Aboriginal liaison police officer aims to build trust with community
Cpl. Angela Desjarlais wants to see more Indigenous recruits on RPS
At 10 years of age, Angela Desjarlais was the victim of a crime and needed to talk to a police officer.
Her experience interacting with the officer was so positive that she credits it with affecting her choice to become a member of the Regina Police Service.
“This person was very, very compassionate and lovely to me, and it made me want to be able to do that when I grew up,” said Desjarlais, who has now been an RPS officer for 19 years.
Cpl. Desjarlais has spent the last year as the service’s Aboriginal recruitment liaison officer. She is tasked with building relationships between police and the Indigenous community, and increasing the recruitment of Indigenous people.
The position was started as a pilot project in June 2016 and will be made permanent in January, at which point Desjarlais will have to reapply.
Being an Indigenous person herself — her family is from Cowessess First Nation — Desjarlais is well aware of the troubled history between Aboriginal people and police.
“I often have family that don’t always like what I do for a living, or are frustrated with what they hear in the news, and I have to deal with that and explain that not everything you see is accurate,” said Desjarlais.
Part of her job now involves educating the public by speaking at schools and reserves, where she can clear up misconceptions people may have about the police.
“There’s questions of abuse of authority or racism or things like that. That isn’t my experience in my 19 years here,” Desjarlais said. “I’ve helped a lot of people. I’ve learned a lot from other people in the community. It’s a very, very rewarding career.”
During her time with the RPS, Desjarlais has worked as a general patrol officer and in several of the service’s departments, including organized crime, commercial crime, the North Central service centre and human resources training development. She has also worked as a crisis negotiator for the past 10 years.
Desjarlais applied for the liaison officer position because she feels it’s important that the RPS have more Aboriginal officers, but she also wanted to learn more about her own culture.
She has attended workshops at the First Nations University of Canada, learning to bead and make moccasins. She also attends cultural ceremonies at which she wears a blue ribbon skirt, usually worn by Indigenous women at ceremonies, that matches her blue RPS uniform.
“Both professionally and personally, it’s been very rewarding for me,” Desjarlais said. “It’s helped with my own journey in reconciliation about finding out about more who I am.”
Currently 9.5 per cent of RPS employees are of Aboriginal decent. Of the 405 police officers, 38 are Aboriginal.
As part of an agreement with the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission (SHRC), the RPS has been working to build a representative workforce. In 2016, the SHRC gave the police a long-term goal of having 14 per cent of its staff be Aboriginal.
That goal may need to be higher, according Len Daniels, the RPS’s manager of human resources. Daniels said the 14 per cent target is based on data drawn from the 2011 census. Taking into account the increase in population since then, he estimates the target will rise to 17 per cent.
The other challenge is that while the census data is based on the entire population, police can only try to attract people from the working population to a job that Daniels admits is not for everybody.
“When you think of all those factors, the amount of individuals that you’re attracting begins to decline,” said Daniels, who is from George Gordon First Nation.
When Daniels met with Chief Evan Bray and deputy chief Dean Rae to discuss the new liaison officer position, they acknowledged it would take time to see change in the RPS’s Indigenous representation.
Where it has to begin, said Daniels, is building trust with the First Nations community.
By establishing new relationships with the community through Desjarlais, the RPS hopes the result will be a broader pool of Aboriginal applicants.
“Ideally what we’re hoping to see, and if we’ve set this thing up the way I believe we’ve set it up, is that they’re coming to us and saying, ‘I want to be a part of what you offer,’ ” said Daniels.
Desjarlais believes one way she can help the RPS reach its goal is by giving young people the same positive experience that she had with the officer when she was a child.
“That’s the biggest thing that we can have is compassion and understanding,” Desjarlais said. “And I hope that’s what people get when they’ve dealt with me on a call.”