Black Lives Ruined: What goes through a Black man’s mind when he’s pulled over

Black Lives Ruined: When a Black man gets pulled over What might go through a person's mind if they're pulled over by police over and over again? Two experts weigh in.

Racial profiling is a systemic problem plaguing Montreal police (SPVM), according to a judgement by Superior Court Justice Dominique Poulin.

But what does that mean in the lives of the victims?

This is part two of a CTV News three-part series called Black Lives Ruined: The effects of racial profiling by police.

The story is almost always the same: a Black man, perhaps in a nice car or walking down the street, is stopped by police.

He asks, “Why have you stopped me?”

The response is he’s either given a ticket, harassed or killed.

The story is almost always the same, whether the case is in Canada, the U.S. or elsewhere.

“We should all be upset. We should all be equally angry that this happens to a human being,” said Dr. Myrna Lashley, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University. “That’s a hell of a way to live your life.”

She equates the lives of Black men to the book Black Skin, White Masks by philosopher-psychiatrist Frantz Fanon.

“Every morning, you’ve got to get up and put that mask on, and you go to work, and maybe on the way to work, you go to a hospital,” Lashley notes. “You need help like [Joyce] Echaquan, and you die because of racial profiling. You don’t think her people are upset?”

For criminal defence lawyer Kwadwo Yeboah, who takes on many racial profiling cases, the fight is personal.

He says he remembers growing up in Montreal’s Cartierville neighbourhood, dashing from police because, innocent or not, running away was always better than getting caught.

“I try to have open arms for people that have been in this situation. They don’t have anybody to really talk to,” Yeboah tells CTV New. “It’s close to me because I look at these people, and these people look just like me.”

He says what’s difficult about the system is victims of racial profiling are being forced to prove their cases have merit rather than the officers defending themselves.

“What frustrates me the most is it’s always the same story, right? I always say to myself, ‘the judges who read these stories are always seeing the same reports,’” Yeboah said. “There is no way that all these different people saying the same thing about the police are lying, right?”

He gripes that Black men are always described by police in the same way: aggressive and arrogant.

“I have five files from different individuals, different times; the police use the same vocabulary,” Yeboah said. “That’s the same thing that happened to me. The police said I got out of my car aggressive.”

Will it ever end?

Lashley laments that the issue is society at large.

“We cannot stop this until we stop the way society functions because racial profiling is really based on stereotyping, and stereotyping is part of racism,” she explains. “Right now, what we’re doing is we’re attacking the symptoms. We’re really not attacking the cause. We’re not attacking the source.”

However, changing society is a huge, perhaps near impossible feat, she admits.

“We always talk about the police, but it happens in health care, it happens in education,” Lashley points out. “We just talk about the police a lot because that’s the one on which we focus the most, but if we can get it through our heads that this has happened across society, then maybe we’ll get a better handle at tackling it.”

She adds it’s not surprising that Black men are immediately suspicious when approached by an officer.

“If you keep hitting me, sooner or later, I’m going to react, no matter how meek I am,” she states. “And you will not like my reaction because I’ve got all this built-up anger inside of me.”

In fact, Lashley, who was previously the vice-chair of the board of the École Nationale de Police du Québec, says she remembers one particular instance of being racially profiled by an officer, herself.

“He stops me, comes up to the car...He asked me where I was going, what I was doing. I said, ‘I live here. I’m going to get milk,’” she recalls. “He looked at me, and he said, ‘who are you?’”

At that moment, Lashley says she started getting mad.

“I looked at him, and I said, ‘I, sir, am Dr. Myrna Lashley.’ He looked at me, and he said, ‘Have a good evening,’” she said. “He never told me why he stopped me. He never said you committed an infraction...The only reason he stopped me is because he saw my face.”

She points out that this type of overarching racism is creating widespread generational trauma.

“I’m going to tell my offspring, my descendants, ‘be careful out there because this happened to me, this happened to Uncle Fred, and this happened to Auntie Jean,’” she said. “I’m trying to do it to help my descendants be aware to protect themselves, but in so doing, I’m also making them fearful. So, I have to arm them to help them. It’s a vicious thing.”

Yeboah adds he always reminds his clients of the importance of staying calm during an interaction with police -- though he acknowledges that it’s sometimes easier said than done.

“I have had clients that get pulled over twice, three times a week,” he said. “After a while, of course, any human being will be frustrated by that type of behaviour. It’s not normal.”

Montreal police (SPVM) declined CTV News' request for an interview with Chief Fady Dagher.