Public Safety Committee on July 23rd, 2020

[Chief Ghislain Picard]

We would certainly like to have the same kind of relationship as the OPP has with a number of tribal organizations in Ontario, but the relationship has been strained somewhat in recent years; I would even go further than that, to 1990 and the Oka crisis. My colleague this morning referred to that situation.

We have a relationship to build. This is not to say there aren't some situations where our communities rely on the SQ and there's harmony. It is positive, but we can't say the same for all communities. Definitely, there's a relationship to be strengthened between the Sûreté du Québec and our communities, especially those that have their own police service. That being said, all of our communities would like to have that opportunity or that privilege.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. Harris.

With that, I'll bring our questioning to a close. I take note that when our parliamentary committee is functioning well, there are two characteristics. One, we have thoughtful witnesses and thoughtful questions; and two, there isn't much partisanship. Indeed, this afternoon and this morning have been a prime example of a well-functioning parliamentary committee, so I want to thank colleagues and I want to thank the witnesses for their contribution to this study.

We will suspend while we change the panel.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

We are ready to go.

We have with us, for our fourth and final panel today, Dr. Jeffrey Schiffer from Native Child and Family Services of Toronto. It's good to see you again, Dr. Schiffer.

We also have Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, assistant professor with the department of sociology at U of T.

Is that UTSC or U of T?

[Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, As an Individual]

It's Mississauga.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

That's too bad. If you were from Scarborough, you really would be an expert.

[Akwasi Owusu-Bempah]

I'll see myself out then.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

As well, we have with us Allen Benson, chief executive officer of Native Counselling Services of Alberta.

With that, I'll call on Dr. Jeffrey Schiffer for a seven-minute presentation.

[Dr. Jeffrey Schiffer, Executive Director, Native Child and Family Services of Toronto]

Good afternoon, members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to provide some testimony.

My name is Jeffrey Schiffer. I'm a Métis person. As the chair has said, I'm currently the executive director of Native Child and Family Services of Toronto.

I want to start by acknowledging the Algonquin territory that you're all gathered on today, as well as the traditional territory of the Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Anishinabe people from which I join you.

I applaud you for calling a series of hearings to discuss systemic racism in policing. This is an issue that we can trace back to the very inception of Canada.

As you're all aware, our nation is built on treaties. Canada today in fact derives its legal status as a nation from treaties. As numerous national commissions, inquiries and reports have noted, the indigenous signatories of these treaties had very different understanding of the implications of these agreements.

Policing in Canada emerged in part as a mechanism to enforce and expand colonization. The North-West Mounted Police, created in 1873, occupied a central role in managing and containing indigenous populations as European settlement advanced. They played a central role in forcibly relocating indigenous people to reserve lands established by the Crown and also in removing indigenous children from their families to be placed in residential schools. For almost 150 years, police in Canada have been utilized to enforce colonial interpretations of the original treaties and to implement Canadian law, which sometimes is not congruent with the vision of a shared nation that was initially promised to indigenous peoples.

We're at a crossroads today in Canada. As RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki has stated, “systemic racism is part of every institution, the RCMP included”. Our national, provincial and territorial, and municipal police services remain ensnared in the historical momentum of the racism and colonial ideologies that framed their creation so long ago. This is evident in the persistent statistics that reveal indigenous people being more frequently questioned and investigated by police, more often subject to violence, sexual exploitation and death at the hands of police, and being starkly overrepresented in the criminal justice system.

In an era of truth and reconciliation, these problems are becoming more acute, rather than getting better. Just as one example, since April 2010, the indigenous population in prisons has grown by nearly 44%, whereas the non-indigenous incarcerated population in Canada has declined by almost 14% over that same period.

Research tells us that the crossroads we're at today provides a fleeting opportunity of significant magnitude. The shock that's in our system at present, due to COVID-19 and global coordinated protests against systemic racism in policing, provides a unique opportunity for change.

I believe we have a responsibility as leaders to ensure public safety and national security that's not only evidence-based, but also framed in reconciliation, equity and diversity. We must ask ourselves, what does the data tell us about where police services succeed and where they fail? What possible pathways lie before us for innovation that can lead to better outcomes for indigenous people across Canada?

