Thank you very much.
My name is Mitch Bourbonniere. I've been involved in community outreach groups that patrol the streets of inner city Winnipeg for the last 30 years, beginning with the original Bear Clan in 1990. Today we have at least six different groups that walk the streets of Winnipeg as racialized peacekeeping groups. We have the Thunderbirds, 204 Neighbourhood Watch, the Initiative, the Mama Bear Clan, the Bear Clan and OPK Manitoba all walking the streets of Winnipeg.
OPK is an organization that supports, welcomes and looks after young men and women who are asking for a better life after being involved in the child welfare system, the justice system, street life gangs and prison. They provide wraparound support around youth issues such as housing, income, employment, education, addiction, mental health and connecting our participants to their original cultures.
Despite experiencing poverty, family breakdown, trauma and violence, as well as involvement in child welfare and youth justice systems, these young people ask for and demand a better life. They work extremely hard to turn their lives around.
It is very discouraging to them when society, and more specifically the police and the justice system, treat them with suspicion and mistrust and as being incorrigible.
I have one young man who was horrifically abused as a child and grew up in an unforgiving child welfare system only eventually to take the life of a rival gang member in a dispute. He was 15 years old at the time. He spent the next 15 years in federal prison.
Coming out a couple of years ago as a 30-year-old, he worked relentlessly to turn his life around, getting his education, his driver's licence and stable housing. He is now fully employed, drives his own vehicle and is a parent to a young daughter.
Because the police have the ability to scan licence plates in traffic, he is regularly pulled over because of his past and questioned aggressively and accused of all kinds of things by police. I know this is anecdotal, but these stories have been told to me over and over again in the last 30 years. Although this is extremely discouraging, he has come to accept that this is just going to happen.
The other young people in my program tell me countless stories of being stopped while walking in the community and being questioned by police and asked for identification for no apparent reason.
Another area of concern is when police are dispatched to do wellness checks of people who are already in crisis and have had previous negative experiences with police, and the situation can escalate quickly.
I realize there are many excellent individual police officers and that the action of a few can taint the reputation and perception of all police. I have heard this being dismissed as a few bad apples. It is my belief that we cannot afford even one bad apple in the police service, as this poisons the perception of police by the community, just as it would not be acceptable for the airline industry to have a few bad-apple pilots. We need to ensure police are properly recruited, investigated and vetted, and that they receive intensive ongoing training around racialized communities and empathy.
I have had some good experiences with the Winnipeg police in downtown Winnipeg with their foot patrol asking us—members of the Bear Clan and OPK—to walk with them because they find it easier to work with the unsheltered folks in downtown Winnipeg when we're there with them. I think it's helpful to community members to see people from their own background who are doing well and are out there trying to help them.
I'd like to see more women in the police, more indigenous people and people of colour.
That is what I have to say at this time.