Cruising with the cops

On the night beat in Montreal’s notorious Centre-Sud.

>> by CRAIG SEGAL
Cover photo of Constables Nathalie Robert and Hélène Rioux by Jason Felker

Saturday, 11:25 p.m.
In the Station 22 Centre-Sud meeting room on Papineau, Agent Claude Paradis prepares his five cops for the night shift. A board mounted on the wall has photos of anti-Hells Angels “Bandidos” and pro-Hells “Nomads.” A notice on the wall says, “Parents complain about condoms near a daycare,” and “Hot areas: Ontario and Bordeaux—re: prostitution; Rouen Park—re: clients who buy drugs at the stop sign on de Lorimier near the bus stop.” Before leaving, Paradis has me sign a release form promising not to hold Montreal police responsible for injury or death.
I’m freezing in the back seat of a Chevrolet Venture police van. We’re waiting for the heater to warm up as baby-faced officer Alain Aubin registers himself and partner Benjamin Rochon into the durable old-school police computer tucked under the dash. A sticker on my window says it’s child proof. So is the door. I try to get out and realize I can’t. I’m locked in.
They tell me there are 75 known prostitutes in the area, and we spend a good part of the evening parked talking with them. Benjamin says almost all street prostitutes are drug addicts. Coke is more popular than heroin. “Not everyone wants to do heroin. With heroin, you get addicted faster. These are base prostitutes. She’ll perform sexual acts and buy drugs and inject them. She’ll do that all night.”
Station 22 covers Centre-Sud, a poor but hopping area that includes the Gay Village and is packed with street prostitutes of all genders and sexual persuasions and gang members. Sherbrooke and the St. Lawrence River border it to the north and south, Amherst and the CP tracks to the west and east.
We park next to a girl walking hurriedly and Aubin calls her over and asks her name and where she’s going. “Suzanne” answers questions in quick staccato. She was born November 26, 1982. She’s on her way to her mom’s place. Does she have a criminal record? “I have tickets,” she says nervously into Aubin’s open window. Meanwhile Rochon looks her up on the computer. More questions. “We spoke to you last night. You were with your boyfriend. Do you remember us?” Yes. “Do you have any drugs on you?” No.

Cheap tricks

The cops tell me blowjobs cost $10 to $20. Sixty for a “complet.” “The prostitutes tell me they use condoms,” says Rochon. “But one told me she didn’t.” Unlike the prostitutes around St-Laurent, these girls have no pimps. The cops tell me they don’t ticket the majority of prostitutes. “We intervene if they commit a crime,” says Aubin. “Otherwise we let the [social organizations] deal with them. We do what citizens want.”
For an hour we are busy with an abandoned Toyota jackknifed across the street, pressed against the bumper of a parked SUV. Seems the driver had car trouble and left. Rochon checks the car and discovers the clutch and brake are busted. The cops fill out a mound of paperwork and call a tow truck. “Policing is this, Monsieur, papers,” says Aubin, despite my asking him repeatedly to call me by my first name. “And I’m not finished yet. I’m writing. My partner’s writing.
“It can take four hours to handle some reports,” he says. “It’s happened that all the cars are stuck on reports and we’re left with just one car patrolling.
Young Benjamin Rochon, 24, is from Point Claire but lives downtown with his girlfriend, a beautician student, 18 minutes from work. Aubin, 37, is from Gaspésie but grew up in Montreal. He now lives on the South Shore with his wife and kids. I’m the first journalist he’s had on a ride-along in his seven years of policing. Neither have fired their guns. When he’s not working, Aubin reads. Rochon, who unlike his older and more experienced partner still refuses to drink any coffee, races cars. Neither smoke.
We listen to rap music on French radio. Rochon says they never fight over the station. I ask what kinds of things they’ve seen besides traffic accidents. “Many deaths. Murders, suicides, ODs,” says Aubin. “It makes us respect life more. We’ve seen everything.”
Aubin points to a young man in a baseball cap walking quickly with a middle-aged blond john in khakis. “The guy in the cap is known for prostitution,” he says matter-of-factly, as we cruise slowly by.

