LETTER FROM MONTREAL

Montreal police chief Fady Dagher can be rightfully proud. On December 12, 2023, the director general of the French national gendarmerie, Army General Christian Rodriguez, during his visit to Canada, accompanied him to a police station under his jurisdiction. He wanted to understand, as close as possible to the ground, the small revolution that his Quebec colleague was undertaking in his city, by advocating "hyper-proximity" policing. "He took notes, lots of notes," said the eloquent Montreal police chief, without prejudging what his counterpart will derive from his brief immersion in terms of concrete lessons to be applied in France.

In his downtown Montreal office, Dagher, 55, greeted his guests in a T-shirt and sneakers. On the table in a small Mediterranean-style living room were jars filled with glass marbles that he used to play with in schoolyards in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire), where he was born and spent his childhood; on the wall is a map of Lebanon, his parents' country of origin, to which he regularly returns on holiday. The city's first police chief with an immigrant background passionately explained how he intends to radically change the mission of his troops. He defends the concept of a "concerted" police force, working in cooperation with the social services, intending to prevent most violence.

It was a chance meeting in 1990 with a police officer who invited him to patrol with him – "professional love at first sight," he still marvels 34 years later – that led young Fady, who had come to Montreal five years earlier to study management with the intention of taking over the family bicycle business, Dagher Cycles in Côte d'Ivoire, to embark on a career in law enforcement. Over the years, the new recruit has worked in a variety of departments: street patrolman, undercover officer in mafia gangs, investigator in the drugs squad, and officer in the riot squad, before accepting supervisory positions in local police stations.

His first assignment in 2005, in an underprivileged neighborhood on the north side of the island of Montreal, served as a laboratory for him. "At the time," he recalled, "Saint-Michel was considered one of the most violent neighborhoods in Canada. Gang shootings, drug trafficking, prostitution, it was what you would have called a 'lawless zone.' In comparison, your French suburbs were like Club Med!"

Dagher has dared to adopt a different approach to the prevailing "zero tolerance!" principle, which is supposed to embody the authorities' determination to fight delinquents and criminals, but with unconvincing results. "I've taken away the zero and kept the tolerance. Because you're not born a criminal, you become one." Convinced that preventing teenagers from going down the wrong path was essential to reducing future crime, the police officer encouraged his officers to work with everyone in the community, from coaches at small sports clubs to social workers and families.

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