Officers smashed in his car window and pepper-sprayed him in the face. Four months later, he received a ticket for driving across a solid single line.

The neighbour’s video is dark and poorly lit, but it captures two Montreal police officers standing outside Ashton Boodoo’s car moments after one of them smashed in his driver-side window and the entirety of the exchange that followed.

“I did not commit a crime. Why are you doing this? Stop,” Boodoo, a black man of West-Indian Trinidadian descent, can be heard reasoning with the officers, his voice cracking with distress.

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“Get out of the car!” one of the officers repeats in response.

“Please, officer, please, officer, get it away — ,” Boodoo says, his pleas interrupted when one of the police officers sprays him in the face three times with pepper spray.

“Get out of the f***ing car right now!” the officer then shouts.

Coughing and letting out high-pitched shrieks, Boodoo is then dragged from his car.

“I didn’t do nothing wrong!” he cries.

His voice becomes muffled when he’s pushed face-first into the ground.

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The arrest took place in May 2015. Four years later, Boodoo, 42, is now suing the city of Montreal and the police officers involved for roughly $93,000.

Made public at the Montreal courthouse this week, the lawsuit argues the arrest “bears all the hallmarks of racial profiling” and that Boodoo believes he was the victim of “driving while black.”

The night of the arrest, Boodoo had been returning home after watching a boxing match at a bar with friends. He was sitting in his car, outside his home in LaSalle, when the patrol car pulled up behind him around 3:40 a.m. Officers later said they had followed Boodoo home to give him a ticket for a traffic violation they witnessed a few blocks away.

Given how dark it was, Boodoo says he first didn’t realize the two men were police officers. When they identified as police, the lawsuit argues his fear of exiting the car then “stemmed from his awareness of the fact that in the greater Montreal area, black men like himself are often profiled as criminals and treated with unnecessary and excessive force by the police.”

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The suit seeks moral and punitive damages but also to recuperate the $25,000 Boodoo has had to spend on legal fees to fight the charges he faced following the arrest.

After being arrested, Boodoo was kept at a detention centre for six hours and charged with impaired driving, obstructing a peace officer and refusing to provide a breath sample. Four months later, he received a ticket for driving across a solid single line that night.

In an unequivocal decision issued last July, Montreal municipal court judge Randall Richmond granted a stay of proceedings on each of the charges, ruling the officers violated Boodoo’s Charter rights. But even had he not found there to be Charter violations, Richmond added, he would have acquitted Boodoo of each count.

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The judge ruled the evidence was “practically non-existent” for the impaired driving charge, that he didn’t believe the officers’ evidence about Boodoo driving over a solid line and that Boodoo never refused to provide a breath sample. His subsequent detention, he added, was “unnecessary, abusive and illegal.”

Richmond concluded the officers followed Boodoo for reasons other than to give him a ticket — “they wanted something else or they were on a fishing expedition,” he wrote — and acted excessively violent toward him.

“Mr. Boodoo posed absolutely no threat to the police officers. Their safety was never in jeopardy, nor even threatened,” Richmond ruled. “Why the police decided to use such force in the circumstances leaves me dumbfounded and concerned.

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“The kind of brutality used by police against Mr. Boodoo is unacceptable and will not be condoned by our courts.”

Boodoo, who works as a psychiatric rehab assistant, was left traumatized by the arrest and says it has led him to lose all confidence in the police.

“It’s only because I had a video that I had proof. Without it, I had nothing,” he said this week, wondering what would have happened with his trial had a neighbour not happened to film the scene.

“I knew I was not guilty so I stood up for what I believed in,” Boodoo added. “But how many people does this happen to who can’t stand up for themselves?”

Besides the damages, the suit also seeks to have the Montreal police force (SPVM) ordered to provide better training for officers to prevent future instances of racial profiling.

The SPVM said it could not comment on the arrest given the ongoing legal proceedings. The force unveiled a new strategy to eliminate racial and social profiling last year