Four ways to tackle racism in policing
PM says he’s ready to answer calls for reform after another shooting
OTTAWA— Another death. Another push for change.
That familiar pattern is playing out again after a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer in New Brunswick fatally shot a Mi’kmaw man named Rodney Levi on Friday night. Police said the man was armed with knives and “charged at officers.”
Levi died just over a week after Chantel Moore, a 26-year-old First Nations woman fatally shot at her apartment during a wellness check by local police.
In the midst of a worldwide movement against racism and police brutality, politicians of all stripes in Canada have denounced “systemic” discrimination in the RCMP and other police forces. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged changes to address it, including wider use of body cameras worn by police officers to document their interactions with the public.
But many are calling for the federal government to do more. Lillian Dyck, a Cree senator from Saskatchewan, called Monday for RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki to resign immediately, alleging that her recent comments about racism in the national police force show she does not understand the issue.
Speaking to reporters Monday on Parliament Hill, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh highlighted a string of recent incidents he said show entrenched racism within Canada’s national police force. They included the arrest of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam, who alleges he was assaulted by RCMP officers when they wrestled him to the ground after stopping to check an expired licence plate. Singh called it a “vicious assault” that shows the need for change.
“These are really clear examples of a broader systemic problem, so we are calling for systemic change,” Singh said. “It is no longer in any way sufficient for the government to say nice words or to make empty gestures.” The RCMP did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
Here are some of the reforms the NDP and others want from the Liberal minority government in Ottawa.
Indigenous policing
Naiomi Metallic, a lawyer and law professor at Dalhousie University, said the government could improve the sense of safety in Indigenous communities by empowering more of them to have their own police forces.
Metallic was part of an expert panel tasked by Ottawa last year to review policing in Indigenous communities. She says chronic underfunding of the existing First Nations policing program has prevented many communities from creating their own law enforcement. This could change if Indigenous policing were declared an “essential service,” she said, and welcomes legislation promised by Public Safety Minister Bill Blair to do so.
The idea is that empowering local police from within an Indigenous community would increase trust and prevent potential episodes of violence, she said.
“Police are seen by Indigenous people as an arm of the colonial state,” Metallic said, pointing to the history of the RCMP in the Canadian settlement of the West and as enforcers of residential school attendance and the Indian Act. “There’s just so much distrust.”
Ban carding
On Monday, Singh repeated his call for the Trudeau government to ban police street checks. Also known as “carding,” these checks proved controversial as extensive reporting by the Star showed they allowed police in Toronto to disproportionately stop and document information of racialized people.
University of Toronto Prof. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, an expert on race and policing, said the federal government could show leadership by banning the practice for the RCMP. But he suggested Ottawa could also effectively prohibit or restrict the practice through Canadian privacy legislation, which would apply to police forces at the provincial and municipal levels.
Even so, Owusu-Bempah cautioned that banning street checks doesn’t necessarily reduce levels of police contact. He co-authored a study in 2019 that found 26 per cent of Black respondents to a GTA survey said they were stopped by police at least twice in the previous two years. Carding was restricted in Ontario in 2017.
Better data
Owusu-Bempah said the “first step” in federal reform should focus on better data. Pointing to a 2011 report he co-authored, Owusu-Bempah said police forces have purposely “whitewashed” data by curtailing the collection of race-based information from victims and those accused of crime.
Statistics Canada’s police-reported crime data from 2018, for instance, does not include information on race or ethnicity.
“Without that data, we’re having an uninformed and unintelligent conversation as far as I’m concerned, and it allows deputy commissioners to stand up and say there’s no systemic racism,” Owusu-Bempah said, referring to comments from RCMP leaders last week that they have since walked back. He added that this data shouldn’t be restricted to incidents in which police use force, as some are calling for. He says it should include information such as data on the race of people who call for wellness checks, in order to put it in the proper context.
“The race-based data collection needs to be much more broad,” he said.
“Defund” the police
On Monday, Singh echoed calls from Black Lives Matter-Toronto to stop the “militarization” of police forces in Canada. This demand comes as activists around the world call to “defund” the police — a reform that Singh described as redirecting money spent on police equipment like “tanks” to health and social services.
Overall, the RCMP spent $3.8 billion in 2018-19, up 34 per cent from five years earlier when the agency spent $2.9 billion, according to data published by the federal Treasury Board.
Owusu-Bempah said the “defund” initiative could mean that social workers or health teams could respond instead of police in some instances, such as wellness checks. “Any time we have the police intruding less into the lives of the public, the less opportunity there is for both use of force as well as criminalization,” he said. Matthew Green, an NDP member from Hamilton, is also sponsoring a petition in the House of Commons that calls for a ban on the use of tear gas in Canada and a study to change how to police are trained to emphasize de-escalating tensions before resorting to force.