Shining a light on racism

For decades Indigenous people in Thunder Bay watched as dozens of their own died under suspicious circumstances that police inexplicably dismissed as accidents.

All along, many suspected their loved ones might have been murdered and police failed to carry out proper investigations because of deep-seated racism. Now they know their worst fears were justified. This week, after a two-year investigation, Ontario’s independent police watchdog released a thundering 200-plus-page report that finds systemic racism exists within the Thunder Bay Police Service “at an institutional level.”

We aren’t talking about a few “bad apples” here, the Independent Police Review Director, Gerry McNeilly, pointed out. The city’s police service was so infused with “racist attitudes and racial stereotyping” that police failed to properly investigate deaths when the deceased was Indigenous.

The result? McNeilly’s team, which studied more than three dozen files involving the sudden deaths of Indigenous men and women dating back to 2009, is recommending that at least nine investigations be reopened and a team be formed to determine whether others should be opened as well.

Many questions must now be answered. Chief among them is this: How could the insistent drumming of complaints from Indigenous families and leaders on this issue have been ignored for so long?

The answer, says McNeilly, lies in the intransigence of police forces who don’t easily adapt to new policies or to changes in the communities they represent.

This is not a problem unique to Thunder Bay’s police department. In fact, McNeilly is sending his wake-up-call of a report to police services across the province that deal not only with Indigenous populations, but other racialized groups.

It should also be studied by authorities in cities like Winnipeg and Regina, which have large Indigenous communities.

Other forces, including Toronto’s, could benefit from reading his numerous recommendations on how to eradicate racism and bias.

In fact, McNeilly’s report is especially timely in light of another study released last week that found Black people were “grossly overrepresented” in incidents between 2013 and 2017 where Toronto police used force resulting in injury or death.

To that end, Toronto Chief Mark Saunders might want to adopt McNeilly’s sensible recommendation that new hires in Thunder Bay be psychologically tested to eliminate applicants who express racist views and attitudes.

Because, as the report on Toronto’s force illustrated, racism doesn’t just affect how crimes are investigated, but how individuals are treated by officers.

Indeed, McNeilly’s report describes the systemic abuse of Indigenous people who came into contact with Thunder Bay police officers going back to the 1980s.

Those accounts, McNeilly wrote “did not appear to be isolated incidents.”

As if to underscore that point, even as the investigation was coming to a conclusion, a video emerged of a Thunder Bay officer striking an Indigenous youth who was strapped to a stretcher.

How does that happen even as senior officers and the board were being apprised of the findings of the investigation? It happens when leaders don’t communicate with their rank and file, McNeilly says.

He hopes that will end in Thunder Bay with the naming of a new police chief, Sylvie Hauth, in November and the naming of the first Indigenous chair of the city’s Police Services Board, Celina Reitberger, earlier this month.

As shocking as the results of the watchdog review are, they will, sadly, not be surprising for readers who have followed this unfolding story.

In March, McNeilly’s team gave a taste of what was to come when it released its review of an investigation into the death of one man, Stacy DeBungee.

It is disturbingly illustrative with how the Thunder Bay force conducted investigations into the deaths of Indigenous people.

McNeilly found DeBungee’s sudden death in 2015 “should have been treated as potential homicide — and investigated as such.”

Instead, investigators speculated DeBungee had fallen down drunk and rolled into the river. They closed the case.

What’s more outrageous is that police came to this conclusion even as an inquest was underway into the deaths of seven Indigenous students, five of whom had been found in waterways around the city.

The inquest also found police were issuing press releases about their deaths even before autopsies were completed. And officers were failing to even connect autopsy reports to their own investigations — or even to find out the results.

Understandably, then, the report makes recommendations on how officers can conduct more robust investigations.

Those, however, can only be undertaken if officers are not blinkered by racist attitudes.

McNeilly’s report is appropriately titled Broken Trust. It’s now up to the new chief and board to mend what McNeilly describes as a “crisis of trust” between police and Indigenous communities.

The inescapable fact is that not only has harm been done to those communities, but some people may have gotten away with murder because officers didn’t feel obliged to properly investigate the deaths of Indigenous people.

That is more than a crisis. It is a clear and present danger that must be addressed.

Gerry McNeilly’s report describes the systemic abuse of Indigenous people who came into contact with Thunder Bay police officers going back to the 1980s