This year, Nooran Rezayi should have been doing what most sixteen-year-olds across the country do — learning how to drive.
He grew up on the South Shore of Montreal, and getting around in a car is a necessity for any teenager in the suburbs. Right now, he should be celebrating the end of the school year and making plans for the rest of the summer. His parents should be hassling him to stop spending so much time with his friends, insisting that he needs to start thinking about the future. And he should be brushing them off, like most teenagers do.
But he won’t.
He can’t.
Because Nooran Rezayi never got a chance to be a sixteen-year-old boy. Last September, he was gunned down in the middle of the day by a member of the Longueuil police. He bled to death on the same streets that he should be practising his turns on. And his parents will never be able to lecture him about his future, because he has none.
On September 21st of last year, someone called 911 stating that more than a dozen individuals were roaming around a street in Longueuil, all wearing black, and armed. Security footage shows us that when police arrived on the scene, there were only six youths, and they were sitting on a curb. When they saw the cop car, the teenagers ran. And within ten seconds, one of the police officers shot Nooran Rezayi twice.
While we know very few details of the official investigation, we do know that Nooran did not have a gun.
The killing of Nooran Rezayi should have sparked outrage in Canada. It’s exactly the kind of event that Canadians watch happen in the US, right before we smugly proclaim that we’re thankful we live in a civilized country.
There are many reasons why the story has played out under the radar. For one, Quebec itself has been in a law-and-order mood over the last few years, with politicians, the press and the public engaging in a moral panic about crime — especially crime that’s perceived to originate amongst young, non-white people.
And outside of Quebec, the national press doesn’t perceive this to be an important story because it took place in a largely francophone, suburban community. If Nooran had been killed in the streets of Toronto or Edmonton or even Montreal, I am certain that his name would be widely known across Canada.
But despite the lack of outrage and the lack of interest, Quebec’s policing establishment appears set on muddying the moral waters even further.
Last week, the Montreal police announced a raft of charges related to Nooran’s death. But they weren’t against the police officer who killed him or the colleagues that helped that cop conduct an illegal investigation in the hours after the shooting.
The charges were made against Nooran’s teenage friends, some of whom witnessed their friends’ death first hand. Eleven underage youths were charged with numerous offences, including conspiracy to commit assault, conspiracy to kidnap, wearing a disguise for criminal purposes, possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, unlawful assembly and not complying with court orders.
These are incredibly serious charges and the sheer number of them is staggering. And while the SPVM refused to state how many of these young people were on the scene when Nooran was shot and killed, they have confirmed that at least some of them were.
So what could possibly have led up to this? And why are these young people being charged when we still haven’t heard a word about whether or not Nooran’s killer will also be facing the justice system?
When a police officer injures or kills someone in Quebec, the Bureau des Enquêtes Indépendantes (BEI) is supposed to immediately step in and take over the investigation. The BEI is supposed to be an arms-length agency that can investigate police officers in a fair and unbiased manner. There are numerous problems with that description of the agency — namely, that the BEI has never once charged a Quebec police officer for killing anyone.
But let’s put that aside for a moment.
After the police shoot someone, they are obligated to immediately call the BEI, who will then begin an investigation. In Nooran’s case, that didn’t happen — the Longueuil police officers waited hours before they contacted the BEI and began to independently interview witnesses and canvass for surveillance footage, tainting the BEI’s investigation.
This wasn’t the first time that the Longueuil police was caught skirting the BEI. Le Devoir recently revealed that Longueuil police officers waited 10 days before reporting an incident in which a civilian was severely injured and eventually died. In fact, 9 per cent of all BEI cases involved a police agency failing to report an incident to the BEI right away. For the Longueuil police service, that number is 20 per cent. And despite the fact that officers who don’t report cases to the BEI are supposed to be fined for breaking the rules, the agency has never once issued a fine to a single officer.
Two days after Nooran was killed, the BEI tasked the SPVM to look into the circumstances that led to Nooran and his friends being on the street that day. The reason for this is because the BEI is only supposed to look into police officers themselves. Any other alleged crimes that they come across are passed off to a different police agency to look into.