Pimps, drugs and cabbies

1:30 a.m. Aubin goes into a rant about taxis. “Taxis are very dangerous. They double-park, cut people off, obstruct traffic.” We park by a metro station and Aubin asks a young man if he’s waiting for someone. He responds affirmative and we drive off. “If he’s still there in 15 minutes, we’ll know he’s selling drugs.”
A few minutes later we park on Ontario E. and the cops talk to a blonde transsexual standing on the corner with a beautiful young drag queen. The blonde denies she’s a prostitute, but complains of pressure from pimps. She seems on the verge of tears. The cops appear sensitive to her plight. Rochon tells me he doesn’t think the drag queen spends her money on drugs. “She’ll tell me she’s going to the U.S. for three weeks and then she’s gone. She says she just likes sex.” We snake through a back alley at 10 kilometres an hour and park by a Mustang. Rochon goes to check if it’s a dealer’s car they know.
Back on Ontario, we get into a conversation about ticketing. Cops can’t ticket for prostitution or suspected drug dealing, so they ticket other infractions like jaywalking and loitering. The cops tell me some people let their tickets pile up in the winter so they can go to jail where they’re sure to find a warm bed and three meals a day.
2 a.m. We respond to a noise complaint. A woman around 40 answers the door in her coat and an older man is sitting on the couch. The cops ask her about the noise and she tells a story about a man jumping in through the front window and sprinting straight to the back door and leaving. She talks so quickly, Aubin asks her to repeat her story. Back in the car he tells me she’s a prostitute and that was her john and she’s using her pad for tricks. “She talks to us like we’re imbeciles!”
Next we park at Pub Jacques-Cartier at 1702 Ontario E. that nearly burned down the previous week (read: biker war). A very drunk bald young Russian is angry about something, and the cops get his friends to promise we won’t have to come back. Which includes me. Now I’m a cop, at least to some people. I feel powerful and coplike. Fierce. Except to the people who see me sitting in the back of the wagon and figure I’m some hyped-up white kid the cops picked up for killing a cat or something equally vile.















Rochon explains his theory on street gangs. Apparently the fight between the Beau Gars and the Bad Boys began with a girl. “The Asians are the most violent,” says Rochon. “There have been nine murders so far this year. But you don’t hear about it. It stays in the community.
We respond to another noise complaint. A young French woman in a tight T-shirt opens the door as she licks cake icing off her fingers. She’s pally with the cops. “I’d invite you in, but the place is a mess.”

Devil in drag

4 a.m. Officer Kim Robichaud, a fit 23-year-old brunette, is deliberating whether she should take the night off. Her knee is in bad shape from an injury she sustained the night before while refereeing a hockey game. Twenty minutes later I’m riding in the back of a Chevrolet Impala cruiser with Robichaud and her partner Nathalie Robert, 30, who is driving. It’s their first time working together. The women cops don’t patrol the streets slowly and question people like the men. They tell me their job tonight is to patrol “hot spots.” It gives us a lot of time to talk. They talk about their ’hood. Robert tells me about a wild transvestite prostitute they know. “He does bad trips over and over. We say he’s possessed by the devil.” They point out a hotel on an Ontario corner that prostitutes use for tricks. “It smells like cats in the stairwell,” says Robichaud. “I’m sure it has cockroaches. I don’t know why a client would go there. And it costs the prostitute $30 a night!”
“Sometimes people who are surprised to see women cops show up ask for men,” Robert says. “We say, ‘You have to deal with us.’” Robert’s boyfriend of four years is a male cop who works at another station. “It’s fun because we have the same breaks,” Robert says. Robichaud recently ended a relationship with a male cop.
I am surprised to learn how little the younger cops earn. Robichaud started at $300 a week (after taxes). “One of my best friends is a hairdresser. She makes more than me. But you get a good pension.”
Robert jokes about noise complaints. “A lot of the people living here think we’re paid to handle noise complaints. Can’t they go tell their neighbour to turn down the music themselves?” I ask Robert to perform for me how an East End person responds when she shows up for noise complaints, expecting her to turn me down. But the long hours in the car are apparently getting to both of them, and they play act together in a hilarious routine I can’t do justice to. Robert plays the tough cop and Robichaud plays the crazed cop-hating beer-guzzling complainant.
I ask if they are allowed long hair and make-up. They’re allowed a bit of make-up. Hair can be long if it’s off their face. They joke about a high-maintenance female cop with long fingernails. “I guess she doesn’t get into much rough stuff,” I offer. “I guess not,” Robert says. I ask about their interests. Robichaud is into going to bars and restaurants with friends and plays violin. Her father plays electric guitar. Robert, who is quite muscular, likes doing weights and sports. She likes Friends and Entertainment Tonight. It’s a quiet night. At 6 a.m., the cops drop me off at home.

