MONTREAL — Police Chief Marc Parent publicly apologized Thursday afternoon — "personally and also on behalf of the employees" of the Montreal police force — for what he termed the "intolerable" comportment of a Montreal constable widely known as Agent 728.

The chief simultaneously announced that Constable Stéfanie Trudeau has been relieved of her firearm and suspended, pending the results of a disciplinary investigation.

"As of now," Montreal Island's top cop added, "she is suspended for the duration of the investigation," an internal police-department process that Parent said will be "accelerated." He refused to forecast how long it could take.

On Wednesday evening, Parent said, Trudeau had been taken off patrols and re-assigned by the force to administrative duties — keeping her away from any contact with the public.

However, a wave of controversy subsequently built on social media.

Parent was reacting to a Radio-Canada report detailing an incident Oct. 2, during which cellular-phone video shows scenes of chaos including Trudeau choking a man in a stairwell. She was also recorded using disrespectful language to describe a quartet of individuals arrested and charged with obstructing police.

Agent 728 already has a history.

Last spring, she was at the centre of an apparently unprovoked pepper-spraying incident at the periphery of a Red Square demonstration.

Her actions became a YouTube hit, attracting more than half a million views.

Trudeau's behaviour when she entered an apartment in the Plateau Mont-Royal borough on Tuesday of last week — after asking a man holding an open beer outside his front door for identification — was "unacceptable," Parent told reporters convened to Montreal police headquarters at unusually short notice.

He said the force was acting in response to "the facts revealed yesterday," a late-afternoon Radio-Canada report "which informed us, for the first time, of the various facts."

Parent said a decision as to whether Trudeau is been suspended with pay or without pay "will be decided by labour relations."

The force's human-resources staff "and internal affairs," he added later, "will (together) decide the way of doing it ... very fast."

Disciplinary measures ultimately taken against Trudeau could range from "reprimand to dismissal," Parent said.

Is Trudeau a danger to the public?

"Well, after what I saw yesterday and what I heard, absolutely," Parent responded.

A psychological evaluation of the officer "is not excluded," he said.

The Radio-Canada report quoted Rudy Orchietti, the man with the open beer, as saying that Trudeau pushed him to the ground and handcuffed him after he queried her why she had asked for his "driver's license, insurance."

Trudeau's intervention, on Papineau Ave., escalated rapidly into a police operation that drew 20 police vehicles and resulted in four arrests.

One of several cellular phones confiscated by Trudeau, apparently activated by accident, recorded her profanity-laced account of the incident, apparently to a supervisor.

Parent cautioned Thursday that not all of the facts are clear; "there are things that have to be verified."

Trudeau described several persons she found in the apartment as "the rats upstairs ... guitar scratchers, all Red Square types, all artists."