Research Series The Laval Community - Police knowledge, political profiling and disinformation- the Montreal police and its GAMMA project

Contributing to the sociological and criminological literature on the police in the context of crowds, on political profiling and police knowledge, this thesis presents an analysis of the construction and circulation of police knowledge relating to the establishment, in 2010, of the controversial GAMMA project (Watch for the activities of marginal and anarchist movements) of the Service de police de la Ville de Montral (SPVM). Our case study focuses specifically on constructed police knowledge that designates the crowd (designation modes), but also on those that designate GAMMA as a mode of police action. It provides a better understanding of how SPVM police knowledge was formed in the media, mainly in 2011, compared to how it was formed, internally, at the SPVM senior management level, between 2010 and 2011. he study takes shape from the analysis of the content of a press review (composed in particular of 36 journalistic articles, 20 press releases and 23 opinion letters) and a corpus of 55 internal SPVM documents obtained in deploying six access requests. In the end, the acquisition of this corpus required more than six years of legal and administrative proceedings under the Act respecting access to documents held by public bodies and the protection of personal information on documents.

Our investigation first proceeds to the analysis of the constructs present in the police media declarations which are regulated by the rhythm of events and societal reactions. Our study manages to raise more specifically the question of police denial. Our sociology of denial makes it possible to identify astonishing effects of certain publicly articulated police knowledge. In particular, we are seeing SPVM public relations efforts having the effect of (re)framing the discourse on GAMMA and directing the public's gaze away from certain GAMMA activities. Proceeding then with an analysis of the constructs laid down in internal strategic documents obtained under the Access Act, our study shows that far from being based solely on criminalizable events, the implementation of GAMMA draws more fundamentally from a problematization of the political marginality of social groups. We present how marginal movements are implicitly operationalized into visible indicators and how the problematization of specific political convictions and characteristics, far from indicators of criminality, amalgamates these movements with a criminal potential, urging GAMMA police officers to adopt attitudes of generalized suspicion towards them. The thesis explores the subjectivity of police knowledge on which is based the institutionalization, at the municipal level, of an additional police response that differentially targets these marginal and anarchist movements. It poses, without detour, the question of political profiling, but also questions sociological considerations relating to the theses of "strategic neutralization", "intelligent control", "normalization" and the "routinization" of the demonstration, as well as as landscapes of exclusion in the reflection on the power effects of the police knowledge studied. It also raises the question of conceptual mousetraps that can feed police imaginations. Tracing the circulation of problematic police knowledge to the internal documents of senior management, the study makes it possible to question the responsibility of the latter in the establishment of GAMMA and in a certain form of high-level political profiling. Our investigation also makes it possible to come back to the media framing of the social controversy which would have been ordered by the General Staff of the SPVM. A media framing that will have serious consequences since ultimately, according to our findings, it will have the effect of misinforming the public and hindering the fight against political profiling.

Keywords : police knowledge; political profiling, political discrimination; right to equality; monitoring, denials; denials; sociology of denial; disinformation; marginality; demonstrations; social movements; Quebec.