Fertile recruiting ground

Saturday, 6 p.m. I’m lucky it’s Officer Martin Denomée’s turn to work the desk. The 27-year-old is chattier than other cops. He tells me he understands the biker mindset. “If it’s a very poor area, a way to make money is to work for the bikers,” he says. “The streets are full of young people. It’s part of their life here from when they’re small.” He says street kids are part of “a vicious cycle. We’d have to reeducate them all and show them love. Montreal is one of the cities with the most groups to help the homeless, but the homeless don’t want help.”
Denomée shows me an evidence room full of hunting rifles and kitchen knives. They’re all tagged and I’m not supposed to touch them. I notice an eight-inch hunting knife has someone’s dried blood on it. Denomée doesn’t want to be a detective like his father; he’d rather get onto the SWAT team.
An hour later I’m riding up front with Catherine Garvais, 25. We talk about arresting drug users. “Some are so high, you could break their legs and arms and it wouldn’t stop them.” What’s it like working as a cop? “You don’t feel like you’re working. You see things people want to see that they can’t.” She occasionally points out hot spots, like Resto Bistro Les Courtisanes at the corner of Frontenac and Ste-Catherine. I ask her if she ever gets any calls for the Salon d’Or massage parlor we pass. “No one’s called us yet to say they’re unsatisfied with a massage.” I try to pry her for personal information, but all I can get is she likes Harry Potter and is finishing up the fourth book.
Garvais says she can’t understand why a person would sleep with a prostitute from around here. “Ninety-five per cent of them have AIDS, HIV, Hep C. Junkies have scratches and scabs on them. They scratch themselves because they feel like they have lice. One who wore a bandage on her nose had scratched her nose all the way down to the cartilage.”

Another world

After pumping $37.02 of gas into the cruiser we head over to a fire above Cobra Appareils washing machine store on Ontario E. to assist. The firemen had to break through the glass door into the store to shut off the sprinklers. Garvais has me redirecting traffic while she deals with the firemen.
Another cop shows up and I get to go upstairs with the fire captain, who shows me how the fire probably started from a cigarette under a wooden table. Luckily the sprinklers put it out. The tenant, a tall drag queen, arrives on the scene in a huff: “Well, this is a wake-up call!”
Back at the station Officer Denomée explains to me that Station 22 is the first to test a dog-leash-type contraption to tie around suspects’ ankles in the back of the car. Apparently suspects were kicking out an average of one cruiser window a week. “Everyone wants to work here,” he says. “It’s here you see the weirdest stuff. It’s another world. People can’t imagine all that we see.
“I spoke to a male prostitute who told me he spent $800 a day on drugs. A 24-year-old female prostitute said she made $2,000 a day,” continues Denomée, a former helicopter pilot. “She was on drugs and she was pregnant. I’ve only seen one prostitute who didn’t take drugs.”
Midnight I guess Station 22 got tired of me, because I am soon hanging out with media relations officer Brigitte Barabé. The 28-year-old shows me the Montreal command centre—full of computers and high-tech gadgetry—before we hit the road.
It’s Barabé’s job to get herself to all major happenings so she can handle the media. It’s a slow night as we drive around chatting. We discuss anthrax scares (50 a day at the scare’s height in November), and later join a fellow police officer for a fruit muffin at a Tim Horton’s. And then the big call finally comes in. A man has “fallen off” the top of an apartment building in Ville St-Laurent. Barabé gets us there quickly, navigating with her map book in one hand as she steers with the other. I get a look at the body before a police officer kicks me off the scene. I stand, freezing, at the yellow police tape watching as detectives and cops hover over the body. Red police lights flash off the buildings illuminating thick exhaust fumes from police cars and an ambulance. Pajama-clad neighbours watch from their balconies, mesmerized.
As Barabé drives me home, I think about a cop’s life: the unpleasant looks we got from pedestrians, standing around in the cold, the long hours spent talking to partners in cars, telling people their loved ones are dead, moralizing with prostitutes. And I think about what Catherine Garvais told me: that cops see what other people want to see. Looking at Barabé—who is just as pleasant and smiley as she was before we got the call—I wonder if the reverse is true: that people don’t see what cops wish they could forget. :