PEACEKEEPING VS. POLICING
Kahnawake shows a way forward
It doesn’t take three parliamentary inquiries, a damning provincial commission and, most recently, an official apology from the Quebec government to indicate police practice systemic racism against Indigenous peoples.
That the police and Crown systemically arrest, prosecute and lock up Indigenous people at much higher rates than white Canadians is a matter of public record.
But for many Canadians, it took just a few seconds of dashboard camera footage to illustrate the problem: an RCMP officer grabs a Denelisun man by the arm and, as he resists, another patrolman comes charging into frame to punch and tackle the man in front of his wife.
His crime? He had an expired licence plate.
The footage, shot in March but published online Thursday, has renewed calls — including from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — for police departments to address racism within their ranks. There’s even people calling for the RCMP to be defunded because of how the force treats Indigenous people.
But in 195 Indigenous-led police departments across Canada, there is another way forward.
Take Kahnawake for instance.
The South Shore Mohawk community’s 36-officer police department is entirely staffed by Indigenous men and women. Dwayne Zacharie is in charge of the Kahnawake police and he said a part of what informs his approach to law enforcement is the officers’ job title: peacekeepers.
“Our officers understand the need to act in the vein of a peacekeeper,” said Zacharie, chief of the Kahnawake Peacekeepers. “Just because you have the authority to arrest people and put them into the system, do you always need to? Is there some alternative way of dealing with a particular problem.”
The peacekeepers hand out traffic tickets, they arrest people for an assortment of crimes but Zacharie said they’re just as likely to help someone with a flat tire or listen to a person going through a crisis.
“There are situations where — technically — a person’s problem falls way outside the jurisdiction of a police officer,” Zacharie said. “But how is it going to look if someone says ‘Sorry, I can’t help you, that’s not my job?’ People don’t expect you to solve their problems, but they appreciate it if you try. That’s our mission, to go out there and try to help people every day.”
Kahnawake is one of dozens of departments funded by the First Nations Policing Program, which employs about 1,300 officers in 450 communities across the country. The $120-million program gives communities much more autonomy in how the Criminal Code is enforced on their territory — something that isn’t the case when the RCMP or Sûreté du Québec are in charge.
Though Kahnawake is the only department that consists entirely of community members, most have a mix of Indigenous and non-indigenous officers. That creates a culture of accountability, according to one policing expert.
“When you have community members in the police department and when the leadership is Indigenous, it sets a tone of respect,” says Nick Jones, professor of Justice
Studies at the University of Regina.
“When we speak to elders, to (Indigenous) community members, to chiefs what they want from their police is that they engage with the community and that they seek to belong in the community.”
The program isn’t without its problems. Salaries are often lower than in non-indigenous departments and budgets come in the form of yearly grants, making it difficult to set long-term goals.
And these departments aren’t immune to internal strife, complaints of excessive force or tragedy. In Quebec, two officers in Indigenous-led police forces were killed in the line of duty over the past seven years.
Steve Dery was fatally shot in Kuujjuaq while attending a domestic dispute in 2013. Thierry Leroux died on patrol in Lac Simon in 2016.
And while the program brings a different approach to policing on Indigenous territories, it doesn’t address the friction between Indigenous and police in urban centres.
Just last month in Montreal, police dispatched 17 officers and a dog in response to an Inuit woman threatening to slash her wrists with broken glass. Witnesses say the presence of armed officers heightened tensions dramatically.
Though the situation ended peacefully, it resulted in a formal complaint to the Quebec Human Rights Commission.
There is also the case of SQ officers in Val-d’or alleged to have paid Indigenous women for sex, beaten them and sexually assaulted them. The allegations, brought forth in a 2015 report by Radio-canada, triggered a police investigation and report that found systemic racism by police against Indigenous people and a system that makes it nearly impossible for people to file complaints against officers.
In one of the most tense moments in Kahnawake’s recent history, a group of residents blocked a commuter rail line that passed through their territory as an act of solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en land defenders movement.
The blockade lasted weeks, it caused some political pundits in Quebec to demand an outside police force crack down on the protest camp, but Zacharie’s peacekeepers showed patience. In the end, the protest ended peacefully, without a single act of vandalism or violence.