Indigenous police forces must be involved in Thunder Bay, panel says

Open this photo in gallery:

The Thunder Bay Police Service and area Indigenous police forces should create a new regional policing model to address the systemic racism that has plagued the TBPS, according to an expert panel that has completed the latest review of the force.

The 201-page report, released Thursday, is scathing in its assessment that not enough progress has been made to fix the TBPS’s significant problems.

The expert panel urges the Thunder Bay Police Service and its civilian board to commit to several steps toward forming a regional model, including joint training and firing-range facilities and sharing of personnel. Cases of Indigenous sudden deaths and missing persons should be investigated by blended teams led by TBPS but including Indigenous officers.

It recommended that the new regional model could combine services from the TBPS, the RCMP, the OPP, the Anishinabek Police Service and Nishnawbe Aski Police Service. “I think that will result in better, more effective investigations, more culturally appropriate investigations than has occurred,” Alok Mukherjee, who led the panel, said in an interview.

Thunder Bay police force appoint new chief

The state of policing has been under increased scrutiny across the country after a series of critical public reports questioning whether Canadians are being well served by existing institutions.

Last month, the Mass Casualty Commission into the April, 2020, Nova Scotia shooting rampage released a 3,000-page report that urged the RCMP leadership and its political overseers to be accountable for mistakes and, also, commit to clearing logjams of unimplemented recommendations from past public inquiries. The Thunder Bay expert panel says in its report that “our panel now makes this same point to the people and communities of Thunder Bay and Northwestern Ontario.”

The final report is the latest in number of reviews launched to ensure that the TBPS deals with dysfunction that includes several continuing human-rights complaints and a collapse in confidence by Indigenous groups, who say the force has failed to properly investigate the deaths of dozens of Indigenous people. Past investigations have been done by Ontario’s official police oversight agencies.

Along with Mr. Mukherjee, a former chair of the Toronto Police Services board, the expert panel includes police leaders, lawyers from First Nations and members of civilian oversight bodies.

“During our consultations, we detected a broad agreement that Thunder Bay and Northwestern Ontario would be better served by an integrated regional model of policing,” the report says, adding that such an arrangement will require extra funding from the provincial and federal governments.

“We believe this to be a model that will not only maximize the area’s policing resources by channelling municipal, provincial and federal funds but also increase the prospect of a more efficient and more culturally appropriate delivery of services.”

The report says the expert panel heard from First Nations leaders who say that within the police service there continues to be “internal denial and debate over the existence of systemic racism.” Confidence in the force has collapsed to the point that feedback from First Nations leaders suggest that the city police service “should no longer be permitted to do major crime investigations, alone,” the report says.

Mr. Mukherjee said the police force’s efforts to start and sustain a major-crimes unit have shown a lack of follow through and focus. Police leaders touted the new unit as a fix to past problems, but it was in reality “significantly understaffed and overworked” and “not solely focused on major-crimes investigations,” he said.

A 2018 landmark report, entitled Broken Trust, found there were “significant deficiencies in sudden-death investigations involving Indigenous people that are due, in part, to racial stereotyping” within the Thunder Bay Police Service.

That report centred on nine problematic police investigations into the sudden deaths of Indigenous people. Since then, these cases have been reinvestigated and subsequent reports have identified dozens more Indigenous death investigations that were incomplete and require review.

Over the past 16 months, the force’s chief has resigned, the deputy chief was suspended for a year, the force’s lawyer has resigned and the police board was stripped of its powers. Several human-rights complaints by former and current force employees as well as a former board member are still under way.

The report says that there have been some positive changes “We note the appointment of a new chief of police, an experienced senior RCMP officer who is Métis, and the appointment of two highly accomplished and respected Indigenous women to the new board.”

Mr. Mukherjee’s report found that despite repeated findings from oversight agencies that the force needs to address issues of systemic racism, there has been inadequate progress. The report recommends that the force and the board institute a formal anti-racism policy.

“No work has been done on this except for the board to identify it as a high priority,” the panel writes. “In the meantime, allegations of racism of all types – systemic, deliberate and unconscious – continue to come forward, vitiating relationships of Indigenous people with the service and its members and of the community with the board.”

The expert panel points out that the force has been the subject of more than 500 recommendations for change over the years.

“The response of the service and the board has, at best, consisted of half-hearted and sporadic measures to act on the many good ideas that were proposed,” it says. “At worst, there have been claims of action that are unsustainable, based on results.”

“But unless you change the institution, these systems of accountability, of monitoring of the way business is done, those recommendations, valuable as they are, will not be addressed in the way that they need to be.”