Longueuil police killed 15-year-old Nooran Rezayi. Five months later, they raided the homes of his friends. This is how police power consolidates.

On the morning of February 26, 2026, police knocked on doors — and kicked some down — across Montreal’s South Shore. Nine search warrants were executed across five municipalities: Beloeil, Brossard, Candiac, Longueuil, and Saint-Philippe. Several of the addresses belonged to minors.

The people targeted were not accused of killing anyone. They were friends of a 15-year-old boy who had already been killed by police five months earlier.

No arrests were planned. None were made.

This is the sequence that defines the case of Nooran Rezayi. First, police kill a child. Then, long after the shooting fades from headlines, they return to criminalize the social world he inhabited. The bullet is followed by the warrant. The killing is followed by the raid. The institution that used lethal force remains intact. The community absorbs the consequences.

The Killing

On September 21, 2025, Nooran Rezayi, a 15-year-old high school student, was shot and killed by officers from the Service de police de l’agglomération de Longueuil (SPAL) on Montreal’s South Shore. He was sitting on a curb with a group of friends. He was unarmed, carrying a backpack filled with schoolbooks.

The immediate aftermath of the shooting — the public scrutiny, community response, and early documentation of the BEI delays — was examined at the time in the initial report on Montreal police facing renewed scrutiny after the teen was killed.

The sequence of events is documented in security camera footage released by the family’s lawyers and in the CBC’s detailed timeline of the case. At 2:47 p.m., police received a 911 call reporting masked, armed individuals in the area. Officers arrived at the corner of de Monaco and Joseph-Daigneault streets at 2:58 p.m. — and the footage shows Nooran was shot within ten seconds of police parking their cruiser. Between officers shouting “get on the ground” and the gunshots, three seconds elapsed. Nooran was shot twice.

By 3:01 p.m., officers had confirmed on police radio that there were no other armed suspects at the scene. The Quebec police watchdog, the Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes (BEI), confirmed that no firearm was recovered from the teenager. As Global News reported, the only items found were a baseball bat, a backpack, and ski masks. The only gun at the scene belonged to the officer who fired it.

Nooran’s mother, Fahima Rezayi, told reporters: “They killed my child for nothing. Why was this officer in such a hurry to fire two bullets at Nooran without even taking the time to think? He didn’t even give him five seconds to lie down.”

The family has filed a $2.2 million civil lawsuit against the City of Longueuil and its police department, alleging racial profiling and disproportionate use of force. The allegations have not been tested in court.

The Cover

What followed the shooting was not an investigation. It was an intervention.

According to BEI director Brigitte Bishop’s correspondence, released publicly by Longueuil Mayor Catherine Fournier, police were required by law to notify the watchdog “without delay” after Nooran was shot. Instead, the BEI was not contacted until 4:34 p.m. — one hour and thirty-six minutes after the shooting. By 6:22 p.m., Longueuil police had already met with and taken statements from up to sixteen civilian witnesses, allegedly including questions about police actions and requests for security camera footage. BEI investigators had not yet arrived.

Nooran’s family was not informed he had been shot until approximately 8:30 p.m. — more than five hours after he was killed.

Longueuil Police Chief Patrick Bélanger told the BEI that a “without delay” notification requirement did not mean immediate notification. BEI director Bishop rejected this interpretation in writing. The “letters reveal several alleged breaches of [Longueuil police’s] legal and regulatory obligations,” the City of Longueuil stated when releasing the correspondence. Mayor Fournier subsequently asked Quebec’s Public Security Minister Ian Lafrenière to launch a separate administrative inquiry into the police force and its chief. As of December 2025, Lafrenière said he would launch such an inquiry, though the timing remained unclear.

The officer who fired the fatal shot was placed on indefinite sick leave. No criminal charges have been laid. The BEI investigation continues.

This is the standard outcome in Quebec. Since the BEI was created in 2016, it has opened hundreds of investigations — 467 total, according to The Link’s analysis. Only two have resulted in judicial proceedings. A CBC investigation from 2019 found that in 126 cases involving Quebec police, including 71 deaths, not a single officer had been criminally charged. In the same period before the BEI existed, ten officers had been charged — a rate of under two percent that the BEI’s creation has managed to reduce further. Half of the watchdog’s investigators are former police officers, a structural fact that undermines the claim of independence.

