A Black Canadian man spoke out about a recent encounter with police in which he said he was violently arrested after they saw him entering his father’s BMW.
CBC reported that Khadafi Keenan Fagan-Pierre was leaving his mother’s home on the morning of April 14 and preparing to use his dad’s car when two officers spotted him.
“Is this your car?” one cop asked after approaching Fagan-Pierre.
“No,” Fagan-Pierre responded.
“Well, whose car is it?” a cop asked.
Fagan-Pierre found it odd that he was getting the third degree.
“Why do you need this information? Is the car stolen? Like, what’s going on?” the 31-year-old asked the officers. “Why are you here?”
Fagan-Pierre lives with his mother in Quebec, but his father, who lives in Ottawa, regularly lends him his BMW to drive. Yet, the cops told Fagan-Pierre that he looked “suspicious” getting into the vehicle.
At that point, the situation began to escalate.
As the female officer walked to the home’s front door, Fagan-Pierre followed behind but was stopped by the male cop. Fagan-Pierre said the male officer grabbed his arm, slammed him against the garage, punched him in the back of his head, and kicked his leg.
“He runs up against me, grabs my left arm and then he just starts going crazy,” Fagan-Pierre recalled. “He starts trying to break my wrist…. I was screaming, ‘please, please stop.'”
Fagan-Pierre said from there, he slammed him to the ground, pressed his face to the pavement, and pinned a knee on his back, which made it hard for him to breathe.
Gatineau Police told CBC that Fagan-Pierre’s arrest “necessitated the use of force,” and he was taken into custody for obstructing a police officer in the execution of his duty.
Fagan-Pierre remembers an officer told him he was being arrested for kicking.
“If I did strike them, it was in self-defense of me just moving my legs from the pain that was being inflicted on me that I had never felt in my life,” he said.
Fagan-Pierre’s mother, Dian Pierre, also witnessed part of the arrest in which she saw her son being slammed to the ground. She said she heard the commotion from inside her home. After she went outside and saw her son being detained, she tried to tell officers that the car belonged to his father, but it didn’t stop the arrest.
“I’m massively confused and in trauma,” Pierre said of the moment she saw the scene. “It was a very negative, jarring situation for me.”
Pierre said her son never fought back against the officer. A neighbor who witnessed the arrest said it looked “rough,” but it didn’t look like Fagan-Pierre was fighting against the cop.
“I tried to express that this was racial profiling,” Fagan-Pierre said. “That’s when they shouted at me to ‘shut up, this car belongs to a 70-year-old person and you don’t look 70 years old.'”
Fagan-Pierre’s father was 69 at the time of the incident.
While the cops didn’t respond to Fagan-Pierre when he accused them of racial profiling, they did address the claims with his mother. She said that one cop told her they stopped her son “because of the way he looks and what he was wearing.”
Fagan-Pierre has locs and was wearing a hoodie, a paisley scarf, ripped jeans, and a hat at the time of the arrest.
A spokesperson for the Gatineau police force said racial profiling is “never tolerated,” and any officer “who makes inappropriate or discriminatory statements or gestures must face the consequences.”
The department also said investigators looked into the case and didn’t find the male officer who restrained Fagan-Pierre violated any policies.
Fagan-Pierre said he was physically and psychologically scarred from the encounter. His wrists were left bruised and swollen, and his elbows, shoulders, and knees got scratched up.
“That nightmare sits with me every night,” he said. “Something needs to really change in the system. It ain’t right. There’s too many Black people that are being assaulted and are being brutalized for absolutely nothing.”
The family filed complaints and is considering taking legal action.
According to CBC, available data shows that Quebec’s police ethics commission received an average of 156 racial profiling complaints from 2017 to 2022. Only 11 complaints were reviewed by the commission members in that five-year period. Four of them resulted in the discipline of a police officer.