In May, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old black and indigenous woman, fell to her death from her 24th-floor apartment when police were responding to a mental health crisis. In June, Chantel Moore, a 26-year-old indigenous mother, was fatally shot by police during a wellness check. A week later, 48-year-old Rodney Levi, an indigenous man with a history of struggles with mental health, was shot and killed by the RCMP in responding to a call about an unwanted guest at a residence.

These three deaths are small pieces in a much larger picture. A study released in June revealed that while indigenous people make up roughly 5% of the population, 38 of the last 100 people killed by police in Canada were indigenous. In the decade spanning 2007 to 2017, indigenous people accounted for more than a third of the people shot to death by RCMP officers.

Mounting evidence is telling a story. It's telling us that police officers are struggling to manage with wellness checks, mental health crises and a variety of other calls and interactions, particularly when indigenous people are involved. Recent studies reveal that typical responses used by police services to address these challenges aren't effective.

In a large study assessing data from over 700 private sector establishments between 1971 and 2002, researchers investigated the impacts of police service initiatives in training, promoting inclusion and establishing institutional responsibility. Of these three strategies, training was found to be the least effective, and while these strategies had some positive impact when deployed together, the research found that systemic racism in policing is driven by a constellation of individual, group, institutional and social elements.

In short, police services may not have the capacity to resolve structural racism themselves. Support from government and community-led organizations will be critical if we're to action the change of seeing better outcomes in this area.

Recent calls to defund police are grounded in the evidence-based recognition that some work currently done by police services can be done more effectively with fewer resources by community-led organizations. For me, it's less about defunding police and more about a thoughtful consideration of how resources might be reallocated to community organizations to take on some of the work related to community safety, mental health response and victims services for indigenous people and racialized communities.

I would like to put three recommendations before you, before I finish today.

First, I recommend that the federal government work with the provinces and territories, municipalities and indigenous communities to reallocate funding and service responsibilities related to mental health and victims services to indigenous organizations. Second, I recommend that some specific funding be allocated to mental health response and victims services for indigenous people. The need is particularly pressing in urban centres like Toronto, where we're seeing massive and rapid growth in our indigenous community. Finally, I recommend that the federal government create an indigenous-led working group to better examine the service needs related to mental health and victims services for rapidly growing urban indigenous communities.

With that, I would like to thank the members of the committee for the opportunity to appear as a witness today. I look forward to answering any questions you might have later on.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Dr. Schiffer.

Professor Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, you have seven minutes, please.

[Akwasi Owusu-Bempah]

I am Professor Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, with the University of Toronto, as we have established.

I'd like to thank the committee, as well, for the opportunity to speak before you today, and Dr. Schiffer for his comments.

In addition to my own research on issues of race and policing, I've worked in operational police policy and, indirectly and directly, with police agencies on matters relating to race, racism and questions of equity. I have interviewed and surveyed members of the general public on their perceptions of and experiences with racism in policing, and conducted similar interviews and research with populations most subject to police attention. I have also spent a considerable amount of time conducting research with and working with racialized officers on the issues they face in the policing world. My comments today reflect not only my academic research but also these professional and practical experiences.

I think it's important in the context of the discussion we're having today to talk about some definitional issues. We're talking about systemic racism here. I think it's wise to think about differences among structural, systemic and institutional racism, each of which is relevant in the Canadian context.

From my perspective, when I'm thinking about issues of systemic racism in policing, I think more about structural racism, which describes a system in which policies, institutional practices, cultural representations and other norms work in varied and often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial inequality. The key part here is that structural racism acknowledges the role that our history and culture have played in creating a social system that privileges whiteness over non-whiteness. Rather than looking at individual institutional practices, structural racism understands racism as being embedded in the fabric of our social, economic and political systems.

Institutional racism refers to institutional policies and practices that, intentionally or not, produce outcomes that constantly favour or disadvantage certain groups over others.

We see structural racism play out in policing when we consider why certain racial groups come into contact with the police more frequently than others, just by virtue of who they are and where they live. Racism in various sectors of our society influences the nature of police work, of course. Most members of our society would expect a heightened police presence in areas where crime is higher. If black and indigenous people suffer racial discrimination in the employment and education sectors, thus increasing levels of poverty and the likelihood that they live in disadvantaged neighbourhoods with higher levels of crime and violence, it follows that these people will have greater exposure to the police, and by extension, police stop and search practices, arrest, use of force, etc.

