Why so many police officers?
An article published by Noémie Mercier in l’Actualité points out some concerning data from Statistic Canada, dated from May 2026.
As the number of police officers tends to diminish accross the country, that figure keeps increasing in Québec, since the pandemic. The province and more precisely Montréal are at the top of the list of canadian cities in terms of amount of officers per 100 000 citizens, that is, 195 for the whole province and 213 in Montréal.
However, neither Québec nor the city of Montréal are leading regarding crime rates.
“In Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, the police officer ratio per 100,000 inhabitants has jumped by 59% since 2019; in Quebec City, by 32%; in the Roussillon and Richelieu–Saint-Laurent regions of Montérégie, by more than 30%; and in Terrebonne, by 20%. No other province has recorded such increases.”
So if it is not the crime rate that drives the amount of police officers in a given location, what does? A 2015 study, done by the sociologists Jason Carmichael (professor at McGill) and Stephanie Kent (Cleveland state University) shows that amongst the factors driving the number of police officers in an area are the amount of racialized persons as well as poor people.
And then, of course, people will keep arguing that there is no such thing as systemic racism!
What is the link between this information and our mission?
To be antifascist, is to fight against all manifestations of racism, systemic or social, as well as all systems of oppressions, such as social classes. The capitalist system requires social inequalities to survive. It also needs to stir up hatred among the population, as it leaves alone the big winners of the system. Alienation, division and repression work well together to maintain the current order.
Poor people = danger! Non-white people = potential danger!
We divide ourselves, we mistrust and fight each other while those select few at the top are smirking at us, gorging themselves on caviar.
The capitalist state requires a repressive and surveillance apparatus. Hence the existence of the police. We know that the police are racist and act with complete impunity. They even surpassed themselves last year by killing the teenager Nooran Rezayi, then arresting his friends, who witnessed the murder.
The government cuts and then argues there is no more money for community ressources, for healthcare, for education. But then, somehow, the budget is always plentiful for the police and their overtime hours.
At the Front Pop, we do not say that we are currently living in a fascist regime but that we can clearly see the political context shifting, with more and more fascistic rhetoric being present in Québec. With our record of police officers in relation to our population. Are our public policies more racist then elsewhere.
We are witnessing a rise in unashamed racist rhetoric in the public sphere, we are seeing laws that infringe upon the rights of several marginalized communities and we are seeing politicians more outraged by anti-racist struggles than racists themselves. There is ample cause for concern.
We should not wait for fascism to be confortable in our home before we can throw it out. It’s already closing in and obviously already installed in our neighbor’s house.
At the Front Pop, we are against the police state and we call for solidarity and empathy for the marginalized.
