The Murray-Hill riot, also known as Montreal's night of terror, was the culmination of 16 hours of unrest in Montreal, Quebec during a strike by the Montreal police on 7 October 1969. Background Police were motivated to strike because of difficult working conditions caused by disarming FLQ-planted bombs and patrolling frequent protests. Montreal police also wanted higher pay, commensurate with police earnings in Toronto. In addition, Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau, who had been elected as a reformer who had promised to "clean up the city" by cracking down on corruption, turned out to be no different from his predecessors and left many people disillusioned. Drapeau's focus on grandiose projects such as Expo 67, instead of trying to improve the daily lives of Montrealers, had also added to the frustration. The journalist Nick Auf der Maur wrote that by 1969, the working class of Montreal had a feeling that Drapeau cared only about building the gleaming modernistic skyscrapers that dominated the city's skyline and was indifferent to its concerns and needs. The police wanted an annual salary for a constable to go from $7,300 to $9,200 and charged that policing in Montreal was more dangerous than in Toronto, with two officers being killed in the line of duty in 1968, and that the frequent rioting between French-Canadians and English-Canadians in Montreal in 1968 and 1969 added to the danger. Between February 1968 and April 1969, there were 41 gangland murders in Montreal, which was more than the previous 15 years combined, as a younger generation of French-Canadian criminals sought to challenge the power of the Mafia, which had traditionally dominated the Montreal underworld. Overall, there were 75 murders in Montreal in 1968, which gave the city the reputation as the "murder capital of Canada." Rioting on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day on 24 June 1968 was committed by Quebec separatists, angered by Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's visit to the city since his federalism had made him into a bête noire for the separatists. Then came demonstrations by junior college students demanding more placements in the universities and taxi drivers protesting the monopoly of the Murray-Hill company's taxis and buses at the Dorval Airport. To many, the monopoly held by the Murray-Hill company was symptomatic of Drapeau's rule in which those with power and influence obtained favours from the city, rather than those without power and influence, such as the working-class taxi drivers. The