Absolutely, and I think you're right that the numbers bear out that indigenous people, in particular indigenous women, also experience very significant rates of racial profiling in Canadian society.
To continue on a bit with what I was trying to get at with my presentation—and thank you so much for your question—whether we look towards increased police training or towards increased community policing, we see that these are things that do not fundamentally get to the heart of racialized policing and the racialized surveillance that you're so importantly highlighting.
I think what we really need to do is work towards minimizing the encounters that Black communities are having with police. If we look, for example, to the deployment of what often are so-called anti-gang squads, they are frequently squads, for example, that have eclipsed.... That was put forward in Montreal, and they were substantively involved in the mass racial profiling of Black communities, particularly in the Montreal North and Saint-Michel regions.
We actually saw a significant budgetary allocation increase because of what they described as increased perceptions of crime. It was unrelated to the actual increase of crime, but this ended up massively expanding the racialized surveillance of Black and indigenous youth in the neighbourhood.
This is why I'm suggesting a reduction, actually, of policing budgets, a reduction in policing those neighbourhoods, and the diversion of funds to things that keep communities safe, such as community centres or anti-violence programs that are not connected to police but are about building communities safely and differently.
If we also move towards the decriminalization of drugs, for example, which we already know increase the rates of hepatitis B, HIV and overdose deaths, as well as contributing to the mass incarceration of Black communities in Canada even as we know that criminalization does nothing to address the real harms associated with drug use, something like the decriminalization of drugs could really substantively impact the well-being of Black communities.