My thanks to the committee for the invitation.
I will give my presentation in English, but I will answer your questions in both official languages.
I want to begin with a caveat that I recognize that, as a white male tenured professor, I speak to this topic from a privileged position, but as you know, I've written about this issue extensively, both about police governance and the RCMP. My latest book also deals with public security in federal systems.
As background, I don't think there's really any debate when it comes to systemic racism in policing in Canada. Anybody who's read the final report by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada reports and the CRCC's “Report into Workplace Harassment in the RCMP”, the evidence is pretty unequivocal.
The real question is, what does this mean and what are the implications?
You have the long version of the text with you. I shall confine myself to the abbreviated remarks, which focus primarily on the recommendations and the action items.
I'm concerned about the growing gap in civil society between policing...and in terms of police-civilian relations. It's ultimately politicians that, of course, set the framework, conditions and constraints for the delivery of police services. I'm deeply concerned that, without concrete and sustained political action and leadership, the gap between police and civil society relations will continue to grow.
I would also like to point out that my 2017 study on the RCMP contains a 41-page annex, detailing every recommendation made in 15 reports between 2007 and 2017. You will find the annex on the Macdonald-Laurier Institute's website. The point is that we don't lack for studies. We don't lack for analysis or diagnosis of what the challenges are. There's a broad consensus on the way forward. In terms of analysis, I would point out that bureaucracies reproduce themselves, so we have an issue of institutional culture.
The second point is that we need systemic use of force statistics for policing across Canada, including the RCMP. I think the recent discussion has shown that better data is certainly an important part of the conversation in terms of identifying the exact challenges.
We need to professionalize policing. The code of conduct for the RCMP says, “Members treat every person with respect and courtesy and do not engage in discrimination or harassment.” The public, I think, expect the same sort of professionalism from police as they do from others—nurses, engineers, lawyers and physicians—and I think they don't see that. I think they're concerned about that, so having more of a service mentality is an important part of the change here. Part of what we see is police officers having assimilated a bit of a solipsistic mentality, in terms of us versus them, over the course of their careers. There are ways to mitigate that.
The fourth point is that we need to reduce the propensity for violence. At the same time, I would say the violence is not arbitrary. There is a national use of force framework to which the police chiefs, I'm sure, will be able to comment better than I can, and most of the force that we see is in accordance with that framework.
The recommendations are that we need to change the leadership and the management model. People enter the organization and they work their way up through the ranks, and there are very few organizations left like that today in our society. They're usually managed by people who are professional managers: professionals in HR, finance, policy and communications. The RCMP has civilianized these positions, so why not ask them to testify as witnesses before the committee?
Part of the leadership and management challenge is also separating the RCMP in the way that DND and the Canadian Armed Forces are two separate legal entities. While that has not eliminated the presence of harassment and racism, it has provided greater bandwidth within those two organizations in terms of dealing with these issues, and has provided a better balance between the uniformed and the civilian perspective. This is something the RCMP desperately needs, and that all police services in this country desperately need.
We have a challenge in that we need to civilianize the delivery of services, as service delivery has expanded for many police forces. We need to make law enforcement organizations more diverse. The quickest way to do that is to civilianize, because for many of the reasons that you have been discussing, I think minority communities are a bit reticent about joining. We need a better model for public and community safety than simply giving everything to the police. I think police are neither particularly efficient nor effective—