by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Gilles Noël was motoring slowly along in the thick traffic on Marie-Anne in April, 2002, when a police officer had him pull over at Papineau. "Have you been drinking?" asked the cop. "No, but what's the problem officer?" replied Noël. The officer, according to Noël, refused to give a straight answer or identify himself and eventually, Noël says, "grabbed me by my collar and shoved me over inside the car." Noël eventually learned that he was being pulled over due to an old ticket he says he hadn't known about, as it had been sent to an old address.

So Noël filed a complaint at the office of the Police Ethics Commissioner, an independent, provincially run body with 38 employees.

Like most other plaintiffs in such situations, Noël was offered conciliation, which he turned down because he felt that he had been a victim of criminal assault. He was then directed to make arrangements with a commissioner's investigator in Quebec City, which was harder than it might appear. "The guy in charge was deaf in one ear and almost deaf in the other," Noël says. The investigator eventually delayed the appointment until December 2003, when the case was transferred to the Quebec police ethics committee, a tribunal independent of the commission.

Plaintiffs can't represent themselves at the committee, so Noël was appointed a lawyer. "Every time we spoke on the phone she raised her voice and hung up after about four minutes," says Noël. He was appointed another lawyer, who was quickly replaced a few days after.

Eventually, Noël spoke briefly with his representative the day before going to the committee. The lawyer had just returned from vacation the day prior, didn't know the file and had no prior experience speaking before the committee.

In front of the judge, Noël says his attorney "kept forgetting the names of the officers involved. The police officer's lawyer, on the other hand, had all sorts of files in different colours, sections highlighted in yellow, very professional and well prepared. And the judge and him were joking around together a lot.

"Then my lawyer had to summarize and spent about 15 seconds silent. He was completely incapable of making a statement. I'm sure he's not a bad lawyer, but he wasn't prepared at all."

Noël, meanwhile, wasn't allowed to speak other than to read his statement of complaint. Not surprisingly, he was recently informed that his complaint was refused. "It's extremely frustrating," he says.

According to the commission's annual report released last week, the ethics committee rejected 119 out of 205 complaints brought forward in 2002-2003.

Yves Manseau of police watchdog group Mouvement Action Justice says Noël's disappointment is common. "I can give you 200 examples like that," he says. "The commission says they don't have enough money to hire the best lawyers, but the police have no such constraints. Theirs are specialized and experienced lawyers paid with public funds via the union's contract."

Most plaintiffs are pressured to sign off their complaints in the conciliation process, says Manseau. "That just makes the file disappear and the citizen can't be compensated. People are frustrated by that. The system is designed to look good, but beneath that it's something else."