In my view, I believe that when police officers are dealing with individuals, instead of first seeing them as potential criminals, they need to hear their stories and be able to see what they can do and how they can address people. In a community.... I can give you example after example of where women very often have been incarcerated when they've actually been victims of violence. They haven't been treated with the same values that maybe other racial people might have been. I'm not saying that I don't believe there haven't been white people who have been victims of issues with police, but far too often in our community there are women who do not get the same values or supports when police are engaged. If they have mental health issues, they're treated really horrifically. Just last week there was the video of an indigenous women having her clothes stripped off in a police station—she was actually drunk and intoxicated—and they gave her a concussion and she had to go to the hospital.
Those issues are real. They're not something obscure that's going on. With the new video cameras available, we're seeing this stuff in the media and being horrified by it, but it's the life that we experience.