The Infrastructure That Made the Killing Possible

Nooran Rezayi did not encounter police for the first time on the day he was killed. Neither did his friends.

The SPAL — Longueuil’s police force — had been running two simultaneous operations in the months before the shooting, each with its own public rationale, each functioning as a mechanism of racialized pressure on young people in the area.

The first was RÉSO, an acronym for Réseau d’aide sociale et organisationnelle, a community policing program introduced as a pilot in 2019 and expanded with $3.6 million in Quebec provincial funding in 2021. Under RÉSO, a select group of officers spent six weeks embedded in communities without uniforms or guns, tasked with building relationships and referring vulnerable youth to social services. Quebec’s Public Security Minister Geneviève Guilbault called it “avant-garde” and said she hoped other forces would adopt it. Media coverage was uniformly positive. The program made Longueuil’s then-chief Fady Dagher so prominent that he was later hired to lead the Montreal police force.

The second was an anti-gun operation funded by Quebec’s $74 million provincial anti-gun initiative, which sent $3 million to Longueuil — launched in the same month as RÉSO, with roughly the same financial support. Ted Rutland, Associate Professor of Geography at Concordia University and one of Quebec’s foremost researchers on racialized policing, documented the timing in The Rover weeks after Nooran’s death: the anti-gun operation “resulted in a massive increase in random police street checks” — 836 street checks in the first three months alone. The same officers rebranded as community partners were simultaneously conducting saturation patrols directed at racialized youth. These were not separate programs operating in tension. They were the same institution doing both things at once.

What the data shows about who bore the weight of those street checks is precise. A Globe and Mail investigation using access-to-information requests documented that in Longueuil, Black residents made up 14.1 percent of all police stops while representing 7.6 percent of the population — nearly double their population share. For traffic stops under Section 636 of Quebec’s Highway Safety Code — a provision Quebec’s own Superior Court invalidated in 2022 as a pathway to racial profiling — Black residents accounted for 24.4 percent of stops, more than three times their share of the population. Arab residents were stopped at 7.7 percent of all stops while representing 4.4 percent of the population. Longueuil police told the Globe they had “not carried out an in-depth analysis of the collected data” and could not explain the overrepresentation.

This pattern was not new, and it was not uncontested. In 2020, Quebec’s Human Rights Tribunal ordered the City of Longueuil to collect and publish racial data on police stops and implement anti-profiling training after finding that a Black man had been racially profiled during a traffic stop. An anti-racism group subsequently claimed that the Quebec Ministry of Public Security had told Longueuil police to delay complying with the tribunal’s order. The province denied this. Longueuil police continued using Section 636 traffic stops — the provision the court had already ruled unconstitutional — pending appeal.

The regional context is equally damning. Rutland’s 2020 research report, Anti-gun or anti-Black? The racial targets of the SPVM’s “anti-gun” squad, documented that when Montreal launched its own anti-gun squad, 74 percent of those arrested were Black — in a city where Black people represent approximately 7 percent of the population. Seventy percent of the charges laid were not related to guns at all. Rutland’s conclusion was direct: the squad functioned “more like an anti-Black squad.” His analysis extended to the institutional pattern: “Historically, every time the Montreal police force is heavily criticized about racism or racial profiling, they double-down and respond by trying to justify the very actions we’re criticizing them for.” The Longueuil sequence — criticism of racial profiling, followed by RÉSO, followed by an intensified anti-gun operation, followed by a killing — is legible as exactly that pattern operating one municipality over.

It was inside this operational context that Nooran Rezayi and his friends spent the months before his death. The officer who killed Nooran had reportedly interacted with him previously. The killing was not a random encounter between strangers. It was the terminal point of a documented pattern of surveillance.

Community Policing as Cover

The RÉSO program was not incidental to what happened. It was central to how the institution presented itself while doing what it was doing.