And on its face, that seems like a reasonable approach. As SPVM chief inspector David Shane argued, if a person is shot by the police in the commission of a bank robbery, it’s the BEI’s job to investigate the shooting, and another police agency’s job to look into the bank robbery itself.
But the circumstances in this case are far from simple.
First off, the SPVM took the most aggressive approach to this as possible to investigate these teenage boys. They assigned their major crimes unit, the same unit that goes after biker gangs and serial killers. In other words, the Montreal police threw their full investigative might against a bunch of teenage boys, many of whom had just witnessed their friend shot to death by a cop.
And in February, they went into action. Around 100 SPVM officers conducted simultaneous raids on the homes of these boys, the majority of whom were still underage at the time and living with their parents. And now come these charges, which are numerous and deadly serious.
Because of the secrecy surrounding police investigations, we don’t have confirmation of what these charges are actually pertaining to or how they might be linked to why these young people were on the street in Longueuil the day Nooran was killed. But through media leaks, we can piece together the most likely scenario.
According to Radio-Canada, the SPVM believe that Nooran and his friends had been feuding with another group of teenage boys since the end of the school year. After Nooran was killed, the police found a baseball bat and some ski masks, indicating that they were likely out there to grab one of the rival boys and rough him up, or at the very least, threaten him with violence. This would help explain almost all of the charges we know about, including the conspiracy to commit kidnapping and assault, the possession of a weapon and wearing a disguise for a criminal purpose.
But did you notice what’s missing from that list of charges? Kidnapping or assault. Or even attempted kidnapping.
In fact, the SPVM has confirmed that no one was hurt and no firearms were involved. The only person injured in this whole saga was Nooran Rezayi. And the only gun found at the scene belonged to the Longueuil police.
So what’s happening to that police officer? Likely, nothing. The BEI has completed its report and has sent it to the prosecutor’s office, who makes the ultimate decision on whether or not to file a charge. But no charges have ever been filed against a Quebec police officer after a police killing as a result of a BEI investigation. And Quebec doesn’t even make the BEI reports public. So in all likelihood, we will never learn the name of the officer who killed Nooran Rezayi and we will never know the justifications provided for them to not be charged.
The SPVM’s Racism Crisis
And this is where I think we need to take a good, hard look at the SPVM and the pat-on-the-back culture of Canadian policing. The entire reason that independent agencies like the BEI in Quebec, the SIU in Ontario or the IIO in British Columbia were set up was that the public no longer trusted police agencies to investigate other police agencies when it came to shootings.
And at least from the outside, it appears that the SPVM is doing its best to ensure that the public outcry over the killing of an unarmed child by their sister agency is as small as possible. Why else would they spend so much time, money and manpower going after a bunch of teenagers who haven’t actually hurt anyone?
I can promise you that if a teenager calls the police today and tells them that boys from another school have threatened to beat him up, it will not lead to a hundred cops simultaneously raiding homes in five different municipalities.
Even in the immediate aftermath of Nooran’s killing, media commentators were speculating that these youths were up to no good, thereby justifying Nooran’s death.
And the racial element cannot be ignored. Over the past two decades, Quebec has been engaged in an increasingly outrageous moral panic centred on immigrants, Muslims and non-white people. They are portrayed as not only being alien to Quebec society, but as inherently violent, especially the young boys.
Nooran, whose parents are from Afghanistan, and his friends are exactly the kinds of young people that the media and the police have spent years trying to make Quebecers afraid of.
And we now know that the SPVM in particular has been a breeding ground for some of the worst racial animus imaginable. In June, Montreal police chief Fady Dagher announced that sixteen officers from Montréal-Nord were under investigation for coordinated racist actions against Black and Arab Montrealers. At least one of the police officers is expected to face criminal charges.
We don’t have all of the details, but the little we do know is shocking enough — multiple police officers arresting people solely because of their race and then taking “trophies,” like locks of hair, from their victims. Other officers allegedly overheard them routinely make racist remarks and encourage their colleagues to join in on their racist and demeaning behaviour.
