he took a year off from his job as an SQ agent in 1991 to work at his own business, a kitchen-cabinet company. Once out of the force he decided never to go back, but his firm went bankrupt and he began to dabble in the contraband cigarette trade. In 1992 he was arrested by the SQ who, he said, hit and threatened him repeatedly during the arrest, and then tried to frame him for cocaine and contraband cigarette trafficking. Rivest says the arresting officer threatened to implicate his 19-year-old daughter as well. Though he was later found not guilty due to the illegality of the arrest and investigation methods, Rivest had found his mission: he set to work getting hold of as many police records documenting wrongdoing in the force as he could, and in 1995 went on Radio Canada's current affairs program Le Point to confess his part in the particularly brutal means SQ officers used in obtaining one innocent man's confession to murder. Rivest set up OSAPP last spring. The organization accepts members for fees ranging from $10 to $100 a month; in return, members receive the newspaper and can also call upon the services of OSAPP's expertise in dealing with the police. The $100 "platinum" membership, clearly designed for people who've had, or may have, a run-in with the law, gets you unlimited free professional consultations with the OSAPP, plus support in such cases as searches, arrests, trials or breaches in the ethics code. The literature promises members of the OSAPP--who currently number 1,800 according to Rivest--will be treated with regard and respect at the hands of the police.
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Gaétan Rivest, the ex-Sûreté du Québec officer who two years ago made headlines for publicly denouncing the illegal practices the force used in obtaining convictions, has come out with another damning indictment of his former employer. The first edition of Le Juste Milieu (The Happy Medium), a 100,000-circulation French monthly tabloid put out by Rivest's organization, the Organisation de surveillance des abus policiers et politiques (OSAPP), came out this month chock-full of reports on police harassment, conflict-of-interest scandals, corrupt cops and questionable deaths involving police at various levels.