RÉSO gave the Longueuil police force a story to tell. Officers are partners, not enforcers. The department is reforming. Leadership is progressive. This story was accepted and amplified by media, government ministers, and the policing establishment across Quebec. The federal government announced additional funding of $4.9 million for Longueuil’s youth crime prevention work in 2023, with Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino praising RÉSO by name.

The program did not replace coercion. It provided legitimacy for it. As The Rover’s analysis put it directly: “It was this police force — a reformed police force — that burdened Black and Arab people with oppressive police stops, that harassed a group of teenagers for months, and that finally killed Nooran on a Sunday afternoon.”

The community policing reform frame also shapes how lethal force gets interpreted after the fact. A department with a sterling public image is extended more benefit of the doubt. Its framing of events is treated as more credible. The mother of the teenager it killed is required to fight harder to be believed.

RÉSO did not fail. It functioned exactly as designed — until the day it couldn’t be sustained.

The pattern of Montreal-area police forces using reform narratives to absorb criticism while maintaining coercive capacity has a documented history — examined in the analysis of how Montreal once again confronts police violence, which traces how the same institutional logic operated in earlier cases.

The Raids

Five months after Nooran’s death, the investigation produced action. Not toward the officer who fired the shots. Toward Nooran’s friends.

The nine search warrants executed on February 26, 2026 were carried out by the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), which had been running a parallel criminal investigation since September. CBC News reported that police would not say what they were looking for or who they were targeting. A police spokesperson offered the procedural justification that officers had convinced a judge of probable cause to find “proof of an infraction.” No arrests were planned. None were made.

This detail is critical. Raids without arrests are not primarily about resolving crime. They assert dominance. They generate fear. They reinforce the narrative that the social environment around the shooting was inherently criminal — and therefore that a police response to it was warranted.

The justification for the warrants drew on the same elements invoked on September 21: masked youths, alleged weapons, a dangerous atmosphere. Five months later, these claims are being used retroactively to criminalize the group of teenagers present when Nooran was killed. If the environment can be reframed as criminal, the use of lethal force within it appears more reasonable by default.

The effect on the surviving friends is not incidental. It is the point. Their grief becomes suspicion. Their continued presence in public view becomes a police concern. The community is taught, again, what happens when you are too visible in mourning.

Parallel Investigations, Unequal Power

The BEI investigates the shooting. Montreal police investigate the context surrounding it. The officer who fired is on sick leave. His department is under administrative review. A public inquest has been proposed.

Meanwhile, the same institution maintains full coercive authority over the community most directly harmed. Street check operations have not been suspended. The Section 636 traffic stop provision, ruled unconstitutional and documented as a mechanism for racial profiling, continues to be used pending provincial appeal. The teenagers who watched Nooran die have had their homes searched.

Time works differently for families and for institutions. For families, time produces grief, exhaustion, and isolation. For institutions, time produces normalization. The longer accountability is delayed, the more the story hardens around police assumptions. Evidence is gathered. Narratives are set. The original killing recedes. What replaces it is the framing police have spent months constructing.

The asymmetry is structural, not accidental. Police are permitted to continue shaping the record of events while the record of their own actions remains sealed. The community absorbs the consequences of both.

The Pattern

Taken together, the sequence is legible.

First, police saturate a neighborhood with racialized surveillance, documented in their own data and confirmed by their own watchdogs, while publicly narrating themselves as community partners engaged in reform. Second, a child is killed in an intervention framed from the start as a response to danger, with ten seconds between arrival and fatal shots. Third, the institution delays notifying the civilian watchdog, interviews witnesses before investigators arrive, and places the officer on sick leave rather than suspension. Fourth, months later, police execute search warrants on the victim’s friends, with no arrests, generating fear while building a criminal narrative around the killing.

This is not a failure of policing. It is policing functioning as designed.

The reform programs are not countering the violence. They are providing the institutional legitimacy that makes it harder to contest. The investigations are not moving toward accountability. They are moving toward consolidation — of narrative, of power, of the proposition that Nooran’s death was a regrettable incident rather than the predictable outcome of a documented system.

