Public Order Services - Gendarmerie / Investigations

Every year, Montréal hosts a multitude of public events and festivals on its territory. The SPVM is directly involved in the planning and organization of these events.

Daily Duties

The Service d'ordre gendarmerie / enquêtes members deal with planned events such as the Saint-Patrick's Day Parade, the Marche des travailleurs May 1st or even the Fête nationale on June 24^th, and many other unforeseen events, whose preparation demands a lot of energy.

For example, the annual Collective Opposed to Police Brutality March (COPB), pro-peace demonstrations against the war, certain student activist actions, major events involving street gangs and first responder plans in regards to emergency measures and possible terrorist acts.

They also meet with various partners and promoters in order to establish a framework for large scale events in regards to the principles of safety and management. After this, the necessary resources are equally divided between the units involved and according to the number of available resources.

Mandate

• Establish strategies and methods to tackle any kind of event, whether cultural, sportive or simple crowd control.
• Coordinate the event preparation at multiple levels, ensure the assignment of personnel and essential resources, including SPVM investigation units and any need for external partners (ministère du Revenu, for example)
• Provide the manpower necessary (police or cadets) for local events.
• Coordinate, at an organisational level, the intervention groups and management of planned or spontaneous demonstrations, or other at-risk events, mainly to avoid dedicating all of our resources on different events, which would limit our ability to answer calls needing our intervention resources.

Training and collaboration

While organising the intervention units, this team is also interested in training offered to their members (basic training and maintaining abilities), and with research and development of methods to maintain law and order, crowd management and the re-establishment of order.

This coordination relies on the contribution of many collaborators; in addition to the Commandant and the training (Drill) Sergeant, both within Operational Planning, it is necessary to thank the contribution of the four regional Commandants and ten intervention police monitors.

The Section services d'ordre - opérations (Public Order Section) team works closely with the Division des événements publics and the Bureau des festivals de la Ville de Montréal. A solid partnership has developed through the years with the other services involved (SIM, US, STM, MTQ, SQ, RCMP, Agence de la santé de Montréal, other police services, public works).

The DPO also created a committee with partners called the Centre de commandement et de traitement de l'information (CCTI), since one of our strengths is the presence of our partners on the CCTI for the management of large scale events.