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One advocate says an apology from Mayor Valérie Plante or the chief of police would go a long way toward changing police culture.

Photo by Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette

“There’s a lack of civility and humanity at the top and that has to change,” said Fo Niemi, director for the Centre on Research in Race Relations. “We want them to apologize, to at least acknowledge that something isn’t right.”

The incident with Menezes began in May 2012, when he and two friends witnessed officer Stéfanie Trudeau giving a cyclist a ticket. When the group approached Trudeau, Menezes says she handcuffed him, threw him in the back of her patrol car and called him a “f—ing Indian.”

Menezes is of South Asian descent.

During a roundabout ride to the police station, Menezes says Trudeau accelerated the car in bursts before slamming on the brakes so his face would hit the Plexiglas that divides the back and front seats.

He claims Trudeau also repeatedly told him that if he challenged his arrest in court, he’d be thrown in jail where he would be “f—ed in the ass.”

In the end, Trudeau and her partner allegedly dropped Menezes in the remote north end of Montreal at 3:30 a.m. knowing he had no money for a cab home. He was slapped with a $146 fine for “continuing to do an act” which the ticket didn’t specify.

The police ethics commission found last year that Trudeau abused her authority, was neglectful of Menezes’s safety and drove her squad car recklessly during the 2012 incident.

None of the commissions’ sanctions applied to Trudeau because she retired in 2015. Constantinos Samaras, her partner at the time, was suspended from the force for two days for allowing Trudeau’s actions to go unchecked.