By Ghazal Azizi Kashi, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Investigative Journalism Foundation

The coroner’s report on 70-year old Robert Hénault’s death weeks after a cop shot him was inconclusive. 

Without a detailed record of the encounter with Montreal police, coroner Paul Dionne couldn’t form a clear opinion, so he recommended that the police wear body cameras. 

That 2015 decision sparked the first embers of over a decade of Montreal and the province flirting with the portable recording devices. 

Body cameras fail to decrease use of force or to boost public trust, the police said in 2019 after spending four years and nearly $3.5 million testing the devices in a pilot program.   

Seven years later, the police, their union and the city are all running towards the same devices with open arms. 

Their U-turn was set off by calls for police reform, but officers patrolling the streets with pricey, AI-powered surveillance apparatus is a step in the wrong direction, critics insist. 

“Many of the things that are sold to us as police reforms have already been implemented, so what does the research say?” asked urban policing scholar Ted Rutland. 

“The short conclusion is that the police and the city are constantly putting in place ‘reforms’ that won’t change anything and marginalizing things that could make a better city for everybody,” he said. 

Montreal said it is hopping on a bandwagon that many Canadian police forces are riding — Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver have already adopted body cameras — but no new research or evidence has inspired the change of heart. 

“There was no specific technological advancement that, on its own, led the Montreal Police Service to reconsider its position on body cameras,” a spokesperson for Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) wrote in a statement translated from French. 

“Trust forms the basis of any successful relationship between the police and the community. The SPVM is therefore committed to working closely with Montrealers, promoting transparency, open communication and mutual respect.”

Wrestling for the narrative

The juice isn’t worth the squeeze when equipping all frontline officers with cameras would cost more than $17 million, and taking care of the cameras and their footage would rack up another $24 million yearly, the SPVM decided at the end of its last pilot. 

Some police officers had even reported feeling monitored and their privacy violated when wearing cameras. But within a year, the Montreal police union had come around. Their reputation was at stake. 

“Far too often allegations by citizens or brief video clips of a police intervention are picked up by the media without the full context being shown, thereby damaging the image of police officers,” Quebec’s police unions wrote to the provincial government in a 2020 letter demanding body cameras. 

The Montreal police brotherhood, which represents SPVM officers, did not respond to a request for comment from the IJF. 

That summer, with demonstrations against police violence erupting globally after George Floyd’s murder, the battle to win over the narrative looked uphill. Polls showed 54 per cent of Quebecers in support of defunding the police.

Protesters demanded transparency and accountability, just as the police and politicians promised them. But when it comes to discussions of reform, these words can mean different things depending on your perspective, says Chris Schneider, a professor of sociology at Brandon University. 

“When police administrators talk about accountability and transparency, they’re talking about something different than, say, victims of police violence,” he said. “These groups are basically just talking past each other.”

Schneider’s latest book on body-worn cameras details that their impact on reducing police force and civilian complaints yields inconsistent results. 

“Sometimes they go down, sometimes there is no statistical significance between police officers with cameras and those without, and there’s been a few studies that have actually shown that police use of force has gone up in the presence of body-worn cameras,” Schneider said. “This is a technology that is inconclusive. And it is very, very expensive.”

His observations are not far from SPVM’s own takeaways from the pilot program. 

“Generally speaking, body cameras have very little impact on the course of police interventions,” reads the pilot’s report. 

‘Total transparency’

Julien Grau-Brown remembers the tense air in the room at city hall where Montreal police and citizens had gathered on Aug. 11. A few months before, SPVM Chief Fady Dagher had revealed in a late-night press conference that 16 officers at a station in the Montreal-Nord borough were under investigation for hateful and racist acts against Black and Arab residents. Some officers had allegedly also cut locks from Black people’s hair as “trophies.”

The meeting in August was the first time the police were facing citizens to answer questions about the misconduct and the SPVM’s plans to restore trust.

Grau-Brown, who wears dreadlocks, says he has experienced first-hand Montreal police profiling him. When he heard Dagher say “the police union, the police, the population, everyone is for cameras,” Grau-Brown was angered.    

“Recording an encounter, whether it’s the police or a citizen, is not the same as making the police accountable,” he told the IJF. 

“My concern is that these body cameras expand the police’s capacity to record people, without necessarily changing who gets stopped, or whose testimony is believed, or who controls the evidence.”

Since body-cameras first entered the public debate, one of the hold-ups to adopting them has been approval from Quebec’s justice ministry, which has yet to set up the structures, technologically and legally, to make the recordings admissible in court. 

A few weeks after that fateful public assembly, Dagher and Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada — who was elected in November 2025 and ran on the promise to spend $40 million on police cameras over 10 years — announced that the SPVM would move forward with buying the recording devices regardless. 

