How racial bias can affect 911 calls and what dispatchers in Montreal are learning to stop it
A 911 operator answers a call from a woman complaining about a “Muslim man” parked on a quiet street. The man strikes the caller as suspicious.
The operator weighs her options: does she send the police? The man is allowed to be there and, by the caller’s own admission, he is doing nothing illegal. A police response in this case, and in others like it, could lead to accusations that officers racially profiled the man — but here, the profiling didn’t originate with the officers.
“Some calls are profiled when they come in,” Rose-Andrée Hubbard, the SPVM’s equity, diversity and inclusion advisor, said in a recent interview.
This isn’t a theoretical problem. That call was real and last week, Montreal’s 911 operators listened to it and others, as part of new training intended to help them screen for bias in calls.
“Everything we are putting in place,” Hubbard said, “is to permit our police to intervene based on the actions of a person, not their identity.” |Read more https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/911-montreal-spvm-training-1.6672775|
#cdnpoli #racism #profiling #social