The SPVM Has Killed Another Person in Crisis

The SPVM killed a person in crisis on May 22, and the machinery built to absorb it — the watchdog, the wording, the wire copy — is already at work.

Around noon on May 22, two SPVM officers on patrol approached a person in distress somewhere in Montreal. They tried to take hold of the person and put them in handcuffs. At some point in that struggle the person stopped breathing, or their heart stopped, or something the public has not been told happened to their body. Paramedics took them to hospital. Five days later they were dead. A person in crisis encountered the Montreal police and did not survive the encounter. That is the event. Everything that has happened since is the institution managing it.

The Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes opened a file the afternoon of the arrest and announced the death on May 27. One detail carries more than the rest: the Sûreté du Québec is running a parallel criminal investigation. The SQ is a police force, not a watchdog, and that track opens when the BEI’s preliminary review flags conduct that might warrant charges. Whatever the officers did at noon on May 22 was serious enough to be treated as potentially criminal inside 48 hours. The public has been told nothing more. No name. No account of the force used.

What the SPVM does to people in crisis

Abisay Cruz was 29 and lived in Saint-Michel. On March 30, 2025, his family called 911 because he was in distress and they wanted help getting it. Six officers came to his balcony. Two put him face-down on the floor of it; one knelt on his back. Bystanders on a neighbouring balcony filmed it. Cruz can be heard saying he was going to die. Then he went quiet. He was pronounced dead at hospital. He left a nine-year-old son. His mother is still asking for a public coroner’s inquiry, and the protests in Saint-Michel have not produced one.

Cruz died on a Sunday. The SPVM had killed another person twelve hours earlier, in a separate Ville-Marie call that same weekend. Jimmy Cloutier, homeless and in mental distress, was shot dead outside the Old Brewery Mission in 2017. Pierre Coriolan was shot in his apartment during a crisis call the same year. The list is longer than four names. Each death arrives as its own file, none referencing the last, so that one at a time they read as separate misfortunes. Only together do they read as what the SPVM does when sent to a person in crisis.

How a killing becomes a “malaise”

The first thing the institution does with a killing is rename it. The BEI release describes a person in crisis, officers who intervened, a subject who was subdued and handcuffed, and then a “medical episode.” The verb in the French original for what the officers physically did is maîtriser — to gain control of, to subdue. It is the procedural word, the one used for any routine arrest. On May 22 it describes what officers did to a person’s body in the minutes before that body stopped working.

“Person in crisis” does the heaviest lifting. It sounds clinical and means nothing clinical. It says only that police arrived and sorted the person into a category. Once the category is set, the death gets read as something already underway in the victim — a body failing on its own, which the officers happened to be standing near. The phrase arrives ahead of the events and bends them into its shape. A “medical episode” is something that happens to a person. A killing is something done to them. The release picks the first word for the second thing.

A watchdog that produces nothing

The BEI exists to investigate exactly these deaths, and across nearly a decade it has produced charges in a handful of cases and silence in the rest. Cruz’s file went to the public prosecutor in August 2025 and has yielded no charges and no findings since. The pattern is documented: the watchdog absorbs each case, returns nothing, and the institution carries on unchanged. An institution told that often enough that killing a person in crisis carries no consequence has no reason to stop killing people in crisis.

This is why the criminal track opened on May 22 means less than it sounds. Cruz’s case was serious enough to investigate too, and so were the others, and the investigations produced nothing. A case can be flagged as potentially criminal in the first 48 hours and still end where all the others end: a closed file, no charges, an institution that has learned once more that the cost of killing a person in crisis is a few months of paperwork. The SQ inquiry will almost certainly join them.

The press finishes the job

The institution cannot launder its own killings alone. It needs the press to carry the wording outward unexamined, and the press obliges. Within hours of the May 22 release, La Presse — Quebec’s francophone paper of record — ran the death under a headline reading Une personne fait un malaise lors d’une intervention du SPVM. A person has a malaise during an SPVM intervention. The malaise belongs to the person; the intervention belongs to the police; the grammar sets them side by side and never lets one cause the other.

Below the headline, the piece reprinted the BEI’s four bullet points almost word for word. The reporter did not lie. The reporter took the only account on offer, on deadline, with the witnesses unreachable and the findings months away, and turned it into a brief. That is the trap, and it is not an accident. A police account written to read as procedure, handed to a newsroom that prints it as procedure, produces a public that files a killing under misfortune. The result is laundered the moment it reaches print.

None of this is particular to Montreal. A man in crisis in Windsor was shot dead by police the same day the May 22 victim was handcuffed, and the release named an SIU investigation and stopped. Toronto’s latest scandal arrived through the same grammar of the lone bad apple. Wherever the police kill, a newsroom is standing by to take the official account and pass it to the public unread — and a killing that the public files under misfortune is a killing no one is required to answer for.

What safety would actually mean

Strip the wording away and the record is plain. The SPVM is dispatched to people in distress and it kills some of them, repeatedly, with no consequence attached. The May 22 victim called no one. Someone called the police on their behalf, or officers saw them and decided to act. Either way, the institution sent to keep them safe is the reason they are dead. This is not a safety service that occasionally fails. Failing the people it is called to protect is its ordinary output.

The conclusion the record delivers is the one its own conduct has earned. Abolish the police. Decolonize community safety. This is not safety as absence. A person in mental distress needs a response built to keep them alive — a crisis worker, a nurse, a neighbour, someone whose training is care rather than control. That capacity already exists. Mutual-aid networks, harm-reduction collectives, unarmed crisis teams, and the Saint-Michel residents who organised their own crisis response after Cruz have been building it for years, often against the same police forces that keep producing the dead.

The May 22 victim has not been named, and may never be. The investigation will close quietly. The next person in crisis the SPVM is sent to will be described in the same four bullet points, and a newsroom will reprint them. The words are not a record of what happened. They are the last step in doing it.

Sources