We see structural racism, for example, play out when we look at arrests for minor drug offences. Evidence from Canada and other jurisdictions suggests that members of different racial groups use drugs at relatively similar rates, yet we see stark racial differences in drug possession arrests. While some of these differences can likely be attributed to officer behaviour and institutional policies and practices, the heightened police presence in the lives of black and indigenous people also plays an important role. So much remedy here lies outside the realm of policing.

It's my belief that the government should follow the call of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police to first decriminalize, and then later legalize and regulate other substances. This would take away the need for the police to address these minor issues.

From my perspective, an example of institutional racism in policing would include the privileging of enforcement-oriented forms of policing over community policing efforts in performance reviews and consideration for promotion. If officers are evaluated on the number of arrests they make, rather than on the extent to which they build strong ties with communities, then officers will be inclined to make arrests, warranted or not, rather than engaging in other activities that may serve to engender public safety. Efforts to increase arrests are likely to involve going after low-hanging fruit, often minor infractions in higher-crime neighbourhoods. Again, racial differences in housing patterns and the greater presence of certain racial groups among those experiencing poverty, combined with the presence of racial stereotypes in our society, will converge to produce racially disparate outcomes.

Now of course there is overlap between structural-systemic racism and institutional racism, and I have no doubt that in the two or three minutes I have been speaking, I've confused some of you. I'm happy to follow up later.

I think it's important to acknowledge that a significant proportion of Canadians believe that racism is a feature of Canadian policing. My colleague Scot Wortley and I have just finished the third in a series of studies examining racial differences in perceptions of the police in the greater Toronto area. We find that between 60% and 80% of black, white and Asian people in the greater Toronto area feel there is discrimination in policing. I know that similar studies have been conducted across the country with similar, although perhaps not quite as extreme, results.

My own work demonstrates that these negative perceptions stem from both personal and vicarious experiences. My own work demonstrates that black people, more than white people, felt they had been mistreated by the police during their last encounter, that the police were disrespectful and that their interactions lacked what we would call procedural justice.

We have evidence on differences in terms of treatment after the stops as well. Research conducted recently by my colleague Kanika Samuels-Wortley from Carleton University shows differences in police discretion, and in particular, the extent to which young racialized people are offered diversion programs. We note that diversion is offered to white youth to a greater extent than it is to black and to indigenous youth.

I won't go into police use of force in great depth, because that has been covered, but we know, similar to the indigenous situation, that, for example in Toronto, black people are not only much more likely to be the recipients of police use of force, but they're also subject to greater force. For example, in shootings, there are many more shots fired by the police than when the individual is white and the threshold for using that force is lower.

I would suggest, or I'd argue, that we need a national database that captures police use of force incidents. We do not know the full extent to which the police are using force at the moment, because this data is not systematically collected by our policing agencies, and thus not made available to the government, to policy-makers and to researchers like me.

It's important that we look at the experiences of racialized officers themselves. Many police services across the country have made great efforts to increase the diversity of their workforce, and I mean diversity in terms of what all their officers look like, but unfortunately, my own research tells me that racialized officers do not feel that they are taken into the police subculture and brought into the police brotherhood. I use the term “brotherhood” there purposely. They're overlooked for task and area assignments, and too often passed over for promotion.

A full examination of the extent to which individual, institutional, and systemic or structural racism impacts upon Canadian policing is not possible without access to racially desegregated police data. This data must extend beyond key indicators, such as stops and searches, and arrests, to include information about the outcome of police activity.

We need information about hit rates from stops, and the number of charges that are dropped by the Crown. We need information on the experiences of racialized officers. I commend the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and Statistics Canada for announcing that they will be collecting race-based policing data, but that must be comprehensive data. If it is just cursory data, the data collected will very easily be used to further stigmatize already stigmatized groups and could lead to the creation of further marginalizing policies.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you for that, Professor Owusu-Bempah.

Our final witness is Mr. Benson, for seven minutes, please.

