Boushie lawyer is haunted by stint with RCMP

Policing Indigenous people was focus, Chris Murphy says.

Colten Boushie, a Cree man, was 22 years old when he was fatally shot by Gerald Stanley in a farmyard in the Rural Municipality of Glenside on Aug. 9, 2016. Stanley was acquitted in the shooting death.

Last week, the Boushie family filed lawsuits against Stanley and the RCMP. The RCMP issued a statement that said, in part, “Recently, lawyer Chris Murphy provided a media interview where he stated that the RCMP in Saskatchewan interact with Indigenous individuals differently than non-indigenous individuals ... This does not present an accurate depiction of the day-to-day reality of the relationships our Saskatchewan RCMP officers and employees have with communities across the province.”

Here, the Boushie family lawyer, Chris Murphy, writes his response:

During my first year of law school at the University of Saskatchewan I applied to the RCMP to be part of their “special constable” program. As I would soon learn, RCMP special constables were essentially temporary “members” of the RCMP who would spend four months during the summer in full uniform, working alongside a partner, and doing everything a full-fledged member would do except carry a side arm and drive the patrol vehicle.

I was ultimately offered the special constable position at the Rosetown, Sask. detachment. I don’t remember all of the details, but at the end of the call I respectfully turned down the offer and explained that I did not want to spend the summer handing out tickets to people speeding between Saskatoon and Calgary. Ten minutes later I got a call back and was given the news: “I got you a spot at the detachment with the most calls-per-member of any place in Canada: North Battleford!” I accepted immediately.

After spending a week at Depot in Regina learning the history of the RCMP, the basics of self-defence and the laws of Saskatchewan/ Canada, my graduating class of about ten special constables was sent out to detachments scattered throughout Saskatchewan. I was assigned to a shift with six other members. A female corporal was the officer in charge of five constables and me. Our detachment covered a large geographical area, but most of the calls we responded to were in North Battleford, the town of Battleford, and the seven First Nation reserves surrounding the Battlefords.

During our 10-hour shifts that summer I got to know the members of my team in a way that only those who share experiences of fear, camaraderie, and laughter can. Certainly none of the RCMP officers I came to know was a “racist,” which is to say, none believed one particular race was superior to another. In fact, none of them uttered a single word that resembled a “racial slur” that entire summer. To the contrary, they were honest, hard-working, good people who were dedicated to performing their difficult jobs.

But, speaking for myself, I now realize that in the course of doing my job, the majority of the people I “investigated” that summer were Indigenous. While I never consciously decided: “I’m giving that white kid a pass,” or “I’m going to search that kid’s backpack because he’s Indigenous,” it just so happened that most of the targets of our illegal searches were, in fact, Indigenous. I clearly failed in my duty and I likely played a role in forever damaging many citizens’ relationships with the police.

In retrospect, the scariest thing that happened to me in the summer of 1998 wasn’t chasing an armed robber over fences through North Battleford backyards. Rather, what still haunts me is that I truly believed it was normal for RCMP officers to focus most of their attention on policing Indigenous people. It was just the job.