As Montreal police manage the fallout of back-to-back scandals involving recent recruits, newly obtained internal data reveals a drop in seniority levels at the station at the centre of a major scandal this summer.

Earlier this month, an officer with just three years' experience was suspended after allegedly urinating on homeless people while on the job.

That followed the dismantling in June of a 16-member patrol unit at Station 39 in Montréal-Nord after allegations of racial discrimination and misconduct.

In the aftermath of those revelations, Montreal police Chief Fady Dagher told CBC News that many of the officers involved were young men with less than five years of experience on the force.

Now, staffing statistics obtained by CBC News through an access-to-information request reveal an overall decline in the level of experience among (SPVM) patrol officers in the past five years at Station 39.

The precinct oversees Montréal-Nord, a racially diverse borough with a long history of documented racial profiling and fraught relations between residents and police.

Front-line neighbourhood patrol officers, known as , averaged just 4.2 years of service in 2026, compared with 7.1 five years earlier.

The demographic breakdown shows overall average seniority at the station dropped from 10.6 years in 2021 to 8.5 in 2026. Patrol supervisors, meanwhile, average 18.7 years' experience in 2026.

The SPVM said the drop in experience is not unique to Station 39, but part of a citywide demographic shift driven by a wave of retirements.

In a written statement to CBC News, police said it has renewed 35 per cent of its personnel over the past five years, hiring about 1,000 new recruits in the last three years alone to fill the void.

Police also pushed back against the claim that young officers are left without veteran oversight on the street. All new arrivals undergo a 15-week integration program where they are paired with specially trained coaching officers to guide them through their first months on the job, the statement said.

The SPVM also said that supervisors regularly go out in the field with their patrol officers, "particularly for major calls requiring an incident commander to take charge." Why veteran oversight matters, according to experts Still, the data points to a concerning dynamic in policing, where veteran officers are often distant from the daily realities of street patrol, according to Victor Armony, a sociology professor at Université du Québec à Montréal who studies policing and racial profiling.

Top-down directives from police leadership, he added, won't necessarily reach rookie patrol groups who have become "in a way, autonomous." Armony also cautioned against the assumption that a younger generation of officers, raised with modern diversity training, will naturally rid the force of discrimination.

"This notion that older police officers are more sexist or more closed to diversity while young people have grown up already in a world where you accept everybody for who they are — that's naive, that's reductive," he said in an interview.

Audio SPVM chief faces big questions over police racism investigation Q&A Montreal police allegedly cut locs from people's hair. Here's the anti-Black history behind that Instead, he pointed to the dismantled unit at Station 39 as a symptom of a broader structural failure, where a lack of experienced oversight allowed alleged misconduct to go unchecked.

According to a separate batch of documents obtained by The Canadian Press, a "radicalized" subculture formed among the ranks of officers at the station.

"If you have a good organizational structure ... the bad apples will be evident more quickly than when you leave them to fester," Armony said.

"It's unbelievable that they could be there for so long doing the things they have allegedly been doing, and no one saw." Police defend supervision, training Police have since submitted evidence to Quebec prosecutors regarding the June misconduct allegations at Station 39.

Asked if a lack of direct supervision on the ground allowed a toxic culture to take root, the SPVM said it is too early to draw conclusions.

"The investigations are ongoing, so it seems premature to comment on this issue," the SPVM said, adding that the "results will tell us if there was a lack of supervision." The SPVM also pointed to its Immersion MTL program, launched in 2023, which requires recruits to spend four weeks without uniforms or weapons interacting with community groups.

A total of 747 officers have completed the training so far and the feedback has been positive, helping recruits understand the realities of the city, the statement said.

Alain Babineau, a former RCMP staff sergeant, said police officers naturally want to move on from patrol work.

"Front-line policing is the toughest job in policing. It's thankless and dangerous," said Babineau, racial profiling director with the advocacy group Red Coalition.

"You should do this for three, five years and then move on to something else because it's very taxing on the individual. And there lies the importance of very good supervision at that level." Yet because veteran officers have priority when choosing their assignments, many opt out of working on patrol in a demanding post such as Station 39, said Minh-Tri Truong, a retired commander with the SPVM.

This creates a dangerous cycle where rookies are being mentored by peers who only have a few months on the job themselves, Truong told CBC.

"In the long term, this police officer moves to another station and he has five years of experience on paper ... but he just learned from somebody who had six months."

Referring to the situation at Station 39, Truong suggested that "when you have a more senior officer, maybe those situations have less of a risk to happen." The SPVM disputes the idea that veterans are avoiding the precinct.

The statement described Station 39 as a "popular assignment," noting that when it asked for volunteers to replace the dismantled patrol unit in June, it received a large number of applications.