Think about how easily this story flips. Same SAQ. Same neighborhood. Same theft. Change one detail — the appearance of the person walking out with that bottle — and suddenly there is a news segment. A tweet that goes viral. A comment section that writes itself. Politicians referencing the clip in speeches about public safety. Community leaders being asked to respond to something their community did not do. That is how fast it moves. That is how little it takes.
That is how fast it moves. That is how little it takes. But that is not what happened. What actually happened is this: a Caucasian man walked into a SAQ located in a Montreal neighborhood full of Afro-Caribbean immigrants, Haitian families, Black Montrealers who have been in this city for generations — and he stole a bottle. Calmly. Confidently. In broad daylight. And then he left. No cameras chased him across social media. No headlines formed around his pink coat and his vampire makeup. No neighborhood got associated with his decision. His individual act stayed his individual act — which is exactly the courtesy that is almost never extended in the other direction. Because here is what the media does and has always done. When a Black person commits a crime in a Black neighborhood, the neighborhood becomes the story. The community becomes the context. The culture gets put on trial alongside the individual. Suddenly it is not one person who made a bad decision — it is a pattern. A problem. Evidence of something that needs to be addressed, surveilled, controlled.
When a white person does the exact same thing in the exact same space, it is just a crime. A weird guy. A one-off. Nothing that reflects on anyone beyond himself. That double standard is not an accident of journalism. It is a structural bias so deeply embedded in how stories get selected, framed, and amplified that most of the people doing it do not even recognize it as a choice. They think they are just reporting what is newsworthy. What they are actually doing is deciding which communities are defined by their worst moments and which ones are not.
The neighborhood where this happened is full of people who came to Quebec with nothing and built something. People who work double shifts, who send money home, who raise children in a city that has never fully decided whether it wants them or not. People who walk into a SAQ and feel the surveillance before they even touch a shelf. People who have been made to carry the weight of a stereotype they did not create and do not deserve. And the man who actually stole — the one in the pink coat, the desperate vampire energy, the completely unbothered exit — he does not represent anyone. He does not become a symbol. He does not make the six o’clock news as an example of anything larger than himself. That asymmetry is the real theft. Not the bottle. It is worth sitting with how easily this specific incident could have been weaponized if the roles were reversed. One image. One clip. One screenshot. And an entire community that did absolutely nothing wrong becomes the face of a crime wave that a man in a pink coat committed alone on a Tuesday. The comment sections would have been immediate. The think pieces would have followed. The statistics would have been pulled from somewhere, decontextualized, and presented as confirmation of what people already wanted to believe. None of that happened here. Because the man who stole does not fit the template the machine was built to process. And that right there tells you everything about what the template was actually built for. This story does not end with a viral video. It ends with a police report, a security guard who legally could not intervene, and a community that once again watched a system fail — not because it broke down, but because it was working exactly as designed. The bias protected the thief. The same bias that surveils the innocent. And when this kind of story does not get told — when the incident gets filed away and forgotten because the narrative does not fit the preferred direction — the stereotype survives. It survives because the moments that challenge it are never given the same oxygen as the moments that confirm it. So this is us giving it oxygen. A Caucasian man stole from a SAQ in a Black neighborhood in Montreal. The community he stole from did nothing wrong. The guard who watched it happen was legally powerless to stop it. And the story almost disappeared entirely — absorbed into paperwork, forgotten by the weekend. We are not letting it disappear. Because the next time someone tries to point at this neighborhood and make it the problem, this moment exists. This story was told. The record reflects what actually happened. And the vampire in the pink coat is the only one who should have to answer for it.
SIIIOCULI — Intelligence. Sovereignty. Awareness. siiioculi.lilxbrxaker.com