Inside the anti-fighting bylaw

  You gotta fight for your right to fight
   Passions run high on the sidewalks of the Main late on a Friday night when most Montrealers are dead asleep: six young clubgoers stare at each other. A swift hand batters a tilted baseball cap, wrenching it askew with a hostile wayward slap. Words are shouted, shoulders lowered, grunts echo while bodies push forward. No one wants to be defeated. A crowd of spectators circles around. Unflattering epithets tossed. A push, a raised fist, arms wrapped around combatants until the battle fizzles out.
   In recent years such fistic showdowns have become commonplace on the strip of St. Lawrence Boulevard that has gobbled up much of the city’s nightclub action over the last two decades. Young bucks locking horns might be part of a timeless drinking custom but the fights have worn down the local constabulary to the point that bar owners were given an ultimatum: either clean up the brawling, or have your opening hours reduced.
   The warning persuaded the merchants and now luckless drunken suburban youth taking it outside have been dealt a legal blow: anybody caught brawling – at least strictly the aggressor in theory – will face a $600 fine.
   The bylaw, set to be passed this week was a result of police losing patience with the current system, where concrete gladiators are often told just to go home, or fined under the wide-ranging disturbing-the-peace noise bylaw. In rare cases fighters are charge with criminal assault, but these often fizzle out victims and witnesses fail to show or speak out.
  The bylaw was deemed necessary when the persistent combatants kept landing blows to public order and uppercuts to the business-as-usual ambiance sought by merchants and most clubgoers.
   “The fighting has caused a huge amount of trouble on the Main between Sherbrooke and Pine which can resemble a war zone at certain times of the evening,” says Alex Norris, city councillor for the Plateau district.
   For decades the Lower Main was a hotbed of gangsters and tavern-searching sailors who would stroll up from the port and trawl for bargain hookers and mind-numbing goofballs. Now that put-up-your-duke ethos has ascended the hill to the area where nightclubs have replaced Eastern-European butcher shops.
   And while most fights end up in mere bruised egos, others have ended in death, including fights that have stemmed from banal disputes over pool tables, barking dogs, driving habits, fast food lineups and drug hogging, among others.
   Once a bus driver punched a passenger to death for complaining about not being allowed to board in the pouring rain, more recently an 11-year-old girl punched and killed a boy one year older. And right on the Main, a bouncer killed a vagrant who exposed himself to patrons through the restaurant window.
   And while Montreal has a penchant for collective mayhem in the form of rioting, one-on-one fighting is not deeply ingrained in the French-Canadian behavioural DNA. The city has a lower rate of assault than other Canadian burgs and its athletic deities, the Montreal Canadiens, have never put bully tactics above skill. But the glorification of street brawls on youtube and having a local boy as MMA champion Georges St-Pierre might have convinced some rowdies that Montreal is alright for fighting.
   Experts have been wary of the new fine but admit that attempting to prosecute an assault charge is a challenge.
  “The problem with an assault charge is that you have you have to prove that the accused intended to harm the victim and that’s not easy,” says Clement Laporte of the Montreal Youth Centre University Institute.
   Laporte believes that getting scrappers to pay such a large fine might also be a challenge, as people who fight people will likely also fight fines. “Many won’t pay these fines or can’t pay these fines, and that leads to alienation between police and the population. Take squeegee punks, they have been ticketed so often that now they just run away when the police try to talk to them.”
   One prominent lawyer gives the fine-for-fighting proposal a split decision. “The saving grace is that it might prevent people from getting a criminal record just for being in a fight,” says Julius Grey. “But the danger is that it gives police the total discretion to decide who the perpetrator is and who the victim is.”
   And while the bylaw might be a handy response to the frictions inherent in bar-room spillout, the bylaw will also apply to the entire city and it might not be a fight in ethnically-loaded neighbourhoods. “There’s always that certain groups will be targeted with this more, as so there’s a risk of racial profiling,” says Denis Barrette of the Association of Rights and Freedoms. “The police always make the same argument: ‘give us all the power and then trust us,’ but that doesn’t always work out well,” he says.
   People should therefore, simply avoid fighting. But staying away from a clash is easier in theory than in practice.
  “The reality behind streetfights is that people who want to fight you don’t really give you a choice, they’re right there in your face,” says Phillip Gelinas whose downtown GAMMA fighting school has attracted its share of pugilists for 15 years.

Gelinas

  “I don’t counsel people to fight, but at the same time, we’re not the Shaolin temple,” says Gelinas.

   “Avoiding a fight could lead to a whole bunch of things you have to deal with psychologically. If you’re going to gnash your teeth later and accuse yourself of failing to have done something, then that might be psychologically more damaging than a lost tooth or missed days of work.”
   Streetfighting has long been a celebrate ritual of Montreal working class custom. But by our era police had figured out how to deal with brawls, which one retired downtown flatfoot says remain commonplace. “On any given fight 30 to 40 people will stop and watch a streetfight, five or six cars would have to stop because they rolled onto the road,” says former cop John Parker.
   “The fighters would be charged under criminal assault but it would be switched to municipal court and they’d be given a $50 fine so they wouldn’t get a criminal record,” says Parker. Traditionally, the accused would be kept in jail cells for a few hours but released on a promise to appear in court at around 7 a.m.
  Parker says that fighters – who could be clad in everything from “three piece suits to ripped jean jackets,” need to be put away behind bars to cool off or else they’ll just start fighting somewhere else.
  “Whenever you try to give them a chance, they’d get involved in more fights. They don’t listen and that’s reality it’s too bad but you have to arrest them,” says Parker.
  But increased paperwork and the absence of drunk-tanks in new police stations makes that difficult. “You could process a fighter and be back on the road in half an hour but now there are so many reports it can take four hours to deal with one of these events,” he says. “That’s a long time to be off the road when your colleagues need your help on busy weekend nights.”
   And it while the bylaw could be an effective deterrent to the problem of street fighting, it could also, in some circumstances, be a tax that’s worth paying, says teacher Gelinas.
   “Do you want to be a lamb the slaughter by avoiding that $600 fine?” asks Gelinas. “I can imagine some kid who will never pay this fine anyway, he draws you, a law abiding citizen into it, your life will be devastated but the scofflaw will refuse to pay his fine.”