After yet another coroner's report into a fatal police shooting, will Montreal police change?

When community activist Will Prosper heard about the findings of the Quebec coroner in the 2017 police shooting death of Pierre Coriolan, his thoughts turned immediately to others who were in mental distress who have also died at the hands of Montreal police.

"I'm thinking about the cases of Nicholas Gibbs. I'm thinking about the case of Alain Magloire. I'm thinking about the case of Sheffield Matthews," said Prosper, a documentary filmmaker, former police officer and former Projet Montréal municipal candidate in Montréal-Nord.

"They were all in a similar situation," he said. Like 58-year-old Coriolan, all three were Black men with mental health struggles.

In his report released Wednesday, Coroner Luc Malouin found that, in a matter of minutes, police provoked "a chain reaction" by the way they responded to 911 calls about Coriolan, who had been yelling and breaking things inside his own apartment.

Malouin found police were relying on "obsolete and outdated" techniques more suited to dealing with an active shooter than with a person in a mental health crisis, and he said police require better training to be able to de-escalate such situations.

Prosper has heard it all before.

"We've seen many coroner's reports indicating the same kind of recommendations over the years, and we are still seeing the same kind of deaths," he said. 

In fact, Malouin himself made similar recommendations in 2016, following the death of Alain Magloire, a 42-year-old man who was shot dead by Montreal police during a tense confrontation near the bus terminal on Berri Street.

The coroner acknowledges that there have been some improvements since then: Quebec's police academy, the École nationale de police du Québec (ENPQ), has enhanced its training for police cadets. 

In a statement, the Montreal police service (SPVM) said it welcomed the coroner's report and underlined that the service started rolling out a new de-escalation training program in 2018. 

But Malouin notes it's expected to take five years to get all SPVM officers trained. He's also recommending that police undergo periodic recertification to keep their skills up to date. 

The city of Montreal also points to the launch of a pilot project last year in the Ville-Marie borough: a specialized team called L'équipe mobile de médiation et d'intervention sociale (ÉMMIS), which includes social intervention workers who assist the SPVM on mental health calls downtown.

According to Malouin, the SPVM fields 1,000 calls a week regarding people in mental distress. 

But advocates for people with mental health issues say police don't always call on specialized intervention teams when responding to these situations.