Community crimefighters aim to keep Pelican Narrows safe
SASKATOON Arielle Merasty loves being the eyes and ears of her community.
The 27-year-old has spent the last year working as a peacekeeper in her home of Pelican Narrows, a community situated about 400 kilometres northeast of Prince Albert within the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation.
Merasty said she signed up for peacekeeper training because she has considered becoming a paramedic and wanted to get her emergency medical responder certification. She was one of eight people to graduate in March as part of Pelican Narrows’ first peacekeeper program and she’s been patrolling the community’s streets ever since.
Working out of the band office, her duties include alerting the RCMP to serious incidents, responding to domestic violence calls, and shepherding youth home if they’re out after curfew.
“It’s awesome, really,” she said. “We look out for people, make sure they’re safe and whatnot.”
The patrols make people feel safer and discourage people from committing crimes, she said.
Now Merasty and her fellow peacekeepers are getting additional training to become Community Support Officers (CSOS). By the end of the year, they’ll be armed with handcuffs and batons and will have the authority to enforce parts of provincial legislation, including the Traffic Safety Act.
Merasty said she’s enjoyed the training and thinks the additional knowledge and equipment will keep her safer and help her be more effective when diffusing difficult situations.
The money to train Merasty and her colleagues comes from a provincial pilot program.
Noel Busse, a spokesman for the Saskatchewan Ministry of Corrections and Policing, said the province is providing funding for nine people from Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation and 20 people from Little Pine First Nation and Poundmaker Cree Nation to take part in a sixweek training program to become CSOS.
It costs $6,220 to train each CSO, plus costs related to instructors travelling to the northern communities.
Once the officers are trained, the First Nations are responsible for paying the CSOS’ salaries.
RCMP Staff Sgt. Dean Lerat, detachment commander for Pelican Narrows, said the community’s peacekeepers have deterred crime and allowed the RCMP to operate more effectively, freeing up officers to handle more serious calls.
He expects that to continue once the peacekeepers graduate as CSOS. Lerat said the RCMP is doing whatever it can to support that transition, including donating handcuffs to the new CSOS.
“When (RCMP officers) go home at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., or whatever time we go home, they’re out alone patrolling. They alert us to potential violent calls or escalation in violence, or other types of mischief, whereas before, we wouldn’t have known, or we would have got called to a serious crime, a serious violent crime possibly,” Lerat said.
“They call us before it escalates, and that’s the most important thing that they do for us. I firmly believe they have prevented serious crime this year because of being visibly available to the community after hours.”
Pelican Narrows RCMP responded to three homicides in 2017 and two each year from 2014 to 2016. So far, no homicides have been reported in 2018.
“The proof is in the pudding of the statistics. We haven’t had anywhere near the violent crime that we’ve had in the past four or five years, so I think that’s a strong indicator that the peacekeeper program is working,” Lerat said.
Pelican Narrows Vice-chief Weldon Mccallum said the CSO program is putting the community on a path to establishing its own police service.
Under the federal First Nations Policing Program, First Nations in Canada can either have their policing services provided by the RCMP, or they can establish their own self-administered forces.
There’s only one self-administered Indigenous police force in Saskatchewan: the File Hills First Nation Police Service that was established in 2002 to oversee Okanese, Peepeekisis, Carry the Kettle, Star Blanket and Little Black Bear First Nations.
Mccallum hopes Pelican Narrows could be the second. He’s looking for money to build or repurpose a station for its CSOS — a building that could one day become a police headquarters.
Busse said the provincial pilot program wasn’t launched with the intention of transitioning communities from CSOS to having selfadministered police forces.
But Mccallum said he hopes the program encourages the CSOS to become police officers so they can provide services to other First Nations. He said it’s important to have Indigenous police officers who speak the language of the communities they’re policing, but there aren’t enough of them.