The North Shore Rapist Is Caught – Guess Who?

The rapist is a cop.
That’s the punch line, the plate of steaming shit that we are being served as if it were just another dish at the local diner.
But i’ve tumbled ahead of myself… let’s go back to the beginning and recap:

Back in October, the police announced that there was a serial rapist attacking women on Montreal’s North Shore. Eight women had come forward since May 2004, and gawd-only-knows how many others had been raped and not gone to the police. And yet it took until spring 2005 for “the authorities” to realize there was a serial rapist – this despite two attacks occurring within ten days of each other in St-Jerome in summer 2004, and three different attacks occurring in Laval.

This late realization – call it incompetence or willful ignorance or simply a lie – was bad enough, but what made me particularly angry at the time was the cops admitted staying quiet about this throughout the summer “because making details available would have hurt the investigation”, which involved putting undercover cops on buses.

As i wrote at the time:

Putting decoys on buses sounds like a great idea, but think a moment: how would warning women in any way interfere with this? Well, he says it: warn women and “the offender is likely to alter his patterns” – don’t warn women, and the rapist will keep to his pattern!

Don’t warn women, and women won’t take any special precautions to protect themselves, so he’ll keep on raping them on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and hopefully eventually he’ll stumble upon a decoy and the police can say they saved the day!

Well, as it turns out our rape-happy mystery man never did stumble on any of these decoys. Apart from the fact that women weren’t warned even after the police figured they had a guy with a very specific m.o. (and at least one was raped during this period – in June 2005), their master-plan was without effect.

Just Beavis and Butthead pretending to be Dick Tracy.

I’ll not dwell on that now, i’ll move on, because as i noted earlier, we have something bigger than that to contemplate, more nasty and in your face than incompetence or callous manipulations.

Coz like i said at the beginning  this posting, it now looks like the man who raped at least eight women was himself a cop. Don’t believe me? Look, it’s right there in that three inch news brief on page A8 of the Montreal Gazette:

Montreal cop accused of rapes
A man identified as a Montreal police officer and accused of committing rapes in Laval, St. Jerome and Terrebonne was arrested yesterday. A task force led by the Surete du Quebec and including police investigators from those three cities arrested the 34-year old. He is to be charged today with one count of sexual assault stemming from an incident in St. Jerome on June 30. The victims, aged 15 to 20, were attacked near bicycle paths, SQ constable Chantal Mackels said. The Montreal police force is to offer its reaction at a press conference today.

The Gazette – as always when police are abusing people (just look at their Mohamed Annas Bennis coverage) – is not even pretending to take this seriously. The “North Shore Rapist” who merited a front page story in October is now only worth a news brief. To find out that the raping policeman’s name is Benoit Guay, to read the details of his attacks and learn that he made a point of targeting teenagers, one has to check out the Journal de Montreal… but i digress.

Back in October, when i first wrote about this case, i suggested that the solution lay not in more police, but in women’s organized self-defense:

Regardless of whether you are anti-cop or not, an anarchist or a liberal, you have to admit that the police are just not able to deal with this problem, and unless you think rape and murder of women aren’t problems that need dealing with…

Avoiding completely the question of whether we even want police in our communities, there is an obvious need to develop our own capacities for collective self-defense. Call it “safety” or call it “armed struggle” or call it a “feminist guerilla”, there is a particular need for women to develop their capacities, because – sad to say – even a left-wing or anarchist group led by us guys will most likely be unable to effectively appraise and intervene in cases of male violence against women.

Today’s news amplifies the above.
It’s not that organized self-defense would be easy, obvious or even guaranteed success.
But how long can we live with the alternative?

Categories: media, montreal, police, quebec, violence-against-women, women