LERA complaint filed in alleged racial profiling

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This article was published 10/03/2022 (1316 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Peguis First Nation man who alleges Winnipeg Police Service officers racially profiled him while he was on patrol outside of a COVID-19 isolation hotel has filed a Law Enforcement Review Agency complaint.

Now, the First Nations Health and Social Secretariat of Manitoba and the Summit of Treaty Five Sovereign Nations are demanding reconciliation and cultural training for the WPS, accusing the majority of city police of exhibiting “racist conduct.”

Under the provincial Law Enforcement Review Act, the review agency is tasked with independently investigating complaints about police misconduct.

If the evidence is sufficient, the complaint may proceed to a public hearing. If the complaint is substantiated, an officer could be reprimanded or dismissed from their job.

The Winnipeg Police Service would not comment on the allegations or the initial call that officers responded to as the matter is now before the review agency.

Junior Cochrane, 41, works as an ambassador for the secretariat’s “turtle team,” which is tasked with supporting First Nations people from remote communities who come to Winnipeg to isolate with COVID-19.

He was doing an hourly patrol outside of an alternative isolation accommodation hotel in Winnipeg (the location was not disclosed for privacy reasons) on the evening of Feb. 3, when he was stopped by a police car. More officers drove up shortly after, he said during a news conference Thursday.

Police questioned him and his pockets were searched — Cochrane said officers didn’t believe him when he said he was working and handcuffed him.

“Another officer was like ‘Should I put two?’ And he’s like ‘Yeah, you better put two, he’s a big guy.’ They put two sets of handcuffs on me and then they pushed me into the car and they told me they were detaining me for assaulting the building manager,” Cochrane said, adding officers told him he fit the suspect description.

“I was like, ‘Well, you got the wrong guy.’”

He said officers were rude to him while he sat detained, pulling up an old photo from a law enforcement database and asking why he hadn’t been in trouble in a long time.

“They were like, ‘What are you doing drinking around here, Junior? You shouldn’t be drinking around this building,’” Cochrane said. “They kept on asking: how much did you have to drink?”

Officers went into the hotel to “see if he was lying,” Cochrane said. Afterward, they uncuffed him and told him he was free to go.

Cochrane said one of the officers apologized to him, but the incident left him angry. He said he’s been treated similarly by police many times over the years, as have many Indigenous people he knows.

The lead co-ordinator of the secretariat’s alternative isolation team, Brenda Sanderson, said the incident was “a slap in the face” for the people who’ve been working diligently during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Completely inappropriate, in my mind. My first thought was racial profiling,” she said Thursday.

Sanderson said the organization reached out to the WPS to sit in a sharing circle with the officers involved, but were rebuffed based on police legal and union advice.

Black River Chief Sheldon Kent, chairman of the secretariat, said First Nations people “can’t tolerate this anymore.”

“We reached out directly to the city police, we reached out to the mayor, we wanted to have a discussion… to talk about strategies to fix this, because this is not new. You got to remember 1988, when (Indigenous leader) J.J. Harper was shot and killed on the streets of Winnipeg, they came out with a whole slew of recommendations,” said Kent, referring to the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry, which issued its final report in 1991.

“Fast forward to 2022, still happening today. It happens too often.”

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @erik_pindera