[Dr. Allen Benson, Chief Executive Officer, Native Counselling Services of Alberta]

Thank you to the committee for the invite. I'd also like to thank and acknowledge the clerk and his office for all the work going into setting this up. I appreciate it.

I am a member of the Beaver Lake First Nation in Treaty 6 territory, and I want to acknowledge that I'm on that territory. I was reminded yesterday by a priest and an elder that while I'm on Zoom meetings, I should acknowledge that I'm in the Creator's space, so I'll do that.

I'm the president of the National Associations Active in Criminal Justice and, as of Monday, the former chair of the Family Violence Death Review Committee in Alberta. I have experience working in Australia implementing some of the recommendations from the Wood inquiry. The RCMP actually assisted the Government of Australia in that inquiry. I was heavily involved in community engagement while I worked for the Premier of New South Wales. I'm also, at present, the facilitator for dialogue with the Alberta chiefs. Last week we had a meeting with our provincial justice minister and four federal ministers, including Minister Blair and another member of Parliament, Pam.

I'm going to speak from all of that experience on a number of different topics, and I'll try to be as brief as I can. Rather than read my notes, I'm going to highlight some key things.

The first thing I'd like to talk about is the use of force. As I've been involved in many investigations and reviews of complaints against the police that have come through my office, I'd like to speak about the Criminal Code. Section 25 of the code allows law enforcement to use force in the course of their duty, and section 26 makes it a crime for police to use excessive force. However, the definition of what is a reasonable use of force is very vague. Because of that, provincial police forces and municipal police forces have their own legal frameworks, so there's no consistency across the country. That creates a challenge.

We need to review the various definitions of “reasonable use of force” and create a federal standard that's incorporated not just in the Criminal Code but in the national police act. A clear definition is important for understanding what the use of force is. A standard needs to be created with input from civilians, women, first nations, Inuit, Métis and many other minorities across this country. That input is very important.

The video of Chief Allan Adam being taken down is a good example of how the police can review recordings and determine that reasonable force was used. According to their standard, reasonable force was used in his case, while most Albertans and Canadians decried that use of force as excessive. The definition of “reasonable” needs to resonate with police and civilians.

The review of incidents should be done from the perspective of an independent process. Municipal, provincial and federal police services need a more independent body that reviews complaints and that reports to municipal, provincial and federal governments. Historically and currently, the work of the police complaints commission for the RCMP has not made a substantive change in the way indigenous people experience police services nationally. The commission needs to be more inclusive, more accessible and more transparent, with the ability to impose sanctions in some cases.

Reviews also need to be accessible. The current processes are complicated and difficult to navigate for many Canadians. All Canadians need to be able to understand and access the process for complaints. Their complaints need to be taken and addressed in respectful ways.

Reviews should also allow for meaningful and engaged indigenous participation in the entire independent review process. This means including indigenous leadership on the team or commission, indigenous expertise in decision-making positions and hiring indigenous investigators.

The review body needs to be composed of indigenous, non-indigenous and other minorities that have a broad expertise, along with other Canadians in policing and social justice. For transparency, the independent review process needs to be detailed and be made available to Canadians with few exceptions. These exceptions need more clarity.

There need to be clear consequences. The consequences of excessive use of force, racism and abuse of power need to be meaningful and transparent to the public. Investigative bodies must be able to recommend sanctions in some cases and have the authority to impose these sanctions.

From a first nations police point of view—and I'm going to speak about my interaction with the chiefs and federal and provincial ministers and recent follow-up with the chiefs—there needs to be a more equitable and consistent funding for self-administered first nation police services. These services must be recognized as essential services, as are other police forces, in federal and provincial legislation.

Inherent to this funding is the negotiation of an agreement with first nations that recognizes the right of first nations to police their communities or to negotiate the delivery of police services by the RCMP or in some cases by provincial authorities.

Further, the chiefs in Alberta region have requested direct negotiations and involvement in the development of any policies, legislation around first nation policing or criminal justice reform.

I'd like to just make a reference to the Siksika Nation. On that nation there are approximately 8,000 people. The hamlet next to Siksika has a population of just over 200 people. The police detachment is located in that hamlet of 200 people. They have 20 officers.

