The Sound of the Police

A quick story about Montreal cops. They have their pig members and moments i’m sure- every group everywhere has their bad eggs- but this group has been surprisingly rational and dear in my experience of late, so, though I have a knee jerk hate-on for authority and power as big as anyone’s, I gotta give credit where it’s due.

3 encounters with cops during St. Jean, ready?

1. drinking beers and munching in the afternoon in the parc, just far enough away from the tamtams for the beat to be a pleasant backbone and not an overwhelming drone, we were stationned near the gazebo and we noticed it was full of instruments and cables running to a set of sockets in the base of the place. Surprisingly, it has power and is kinda all good to go for shows. We’d been there for a short while and Erik had his guitar out when a perfectly dapper bilingual Montreal musician, all in black with a bowler hat, came rambling smiling over. He asked if we were musicians and said he might play an impromtu show in the Gazebo. He said he’d asked the cops if it was legal to plug in and do a show and they’d said it was legal if he didn’t suck. Now that’s a good policy.

(side note - we found out after a bit that the instruments in the gazebo actually belonged to friends in a band called The Ease Down, some of whom are also in WhiteRoom, who played at the What is Indie night we organized during Fringe. As I mentionned here, I owed those guys a beer so I paid up one in the park. Then they asked us to gather ’round their piano in the woods and sing along to one of their songs, Shapeshiftin Lover, for the final scenes of the music video they’d been shooting all day. We did so with gusto.)

2. an hour or so later, we saw a small gang of police heading our way. We’ve never been clear on what the law is for park drinking here - I knew a friend who got a ticket for sharing a beer in a park with a friend. When caught, the officer had told her they needed to have food to get away with it… a picnic makes outdoor booze legal? Or maybe it needed to be covered? Anyway, we weren’t sure, so we tucked beers under blankets as the uniforms approached. They smiled ruefully at our lame disguises and said “Actually, it’s legal, don’t worry, you just need to use plasic cups and please get rid of the glass bottles, thank you.” And they actually HAD cups for us. They cops came bearing smiles and park-safe plastics.

3. After midnight, up under where the highway crosses St. Laurent boulevard, a bit beyond the train tracks and through some shrubbery, we found ourselves dancing with 600 other happy hipsters at the St.Jean / Tupac bridge burner (which could have had more Tupac for my taste, but was still wicked). Clearly an illegal but peaceful gathering… we all thought that there was too much pre-buzz about it and would get shut down before it even got started, but instead the cops stayed back aways, unthreatening, and, as you’ll see in this wicked video, they even waved. (thanks to Anne Marie for the video, and to Tessa for linking to a bunch over on that invite post).

These power dynamics are confusing and complicated but great. If you want your city to be an artists’ haven, you gotta take a page from these Montreal moments: have your cops help create a safe and inspiring space, with a rational and kind eye for the areas of law that should be, could be, more generously and joyfully grey.