The internal experience of that legitimacy — what racism inside the institution looks like from senior command — is documented in the analysis of why a top Montreal police commander’s resignation changes nothing, which examines how Patrice Vilcéus’ departure confirmed that structural change is not possible from within the SPVM.

Meanwhile, 15-year-old boy is dead. His friends have had their homes raided. No officer has been charged.

The system has made its priorities unmistakable. And it will not change them on its own.

Sources

1. CBC News, “A timeline of events in the fatal police shooting of 15-year-old Nooran Rezayi,” December 12, 2025 (10-second sequence, BEI notification gap, witness interviews, family notification delay): https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/timeline-nooran-rezayi-shooting-longueuil-9.7014322
2. CBC News, “Family of teen shot dead by police suing Longueuil, Que., police force,” December 9, 2025 ($2.2 million lawsuit, racial profiling allegation, footage showing 3-second window, schoolbook backpack): https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/family-nooran-rezayi-longueuil-9.7007707
3. Global News, “Quebec family releases chilling video as they sue police in death of 15-year-old Nooran Rezayi,” December 9, 2025 (items seized: baseball bat, backpack, ski masks — no gun; racialized teenagers sitting on sidewalk): https://globalnews.ca/news/11569853/nooran-rezayi-lawsuit/
4. CBC News, “Longueuil, Que., police chief allegedly gave police watchdog erroneous information about fatal teen shooting,” December 11, 2025 (BEI notification timeline, witness interviews, BEI director Bishop correspondence): https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/longueuil-mayor-calling-rezayi-shooting-9.7012419
5. CBC News, “Quebec minister to launch investigation into police shooting death of 15-year-old,” December 16, 2025 (Lafrenière administrative inquiry, BEI independence): https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/public-security-investigation-longueuil-police-rezayi-shooting-9.7017426
6. CBC News, “Montreal police conduct multiple raids in connection with shooting of Nooran Rezayi,” February 26, 2026 (nine warrants, five municipalities, no arrests, SPVM framing): https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/spvm-raids-nooran-rezayi-shooting-9.7107034
7. The Link, “Editorial: The only option is defunding, not reforming,” October 2025 (BEI 467 investigations, 2 resulting in judicial proceedings; SPVM budget increase): https://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/editorial-the-only-option-is-defunding-not-reforming
8. CBC News, “126 cases and 0 criminal charges: Is Quebec’s police watchdog doing its job?” May 22, 2019 (BEI founding record, 126 investigations, 0 charges, 50% former police investigators): https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/126-cases-and-0-criminal-charges-is-quebec-s-police-watchdog-doing-its-job-1.5140820
9. The Rover, “The Killing of Nooran and the End of Community Policing,” September 30, 2025 (RÉSO program analysis, simultaneous anti-gun operation, $74M provincial fund, $3M to Longueuil, connection to street checks, “reformed police force” critique): https://therover.ca/the-killing-of-nooran-and-the-end-of-community-policing/
10. The Globe and Mail, “Black and Arab people overrepresented in police stops in Longueuil, Que., data show,” March 27, 2024 (stop data by race: Black 14.1% of stops vs 7.6% population; Arab 7.7% vs 4.4%; Section 636 data; Longueuil police response): https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-longueuil-quebec-police-stops-race-data/
11. CBC News, “Anti-racism group claims Quebec told Longueuil police to ignore court order on racial profiling,” January 10, 2023 (2020 Human Rights Tribunal order, Ministry alleged to have instructed non-compliance, Red Coalition): https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/red-coalition-longueuil-police-court-order-1.6708628
12. CBC News, “Longueuil’s ‘avant-garde’ approach to community policing gets $3.9M funding boost from Quebec,” June 14, 2021 (RÉSO program, $3.6M provincial + $300K Health Ministry, minister’s “avant-garde” quote): https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/funding-longueuil-community-policing-1.6064887
13. Government of Canada, “Government of Canada invests $4.9 million for at-risk youth in l’agglomération de Longueuil,” May 24, 2023 (federal funding, RÉSO praised by name, Minister Mendicino quote): https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/news/2023/05/government-of-canada-invests-49million-for-at-risk-youth-in-lagglomeration-delongueuil.html