While most of the officers were relatively young recruits (with the exception of two sergeants), this is the same unit that killed Freddy Villanueva, an unarmed 18-year-old Honduran immigrant, in 2008.
And despite what some may argue, racism is a deeply-embedded problem within the SPVM. Random police checks, which are often motivated by race, remain an ongoing practice within the force. In the chic Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood, a Black person is 15-times more likely to be arrested than a white person. Even Montreal’s own mayor, Soraya Ferrada, has told reporters that her husband, who is Black, has been randomly stopped five times within the last year, for no reason whatsoever. And in the city at large, Arab Montrealers are even more likely to be randomly stopped by the police than Black residents.
Much of the media scrutiny around the SPVM’s racism scandal has died down over the last few weeks in the aftermath of the tragic killing of SPVM officer Mohamed Lamine Benredouane by an incel shooter last month. In fact, a public forum about the scandal has been postponed multiple weeks because it overlapped with the civic funeral for Benredouane. Why these two events were scheduled for the same day is a question that only the SPVM can answer.
A Cover-Up
All of this begs the question — can the SPVM be trusted to honestly conduct the investigation into Nooran’s friends?
I, for one, am extremely skeptical.
As an institution, it is in the SPVM’s interest to sweep the story of Nooran Rezayi under the proverbial rug. For one, Fady Dagher, the chief of the Montreal police, led the Longueuil police service from 2017 to 2022. And because they are in neighbouring jurisdictions, the two police forces often work on joint operations together.
But even if these two police forces weren’t joined at the hip, there is a simple reason to doubt the SPVM’s impartiality — cops look out for one another.
Especially when it comes to the use of force, the thin blue line culture remains at the heart of how police operate. You would be hard-pressed to find any police officer in this country go on the record and publicly state that a colleague was wrong to use their firearm against a civilian.
Now some will argue that the charges filed against Nooran’s friends had to go through prosecutors first. But recent events have shown us that Crown attorneys are not immune from seeing themselves as part of law enforcement. In Ontario, two cases were thrown out last month after Crown prosecutor Marnie Goldenberg was seen swearing at a Toronto police officer outside of a court room when he refused to state that a man had intentionally driven a vehicle at a fellow officer.
“We protect our own,” she was heard yelling at the officer.
For me, I keep coming back to one question — why was this case such a priority for the Montreal police? Why did they assign the major crimes squad to it? Why were around a hundred officers deployed for simultaneous raids targeting underage kids?
Because remember, none of these youths are alleged to have hurt anyone at all. Even if that was their intention, they are not being charged with assault or kidnapping or any other kind of violent offence. In fact, it seems almost a certainty that if Nooran Rezayi had not been killed by a police officer, none of these youths would have been charged with anything at all.
And also remember this — if the Longueuil police officer who killed Nooran is ever charged, some of these youths would be witnesses at his trial. Will Nooran’s friends feel that they’re under pressure to alter their testimony because of the criminal charges against them? And will these charges be used as leverage in the civil suit filed by Nooran’s family against the Longueuil police?
This summer, instead of learning to drive or applying to colleges, these kids will be spending their time consulting lawyers and going in and of court rooms. The charges filed against them will be used to demonize their communities and to justify their friends death.
We need to call this what it is — a cover-up. The full force of the state is being deployed against a group of teenagers in order to silence them, smear their reputations and cover-up the unjustified and unjustifiable killing of an unarmed child.
Because Quebec’s policing establishment understands what it would mean for the public to see Nooran Rezayi’s death for what it is. They know, deep in their hearts, that if people truly had to reckon with what happened, there would be fury and outrage directed at the cops. They are doing everything in their power to distract from the one inescapable fact surrounding this entire sordid affair.
The fact that there was only one victim of violence on that sunny day last September. His name was Nooran Rezayi. He was fifteen years old. He was unarmed.
And he was killed by the Longueuil police.