Those 20 officers provide police services—very little by way of police services, but police services, nonetheless—to Siksika First Nation. The question of everybody in that whole region is, why isn't that detachment on the reserve and serving the biggest population of the whole region? That's just one example of many challenges around policing from outside the community.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Unfortunately, Mr. Benson, we're going to have to leave it there. Time is a tyranny here.

I'm going to ask Mr. Vidal to start the six-minute round.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Again, I want to make the comment I made earlier, that we've had such an impressive round of witnesses all day today. I want to express our appreciation to each of them for taking the time and making the effort to come and share their knowledge and experience with us.

I want to start with Dr. Owusu-Bempah. Would you please comment on the pace of the federal government's implementation of various reports tabled on policing, racism, and the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls?

[Akwasi Owusu-Bempah]

In choosing my words carefully, I would call it almost glacial.

There appear to be efforts made towards some progress in some senses, and I'm not seeing that progress made in the actions of the membership at the federal level of policing. While there are numerous initiatives, whether in hiring or in community consultation and such matters, intended to ameliorate many of the problems that have been discussed by the speakers, including me, just now, I don't think we're seeing the same in terms of action with respect to how members of the public are being treated. That's my general sense.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you for that.

I'm going to follow up with you with one more question before I move on.

We've talked a lot today about and I've asked some questions about good relationships and how they're vital in order to build good policing policy—or good community policing policy, to be maybe more specific. In your opinion, what are the top priorities that the RCMP could work on this summer—get right to work on—in order to improve relationships with various communities throughout the country?

[Akwasi Owusu-Bempah]

I think the most important thing to consider when we think about relationship building between the police and the communities they serve is that you can spend countless hours trying to foster good relations and all it takes is one high-profile case of abuse to undo all of that work. That's the reality.

What progress could be made in the immediate...? I would like to see a clear signal from the commissioner on exactly how systemic racism, as she now understands it, is going to be addressed, and for that to begin to be rolled out over the summer. I think many of us in the academic world, as well as others watching, were quite shocked given, again, all of the recommendations that have been made and all of the talk around addressing issues of, I would say, diversity, because “diversity” is often used.

I think we need to recognize that issues of racism are different from issues of gender discrimination, which are different from issues of discrimination for sexual orientation. The fact that, in 2020, the commissioner of the RCMP could not articulate what systemic racism is has done nothing to appear to the public that the service is doing something to address systemic racism. I think a statement with clear plans on how that's going to be dealt with needs to be—

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Chair, I have a point of order. We've had no interpretation for the last few minutes.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Have we lost translation?

Okay, perhaps you could just hold that for a second.

While we're fixing translation, Professor Owusu-Bempah, perhaps you could move a little closer to your microphone. Apparently there's a bit of a problem.

Okay, we'll start again.

[Akwasi Owusu-Bempah]

Table a plan to address excessive use of force. Table a plan to address the release of race-based data, which the RCMP has been reluctant to release. Address the community relations strategy, and recognize, again, that one high-profile case of police abuse is going to undo good work that's done.

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Thank you for that.

I'm going to ask Dr. Schiffer to answer the same question. I think I'm going to be able to squeeze in the rest of my questions.

[Dr. Jeffrey Schiffer]

Is it the same question about actions that could be immediately taken?

[Gary Vidal, Conservative, Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River, SK]

Absolutely, yes.

[Dr. Jeffrey Schiffer]

Fantastic.

As my colleague just said, a world of community relations can be taken down by one negative case. What we are seeing, particularly in the indigenous community, is that a lot of the cases that go wrong happen when we have law enforcement officers trying to intervene around mental health crises. What we do know is that the intergenerational relationship between indigenous people and law enforcement impacts an interaction before it has already started. We also know that law enforcement officers, whether they're with the RCMP or the police, don't have a lot of training in de-escalation around mental health and certainly not training in support that's indigenous-specific.

I think taking some of these problem areas where police services struggle and shifting them over to community-based organizations that already know how to do that well would remove the possibility of those interactions going wrong, and limit the number of times that we would see those emerging. I do think that a thoughtful consideration of where police services are struggling and our capacity to empower community-led groups to take on some of that work would make significant change.