MONTREAL - Her language was atrocious, her behaviour shocking and unbecoming of a police officer.

By now, most people — including students at Quebec’s national police academy — have viewed the footage that captured Montreal Police Constable Stéfanie Trudeau treating citizens in a way her boss described as intolerable and unacceptable.

She is, said police chief Marc Parent, a danger to the public.

Doesn’t exactly instill confidence. But what perhaps is more worrisome is that some in the force say Trudeau is not unique.

“If people really knew how the police operate, they’d be shocked,” said one veteran Montreal police officer. “It’s a disaster.

“In the past 15 years, there’s been a real lack of discipline.”

The officer, who asked that his name not be published, said that if something similar had happened “in the old days,” Trudeau’s sergeant would have hauled her into the office and asked her “what the hell happened out there?”

Instead, he said, the whole incident was kept under wraps and there was no move to reprimand the officer until this week, when cellphone video of the Oct. 2 incident was aired on Radio-Canada and the brass was forced to suspend Trudeau and launch an internal investigation.

Montreal Police spokesman Ian Lafrenière wouldn’t comment on the officer’s claims, saying that if the investigation concludes that something should have been done, the force will take steps to change things.

The video showed Trudeau choking a man in a stairwell and using disrespectful language when relaying details of the scene to her supervisor.

The incident began when Trudeau asked a man holding an open beer on the street for identification. Things escalated and in the end, 20 police vehicles arrived on the scene — an indication, said the veteran, of just how out of control things have become.

He said young recruits are so jittery, they don’t walk the beat so don’t get to know the neighbourhoods or people. Some, he said, won’t even go into the métro alone, despite being armed with a gun and pepper spray.

“They go out on a call, go straight back to their station, roll up the windows and shut the door,” he said, adding that it was just by chance that the Dawson College shooting wasn’t a massacre. “The mindset is just not there at all and we’ve just been very lucky in the past few years (that worse things haven’t happened).”

He pointed to two main problems: the lack of military-style training with a focus on discipline, and incompetent supervisors unwilling to make decisions for fear of jeopardizing a possible promotion to top brass.

After complaints from Quebec police forces that young recruits weren’t up to snuff, even after 15 weeks at Quebec’s police academy and three years of mandatory college-level police technology courses, the École nationale de police in Nicolet three years ago introduced psychological testing.

No one, said Pierre Saint-Antoine, a spokesman for the academy, has been rejected from the academy based on the outcome of those tests, but it could affect their standing in their class and will be given to the police force that is interested in hiring them.