Urban police boost spending on terror fight
Urban police forces across Canada are diverting resources to terrorism-related investigations, but stress they don’t have a clear picture how many present imminent threats.
Montreal police have launched 100 terror-related investigations in the past two months, while the force policing Brampton and Mississauga say they’ve seen a tenfold increase in terror-related tips.
“You never know when these people will switch and take up action,” said Montreal police chief Marc Parent, adding that officers have deemed at least 40 per cent of the cases as mental-health related. “That demands of us enormous vigilance and choices that sometimes keep us awake at night.”
Parent says his security liaison team is dedicating 90 per cent of its time to terrorist threats, to the detriment of other local issues. But he said the force has chosen to increase its response, and isn’t sure whether there is more of a risk to public safety.
Parent was speaking alongside heads of Edmonton and Peel Region police forces Monday at the Senate national security committee.
Brian Adams, deputy chief of the Peel Regional Police, says his force is rolling out a 4-5 hour training course to all officers so they can identify and deal with radicalized people. He says it’s partly in response to officers’ own concerns.
“They have concerns for their own safety and their families. I’ve been a cop for 30 years and it’s the first time ever in my career where you’re getting that reaction from the officers themselves,” said Adams.
He says he’s aware of roughly five to 10 people in Peel who are among the more than 90 Canadians the RCMP is investigating as threats to national security. Montreal police said believe their city harbours 10 to 20 of them. Edmonton police chief Rod Knecht avoided providing numbers.
“We don’t know the threat in its entirety,” he said, but added that “we don’t have a tenth of the resources we need.”
Knecht also wants the federal government to lower the bar for lawful access to cellphone data. Police can only obtain such a warrant when they can convince a judge they reasonably believe an offence has been committed.
“I think it really constrains law enforcement and I think it’s something we’re going to regret in the future,” Knecht said.
Meanwhile, Knecht said Edmonton cops have close ties to groups like the Somali community. “It’s the parents we have to win over, because some of these people come from places where policing is not an admirable profession.”
After the Citizen profiled Michelle Walrond last week, the committee invited her to testify Monday. Walrond’s son, Luqman Abdunnur, was arrested last month while the subject of a national security investigation. He had recently stood up in a local mosque and hailed the killing of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo as a heroic act.
“Ignorance is like an infectious disease, it has to be excised aggressively,” said Walrond, a U.S.-raised English teacher and anti-poverty activist.
Walrond told the committee that foreign money is helping train and employ some Canadian Muslim preachers to spread extremist views like Wahhabism or Salafism. She wants a federal certification for religious preachers of any faith.
“In Canada, anybody can call themselves an imam,” she said. “And there’s nobody else that’s around that has the ability in the Muslim community … to say that’s not right.”