Bridging the gulf, two decades on

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Evan Maud alleges police dropped him off on the outskirts of town. (JOE.BRYKSA@FREEPRESS.MB.CA)

"We heard a litany of complaints and examples indicating that many, if not most, aboriginal people are afraid of the police. They consider the police force to be a foreign presence and do not feel understood by it."

-- Aboriginal Justice Inquiry report 1991

So what's changed? Do the words above ring as true today as when they were written, a time most observers consider the lowest point in modern Manitoba history in the relationship between urban aboriginal people and the Winnipeg Police Service?

"I certainly don't think it's any worse than it was back then," said University of Manitoba criminologist Rick Linden, who worked on the AJI 20 years ago. "But I don't think you'd find anybody who says the level of trust is where they'd like it."

Back during the AJI, which also examined the 1988 city police shooting death of J. J. Harper and 1971 RCMP handling of the murder of Helen Betty Osborne, the two solitudes of Manitoba were at war.

Linden and others say since the AJI's recommendations have been adopted, aboriginal people have a greater say in everything from policing issues, local government and education to child and family services. Their culture, at one time hidden, now grows and flourishes.

Grand Chief Ron Evans of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs said he believes the relationship between police and aboriginal leadership has improved over the past 20 years.

"However, just because a relationship is a good one, a positive one, at our level, the decisions and the agreements we have, they need to be filtered right down to the citizens," Evans said. "If that's not happening, then obviously something is broken down in the system."

Evans said one way to fix that is for the Winnipeg Police Service to do what the RCMP did more than a year ago. Const. Monique Cooper, who is of Ojibway heritage, was assigned to work full-time with the assembly to bridge a perceived gap between the RCMP and First Nations on high-profile public safety issues.

Evans said that position has improved communication between First Nations and the RCMP, and he will raise the idea of city police duplicating it when he next meets with police Chief Keith McCaskill.

"I'm sure he'll be open to it," he said. "It's just a matter of making it happen."

Two recent events suggest a lot more has to be done. The first is 20-year-old Evan Maud's allegation two city police officers, or at least two men who appeared to be city police officers, on Dec. 3 threw him in the back of an unmarked police car and drove him out of the city in what's euphemistically called a "starlight drive."

Maud claims once outside the city, the men made him strip off some of his clothing, run as fast he could and threatened to Taser him. They also tossed him a local high school sweater to wear. They then left him to make his way home.

Maud said he plans to file a complaint with the Law Enforcement Review Agency (LERA). A LERA spokesman said Friday Maud has been in contact with the arm's-length investigative agency and a formal complaint is forthcoming. McCaskill has also said police will look into the high school student's allegation.

"We don't know what happened yet until the complainant can come and talk to us, and we can look at this as fully as we possibly can to get the facts out," McCaskill said this week. "I think that's what the public needs and deserves, that's what the aboriginal community -- that's a part of the overall community in Winnipeg -- need and deserve."

Evans is encouraging Maud to also speak to Winnipeg police about his allegation so it can be investigated quickly.

"They need to file a formal complaint so that the process comes into play," he said.

The second event has to do with a petition calling for a special aboriginal unit within the Winnipeg Police Service.

Rodney Hunt, chief of the Saskatchewan River First Nation Inc., started the petition after three people were randomly shot in a 45-minute span in the North End Oct. 23. Two of the victims died and no one has been arrested. Hunt lives in the North End.

"People are scared to go out because there's been no solution to it, and a lot of people are afraid of non-native police," Hunt told the Free Press in an earlier interview.

City police Supt. Dave Thorne said in a prepared statement police, at least at this stage, aren't prepared to create an all-aboriginal unit -- that developing relationships in any community is the job of every officer.

"Limiting options for job opportunities within the service to any of our employees would be unfair and is not something that the service sees a benefit in doing," he said.

McCaskill said police flooded the area after the shootings, first to drag a net for a suspect and second to reassure the community they were safe.

"We've put a lot of officers in the North End, for instance, because that community was hurting," he said. One of the AJI's recommendations two decades ago was that city police do more to hire aboriginal people and to set an initial target of hiring 133 aboriginal police officers. The service's 2009 annual report, released this month, says there are 151 such officers.

Linden said work to make the police service more accessible and responsive to First Nations goes on each day.

"If anything, (the relationship) should be better because I know we have a police chief who's genuinely concerned about the aboriginal community," Linden said. "It's not something that he's done since he was chief. He's always been a really community-focused guy."

What hasn't changed is the high rate of aboriginal participation in the criminal justice system, both as offenders and victims. Aboriginal people are three times more likely than non-aboriginal people to be victims of violent crime, specifically sexual assault, robbery and physical assault, according to Statistics Canada.

More troubling, the average homicide rate for aboriginal people is about seven times higher than for non-aboriginal people. And when taking population differences into account, it's been found aboriginal people are about 10 times more likely to be accused of homicide than non-aboriginal people.

StatsCan also says that in Manitoba, aboriginal people accounted for 71 per cent of sentenced admissions in 2005-06 (and make up 16 per cent of the outside population), up from 58 per cent in 1996-97. Many factors are driving these numbers, the most obvious being stubbornly high poverty rates, broken families, substance abuse and unemployment. One thing that wasn't as much an issue during the AJI as it is now is aboriginal youth gang crime. That subculture and the violence it breeds has brought a whole new level of policing to city streets and rural reserves that didn't exist 20 years ago.

Aboriginal newspaper Grassroots News reporter Don Marks said that's brought more young aboriginal youth into contact with police and probation officers than ever before. The ongoing war on auto theft has done the same thing.

"A lot of innocent native kids are being harassed," Marks said. "Every kid says it's a problem. We know that there is racial profiling, but at the same time, how do police do their job? The majority of the crimes are being committed by the gang-bangers."

The result?

The Manitoba Youth Centre is often bursting at the seams and the Agassiz Youth Centre near Portage La Prairie has had to be expanded. Provincial adult jails are also expanding as is the federal Stony Mountain Institution.

Also, a recent national study says it found most urban-dwelling aboriginal people believe their non-aboriginal counterparts see them in a negative light.

The Urban Aboriginal Peoples Study, published by Toronto-based Environics Institute, was created from a survey of 2,614 face-to-face interviews with First Nations, Métis and Inuit adults from 11 different cities across Canada between March and October 2009.

In Winnipeg, the study found almost all aboriginal people agree others behave in an unfair or negative way towards them. Winnipeg has one of the largest urban aboriginal populations in the country.

And almost half of the 250 people surveyed expressed concern about crime in Winnipeg.

"In particular, concerns about violence and murders are prominent in Winnipeg," the study says.

bruce.owen@freepress.mb.ca

-- With files from Gabrielle Giroday

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 11, 2010 A6