Montreal’s police service has fired seven officers over racist and discriminatory conduct, five of them from Station 39 in Montréal-Nord, the neighbourhood at the centre of the scandal that began in June. Police Chief Fady Dagher announced the dismissals at a news conference Monday afternoon.
The scandal began with Black and Arab men stopped by a Station 39 patrol unit. Two of the seven worked at Station 21, downtown. The service described the grounds as “discriminatory and racist gestures” and derogatory acts.
The conduct reported by Montreal outlets covers a wide range. At Station 39, officers were accused in June of cutting locs from men they had stopped and keeping the hair as trophies. That led Dagher to dismantle a 16-officer unit, suspend two officers and reassign the rest. Another Station 39 officer is accused of erasing evidence from the phone of a domestic violence victim in September 2025. At Station 21, one officer is accused of urinating on a homeless person around the end of August, and another of mocking a person left in a humiliating position during an arrest.
These are the service’s own findings of misconduct, announced by the chief. They are not court verdicts. The firings are administrative decisions, and the Crown prosecutor’s office (the DPCP) has had the evidence on the Station 39 allegations since June. Quebec’s police ethics commissioner opened a separate investigation at the time. Neither process has produced a charge that we can confirm.
That gap matters in Montréal-Nord, where residents told reporters after the June allegations that they no longer trust the police. The June allegations were not an outsider’s accusation. Dagher has said the information came from inside the force. Losing a job is a consequence. A courtroom is accountability, and the people whose hair was taken have not seen one yet.
A police union can contest a dismissal, and arbitrators have reversed firings in Canada and the United States, sometimes years later. Whether these seven stay gone depends on how well the service built each file. The service has not said how many of the 16 officers first investigated remain on the job, and we could not confirm that figure Monday.
Black community groups in Montreal have called for a public inquiry rather than an internal clean-up. Monday’s firings answer part of what they asked for. They do not say how a unit was allowed to operate that way, or who above it signed off on the stops.
The Crown’s decision on charges is the next test. Until the DPCP says whether it will prosecute, the officers who cut those locs are out of a job but not out of reach of the law, and Montréal-Nord is still waiting to hear which.
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