The relationship between Canadian law enforcement and First Nations communities has long been tenuous — to say the least — but Canadian police officials are looking to change that.
A new action plan created following a conference last month with over 180 Canadian police, policymakers, and indigenous leaders seeks to improve local police’s relationship with the First Nations population. The plan recommends continued emphasis on missing and murdered indigenous women, engaging in productive relationships with indigenous communities, and utilizing the First Nations Policing Program as an “essential service” to reduce the number of indigenous people in the criminal justice system.
“[Between First Nations people and police forces], it’s all about relationship-building and trust and how we view police — ‘you’re only there to come pick us up,’” Perry Bellegarde, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said at the Canadian Association of Police Chiefs conference. “That’s starting to change.”
Indigenous people — particularly women — have suffered widespread abuse perpetrated by the Canadian police. While indigenous people make up only about 3.8 percent of the Canadian population, they account for 23.2 percent of the country’s inmate population.
The current agreement under the First Nations Policing Program — created in 1991 to address unequal police services between First Nations and non-First Nations communities — will expire in 2018, making the new efforts to change policing of the indigenous population critical. And so far, there are a lot of good signs.
“Our relationship with the police has come around 180 degrees,” said James Favel, the project coordinator of the Bear Clan Patrol, a local safety group established in 1992 to attend to the needs of the indigenous population in inner-city Winnipeg. “Today, the outcomes have been well beyond anything I could have imagined.”
Although the Bear Clan Patrol stopped operating a few years after its inception, Favel revived it in 2014 after a local indigenous teen’s body was discovered wrapped in a plastic bag in the Red River. Since then, the group has worked closely with the police, especially when it comes to missing persons.
“We’ve been called to do search and rescue kind of stuff,” Favel told ThinkProgress. “There have been a few high-profile missing person [cases], and we were involved in all of them.”
“People aren’t afraid to be on the streets anymore,” he said, adding that gang activity has lessened since the patrol resumed.
The World’s Indigenous Suicide Crises, By The NumbersWorld by CREDIT: AP Photo/Brennan Linsley A state of emergency was declared after 11 members of a single, remote…thinkprogress.orgMylène Croteau, a spokesperson for the First Nations Policing Program, also told ThinkProgress over email that a renewed approach to indigenous policing has already been set in motion. “Public Safety Canada is engaging stakeholders — including Indigenous communities, Provinces, Territories, the RCMP, [and] First Nation police services and policing associations, such as the First Nations Chiefs of Police Association — on the development of this renewed approach,” Croteau said. “These engagement activities offer an opportunity for partners and stakeholders to provide real and meaningful input into shaping policy for the safety and security of Indigenous communities.”
The changes are of course long overdue — and many hope that they will include a focus on the way the RCMP interacts with Canadian indigenous women, who have been especially victimized by police in the past. Various human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have documented and condemned the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for repeated accounts of verbal, physical, and sexual assault on indigenous women.
This summer, the Canadian government is expected to establish a mandate for an inquiry into approximately 1,200 missing and murdered First Nations women, although some say that number could be as high as 4,000. Indigenous leaders like Bellegarde have condemned the Canadian police for their performance in investigating the disappearances and murders — saying enough resources were not dedicated to the investigation.
In 2015, reports of abuse of indigenous women at the hands of police in Quebec prompted an internal investigation in the provincial police department. The women alleged that police officers would pick up women who appeared to be intoxicated, drive them out of town, leave them in a deserted area, and sometimes physically or sexually assault them. Quebec’s Public Security Minister Martin Coiteux recently said he will follow up on the allegations of abuse, but security of the indigenous population — and women specifically — hasn’t always been a priority.
“There was no interest. At the top, there was really no interest in the security of aboriginals, aboriginal women,” Isabelle Parent, a former employee of Quebec’s public security ministry, recently told Radio-Canada’s investigative program Enquête. “That shocked me.”
Rachel Cain is an intern at ThinkProgress.