by KEN HECHTMAN

"We see a lot more police violence against people of colour," says Dee LeComte of the Collective Opposed to Police Brutality (COPB) and one of the organizers of next Saturday's seventh annual International Day Against Police Brutality. "But we also see a lot of social cleansing, a pattern of continual low-level harassment and threats to drive undesirables out. We also see people targeted for knowing their rights. They're seen as a threat and the threat is removed."

The organization tracks allegations of police brutality, and one of the cases of social cleansing they're looking at is that of Mary J., a former transvestite prostitute now afraid to leave her home who plans to move from her neighbourhood. She has no intention of making a complaint to Quebec's Police Ethics Committee, saying, "I don't believe in the system. When it's the word of a cop against the word of a hooker, they're going to laugh at you."

LeComte doesn't have much faith in the Ethics Committee either. "I think pretty well everything is refused. Once in a blue moon, they do something - it's like winning the lottery," she says.

"The first thing they do is push for conciliation, where no penalty applies and no record is kept," LeComte continues. "We encourage people to complain anyway, just to increase the volume of complaints, just to put it on the record. If anything is done, it'll be because of the quality of the victim - professional, business owner - and not the seriousness of the abuse."

Cops on campus

But COPB isn't just concerned about what's happening to people on society's fringe. They're also keeping an eye on events at UQÀM, where a heavy police presence has been leading to friction between students and the forces of law and order. At least one student, Gael Lavigne, is filing a complaint with the Ethics Committee because of her treatment at the hands of over-zealous cops.

"The police bring suspected drug dealers into the Music Pavilion to search them," she says. "It's got low traffic and tinted windows - nobody can see what they're doing. They want to keep students from hanging around in front of the building so they give out tickets. There's just one problem. It's legal for us to go to class. It's illegal for them to be there. There must be a formal agreement for the police to enter the campus. They can't just use the doorway of the Music Pavilion as a temporary holding cell."

Since complaining to UQÀM security, she says she's been harassed and threatened by the police. After getting roughed up while witnessing the arrest of another student last fall, she began carrying a tape recorder to school. She made six tapes between October and November, all of which can be heard on the COPB Web site. On one, a cop tells her, "I know I have no right [to be insulting] but how I talk is my business and if you don't like it you can go fuck yourself." On another, another cop makes the veiled threat, "Watch yourself. You never know what can happen late at night."

On Nov. 25, she tried to enter the Music Pavilion after telling the police, "I have done nothing, I have said nothing, I have waited until the arrest was over and now I'm going to go practice my cello." At that, she says police applied a chokehold and cuffed her. They took her to Berri metro where, against department regulations, she says a male officer - whom she was unable to identify because her head was being restrained - patted her down.

When student representative Hugo Ducharme raised the issue at the university Student Life Council, he was apparently told by UQÀM security director Alain Gingras that he couldn't talk about Lavigne's case there. Gingras and UQÀM public relations all refused to comment on the series of incidents.

LeComte describes COPB's annual police brutality demonstration (Saturday, March 15 at 2 p.m. at metro Côte-Ste-Catherine's Mackenzie King Park) as victims' only way of getting their voices out. "The problem isn't a few bad cops," she says. "This is a worldwide event because it's a worldwide problem. It's systematic. The police are there to keep the rabble in line and protect private property. They're protected for anything they do towards that." :