I would just add that, when you don't have specialized units, such as traffic reconstruction, it delegitimizes your police service. I'll give you an example. There was a very brutal, terrible accident right in front of one of our band offices. The comments from our community were, “Why are UCCM police not investigating this? Why are the OPP coming in here, to our area?” Then it's, “Well, they're the real police; they're the fake police. They're just here as a show.” That is not true. We have very competent officers. We don't have the units to be able to do that.
When we talk about drug units, and when we're working with the OPP.... During my first year here as the chief of police, we did an undercover joint force operation with the Ontario Provincial Police. It was very successful, but as soon as that was done, they had their own communities to take care of. We don't get to keep that drug unit. It moves on. When you don't have a concentrated saturation on a certain area of a criminal element, such as drug trafficking or human trafficking, it just perpetuates and comes back, and it comes back three or four times. As soon as that undercover project ended, it created a vacuum and a turf war started. Within one month there was an attempted murder and a murder involving the same group that had originally been fighting with the people we arrested in our undercover project. We do need those units to continually work.
Also, those specialized units offer lateral movement for your officers and civilian staff within the organization to learn and to grow as professionals and as a police service. It legitimizes your entire police service. We should, at some point, especially after 30-plus years, not have to ask our big brother for help all the time. Although we appreciate everything we get from the OPP and the RCMP, it would be nice for us to do our own major cases.
Currently, at UCCM there is a missing indigenous woman, Juanita Migwans. I want to say her name here because it's very sad that she has gone missing. We should have carriage of that investigation, but we don't have the detectives to handle major case management. We don't have the numbers, by legislation, to do that, so the OPP have to take carriage of that investigation. However, it should be an indigenous service looking after a missing indigenous woman.