“What I’m saying to [the Ministry of Justice] is that I’m starting the process of implementing cameras, we’re going to do it in a very progressive way so I’m giving them time to do that, but I’m telling them that I’m coming with videos,” Martinez Ferrada said at an Aug. 21 news conference

“Everything will be filmed,” Dagher said, and promised “total transparency” from the Montreal police, including when releasing the footage. 

But as current laws dictate, the public can expect to almost never see the recordings. 

“Privacy laws in Canada are very strict and they’re federal, meaning they come out of Ottawa, and coast to coast, they largely prohibit the release of body-worn camera footage,” Schneider said. “It’s the stuff of nightly newscasts in the United States, but that’s different in Canada.”

The Ministry of Justice told the IJF that it has the technology to handle video evidence, but directed questions about admissibility to the Minister of Interior Security. The Ministry of Interior Security said it “cannot comment on the transparency commitments of the City of Montreal and the SPVM, nor can it replace the competent authorities regarding the communication of recordings.”

Accountability?

Unless the city can guarantee the release of footage, Montrealer Alexandre Popovic is “not even interested in having a conversation about body cameras.”

A spokesperson for Coalition Contre la Répression et les Abus Policiers, Popovic helps families who lost loved ones in police interventions find answers. 

“I tried in the past to make an access to information request to get recordings from body cams, and each time they were denied,” he said. “It seems to me that it’s all a public relations strategy.”

When Crown prosecutors ruled Const. Jean-Luc Lapointe’s 2008 shooting of unarmed 18-year old Fredy Villanueva as an act of self-defence, outrage followed. That’s how Quebec’s police watchdog, the Bureau des Enquetes Indépendantes (BEI), was born. 

In the past decade, 506 files have landed on the BEI’s desk, which investigates cases of serious injury, sexual assault or death during a police intervention or custody. Nearly 85 per cent of the investigations have closed with no charges laid. 

“When as a citizen I break the law, there are consequences for me. So, why not for them?” asked Popovic.

Critics of body cameras worry that the technology would only inflate police budgets without fixing systemic issues of racism, violence and misconduct in policing.

“If a police officer thinks he has the right to use deadly force, and the court system will agree with him, and there’s police impunity, well, body cams won’t change nothing,” said Popovic.

An independent third party needs to govern when cameras are activated, control the footage and determine how the recordings are integrated with other oversight tools, said Tamir Israel, director of privacy, surveillance and technology at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA). 

“They just have not been implemented in Canada in a way that allows for their promise of accountability to bear out,” Israel said.

But even in the United States where regulations on body cameras can vary per jurisdiction, a national survey found that almost 93 per cent of prosecutors’ offices use recordings to prosecute citizens, while just eight per cent had used them in cases against police officers.

In September, Montreal passed a motion that bans insults against police and city employees, raising new concerns about how body camera footage might be used. 

“By announcing new police powers and surveillance capabilities while refusing to act on well-documented problems of systemic racism and racial profiling within the SPVM, the city is compounding existing problems,” the CCLA said in a press release. 

When asked if there are any successful models for adopting body cams to monitor the police, David Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — a digital rights non-profit in San Francisco — responded, “No.”    

‘A complete surveillance package’ 

Officers across 16 of Canada’s biggest cities, three provincial police forces and the Mounties all wear body cameras, the IJF revealed in September, and they use the same supplier, Axon Public Safety Canada. 

“There are several large tech companies vying for the market share of public safety surveillance,” said Maass. 

Axon, the supplier for SPVM’s body camera pilot, is one of them. 

Motorola Solutions is another. The Chicago-based company is the body-camera provider for the police in Charlottetown, P.E.I.

Neither company responded to the IJF.

Advocates of police reform worry that many of these suppliers have been pushing their surveillance technologies in the name of accountability. 

Rutland has noticed that trend in Montreal. 

“The SPVM has a fairly concrete plan to increase surveillance in Montreal [which] includes more surveillance cameras in public spaces. They want to have people’s doorbell cams connected into the SPVM’s network, and they want body cameras … constantly filming anything they see,” Rutland told the IJF. 

Rutland worries that these gadgets make the use of AI inevitable in law enforcement, and eventually in the justice system. 

“The only way that you can ever make use of all that footage is to have AI software,” he said.

In 2025, the SPVM contracted iMotion Security for an AI-powered video analysis tool. It was developed by Rank One Computing, an American company specializing in biometric identification. But the Montreal police told the IJF that “biometric recognition, specifically facial recognition, is not part of the current scope of use.” 

“It’s sad that people believe that [body cameras] will change something, because they’re going to be very disappointed when it doesn’t,” said Rutland. “That their desire for body cameras comes out of usually a place of empathy or rage about these injustices that we see all the time, it makes me really upset.”

Learn more about our News Monitoring here.

---