Hanes: Outlawing insults against police would be going too far
You know casual misogyny has got out of hand in Montreal when a young man feels entitled to spew sexist, degrading filth at a female police officer to her face, film it, and post it on TikTok for all to see.
That’s how Mohamed Bekkali earned his 15 minutes of fame last week.
Bekkali is a foul-mouthed 24-year-old Anjou resident who pulled out his camera during a recent traffic stop. Doing his best Andrew Tate impression, Bekkali wanted to show that ” in Montreal, you can insult the police, you can put them in their place. You just have to be intelligent about it.”
Bekkali is right. It isn’t illegal to insult the police in Montreal, although it is in some other municipalities. But it could be soon, thanks to him.
Because Bekkali wasn’t so “intelligent” about the choice of slurs he used to try to prove his point in his now notorious viral video.
The invective Bekkali hurled at the officer went beyond insult. It was so vile, so vulgar, so degrading toward the female officer (who showed remarkable grace under pressure) that it prompted disgust, outrage and alarm. He was outed in the media and some very powerful people took note.
Police Chief Fady Dagher, the rest of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal, the police brotherhood, Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada and media pundits all called out his tirade as a disturbing case of misogyny. Ninety-two members present in the National Assembly on Wednesday from all parties unanimously voted on not one but two motions condemning the misogynistic rant. As they should.
Bekkali deserves to be publicly shamed until his mom washes his mouth out with soap and he can’t get a date for the rest of the decade.
But lawmakers are also now contemplating making insulting police officers an offence in Montreal. That would be a mistake.
Enacting laws or bylaws to crack down on insults or to protect police from getting berated would be going too far — overreacting and overreaching, even if the matter is serious. It would also miss the point of what makes Bekkali’s video so appalling.
If police and prosecutors believe his vicious tirade rises to the level of hate speech against women, there are already laws that exist under which a person can be charged and tried in the criminal justice system.
Hate legislation is a reasonable limit on free speech in a democratic society and has been tested before the courts.
Some would argue authorities are too timid in investigating or prosecuting hate speech, be it misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic.
But liberty of expression is an important constitutional right, including the freedom to say or write things that shock and offend. Current legislation generally strikes a delicate balance between free speech and hate.
A law criminalizing insults would not. Rather, it would be a slippery slope that could quickly lead to abuse of power or descend into absurdity.
The obscenities that often fly at Montreal’s annual anti-police brutality march, Black Lives Matter rallies or the anti-ICE demonstrations that occurred in Minneapolis are forms of dissent that are justified and should be tolerated in a democracy.
We may or may not agree with the language or the tone, but do we really want curses, taunts and scorn against authorities outlawed? What even constitutes an insult, and should the person on the receiving end have the discretion to punish the offender — especially if the target exercises the authority of the state? How long before someone gets a ticket for sarcasm, or rudeness, or swearing? Some pretty petty stuff could end up eating up valuable court time.
In 2023, Quebec Court Judge Dennis Galiatsatos said he wanted to throw a case out involving a dispute between neighbours in which one was charged after giving the middle finger to the other. His decision went so far as to enshrine the lewd gesture as a right.
“To be abundantly clear, it is not a crime to give someone the finger,” the judge wrote in his strongly worded ruling, which made international headlines. “Flipping the proverbial bird is a God-given, charter-enshrined right that belongs to every red-blooded Canadian. It may not be civil, it may not be polite, it may not be gentlemanly. Nevertheless, it does not trigger criminal liability.”
Neither should insults.
There’s no doubt cops are subjected to some nasty language in the course of their duties. It’s an occupational hazard that comes with the territory of dealing with people who are sometimes at their worst.
As human beings, it must understandably get under their skin after a while. But do police officers deserve to be shielded more than teachers, doctors, nurses, politicians, journalists, construction workers or any other profession that tends to be a magnet for disrespect?
As much as more civility is welcome and needed in a polarized world where trolls hide behind their screens to verbally attack others online, we don’t need Big Brother taking over enforcement duties for Miss Manners.
It’s when words are weaponized to demean, degrade or stir hate against a person based on the essence of their being that we have to draw the line, which brings us back to what makes Bekkali’s screed so problematic.
If there was any truth to his claim he has been a frequent target of police interceptions because of his Maghrebian background, he sounded too much like a guy who has been stewing in the manosphere to be taken seriously.
Besides, he wasn’t haranguing the police officer for her profession. He was humiliating her as a woman, peppering her with epithets like “b^&*,” “dirty whore” and “slave.”
No woman should be treated like that. Ever. And yet, we live in an era when Bekkali thought there was an audience for this kind of misogyny, when there is a whole industry of commentators and influencers poisoning the minds of young men, turning them against women and encouraging them to be alphas.
Toxic masculinity has become a problem in classrooms, locker rooms, heck, even the Oval Office.
Misogyny is not an undercurrent anymore — it’s out in the open.
It undermines the equality women have fought for and are still struggling to fully achieve. It dehumanizes our daughters, sisters, girlfriends, wives, mothers and grandmothers. It can lead to physical and sexual violence.
This is the disturbing thing that we must denounce and try to remedy.
We don’t need a law to defend cops from sass. We need a culture that stands up to counter the normalization of unabashed misogyny.
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