Fighting the stigma, one call at a time
City police aboriginal numbers inch
upwards The place reeks of stale cigarette smoke. Acting Sgt. Preston Parranto is trudging up the stairs on his way to another routine call.
It’s the patrolman’s version of Murphy’s Law: If anything bad happens in an
“WE NEED MORE METIS AND FIRST NATIONS POLICE OFFICERS IN SASKATOON.”
CHIEF CLIVE WEIGHILL
apartment building, it happens on the top floor.
He finds a man in his mid-50s passed out cold in the hallway. The carpet is stained with watery vomit.
“You want to go somewhere? The BDU or the Lighthouse? Are you allowed there?” Parranto asks.
A few feet away is a sports bottle still half-full of hand sanitizer and water. The man on the floor slowly regains consciousness.
Parranto grew up a member of the Buffalo Lake First Nation, and both of his parents are fluent Cree speakers. He’s not fluent himself, but he exchanges a few words with the man in his traditional language.
“It’s amazing just how much you can disarm a situation by saying a few words in Cree,” he says later.
In 2002, only 30 aboriginal people worked for the Saskatoon Police Service. More than a decade later, that number has risen to 53, or 9.9 per cent of the police service. It’s a percentage the force wants to improve.
“We need more Metis and First Nations police officers in Saskatoon,” says Chief Clive Weighill.
Most of the force’s aboriginal members are constables, but some of them, like Parranto, have climbed the ranks into more senior supervisory roles.
Still, only one aboriginal person is part of the police executive, and the total numbers haven’t improved significantly since 2010.
Furthermore, the aboriginal employment numbers fall short of the 13.1 per cent target set out by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission. The force has its own goal of becoming 16 per cent aboriginal by 2020.
Despite the shortfall, the numbers are trending upwards, and officers like Parranto have become symbols of a police service bent on diversifying its workforce.
He’s built like a lumberjack. His hair is cut short. His five o’clock shadow is at least two days old. It’s not hard to imagine him as a younger man living in the bushes of northern Alberta, wielding a chainsaw. He grew up hunting and trapping. Beef, he says, was a luxury.
He never imagined he would become a police officer.
“I always thought it was awesome, but I never thought I would do it because of the family I grew up in. My uncles were always in trouble. Drugs and alcohol were a problem. I seen my aunties get the s--- kicked out of them by my uncles and stuff like that,” he says.
Through all of it, Parranto kept his nose clean and eventually successfully applied. Those early years were tough, he admits. The Stonechild inquiry was in full swing, and aboriginal relationships with police were at an all-time low.
“It was a bad time to be a police officer. It was especially a hard time to be a native police officer, because it was kind of, ‘You are damned if you do or damned if you don’t,’ ” Parranto recalls.
On the street, aboriginal people would hurl insults at him, calling him a sellout, an “apple” — red on the outside, white on the inside.
“I was getting in way more fights back then, because everyone was on their guard. They hated us. They were scared of us.”
Now, he says, things have improved dramatically. Under the leadership of Weighill, aboriginal recruitment has become a focus of the force.
Working for the police service’s culture unit, Marc Belanger’s full-time job is to get more First Nations and Metis people working for the Saskatoon police. An aboriginal officer himself, he spends his days travelling all over the province attending career fairs and visiting reserves, trying to convince young people that a job in law enforcement is a good idea.
“I wanted to be a police officer since I was six or seven years old. We want those kinds of people. Those are the people who are going to make good police officers,” he says.
Chief Felix Thomas of the Saskatoon Tribal Council says getting more First Nations and Metis officers out on the street can help drastically improve relations with the aboriginal community.
“People will open up more to someone who looks like them,” Thomas says.
More aboriginal recruitment can have a snowball effect, he adds. The more young First Nations people see aboriginal officers on the street, the more they will see policing as a viable career.
While aboriginal numbers on the force jumped in the early 2000s, Weighill notes it can be as much about retention as it is about attracting new recruits.
“We’ve been hiring new First Nations (and) Metis employees, but we are losing them at the same time. There are other opportunities out there,” he says.
Parranto admits aboriginal officers have to fight the stigma. This police force was once one of the most notorious in the country, and a disproportionate number of people arrested in Saskatoon are aboriginal.
In 2011, aboriginal adults accounted for 77.6 per cent of Saskatchewan’s prison populations, despite the fact that aboriginal people only make up 11.9 per cent of the province’s total population.
“I see these kids and I say, ‘Hey, you know what? I grew up in a tough life. I grew up with those problems. I have first hand experience,’ ” Parranto says.
When asked why he wanted to become a police officer, at first Parranto sticks to the clichés. He wanted to help. He wanted to help his community, his people. But there is another reason as well — one that might resonate more with young people.
“I like to ride fast and kick ass. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy that. But who wouldn’t? That’s part of the allure of policing,” he says with a chuckle.