Montreal Metro | A text message to report incivility

The Société de transport de Montréal (STM) is setting up a text message service to allow users to report cases of incivility in the metro. Increased monitoring will also be carried out during the winter season in 13 stations deemed to be more risky.

“Our customers need to be able to discreetly and quickly report different situations that could harm their sense of security. […] The more precise the reports, the more quickly we will be able to intervene,” said the carrier’s general director, Marie-Claude Léonard, on Monday.

His group hopes to have a better overview of “non-urgent” situations in the metro and to intervene more quickly. You will have to text 1-888-786-1119 and it will be possible to provide a photo or send a voice message. A follow-up will then be done with the user, if necessary.

Initially, the system will not be available for buses, but it should be in place soon, if all goes well in the metro.

“We invite people to report to us, for example, a person who is sick on a platform, or who is intoxicated, who smokes, who bothers customers, in short, incivility. But it could also be a patch of ice at the entrance to the metro,” indicated the director of security at the STM, Jocelyn Latulippe.

For the winter season, 13 nerve stations will be patrolled by quartets of special constables and security ambassadors, whose mandate is to identify risky situations. The targeted stations are Joliette, Frontenac, Papineau, Beaudry, Berri-UQAM, Mont-Royal, Jean-Talon, Place-des-Arts, McGill, Atwater, Lionel-Groulx, Place d’Armes and Bonaventure.

“Our executives and managers will also be much more visible during the winter,” persisted Mr. Latulippe. “Often, our people are there, but are not noticed enough,” he admitted.

Not a refuge, the metro

Soon, the STM will have 20 more special constables, for a total of 180 employed. The company aims to reach the milestone of 200 by 2025. There should be around thirty safety ambassadors by the end of 2024.

More than ever, the issue of safety in the metro is on everyone’s lips. Last spring, two violent events that occurred at the Lionel-Groulx metro station – a homeless man beaten and stabbed by a group of young people and a young woman hit in the face – had left their mark.

The president of the STM, Éric Alan Caldwell, for his part reiterated Monday that “the metro is not a refuge.” “There is a lack of shelters, there is a lack of accommodation resources in Montreal. We must release more resources for homelessness, because the reality and what we are seeing is that more and more people are finding refuge in the metro in the winter in Montreal. »

“This burden cannot only be on the STM,” underlined Mr. Caldwell, whose teams carried out around 10,000 escorts to the exit last year, when the metro closed. This year, there have already been 8,500 of these operations.

On the ground, the situation is still felt very strongly: as of today, more than 45,000 calls had been made to involve special constables, compared to 47,000 for the whole of 2023. We therefore expect to stagnation, or even a slight increase, for 2024.