Garnet Papigatuk, left, and Joshua Papigatuk are pictured in this undated image.Francois Leger Savard/The Canadian Press
Kent Roach is a professor of law at the University of Toronto and is the author of Canadian Policing: Why and How it Must Change.
Between late August and early November, nine Indigenous men and one Indigenous woman died at the hands of police in Canada. Despite an emergency debate in Parliament and calls for a national inquiry, there has been little official response.
The continuing independent criminal investigations are necessary in each of these cases, but they will not address whether the 10 tragic deaths, including the RCMP’s fatal shooting of 15-year-old Hoss Lightning Saddleback in Wetaskiwin, Alta., could have been prevented, whether police use-of-force guidelines are justified and evidence-based, and whether agencies other than the police should have responded to the incidents that ended with these deaths. The federal Minister of Indigenous Relations has indicated there have been enough inquiries and called for the police services involved to take action, but this neglects that four of the deaths involved the RCMP. The federal Minister of Public Safety has also pointed to continuing discussions aimed at improving his ministry’s oft-criticized First Nations and Inuit Policing Program, but these discussions seem stalled, with little sense of urgency or imagination.
It may be a sign of hardening and fearful times that the 10 recent deaths have received less attention than four incidents that occurred directly in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in May, 2020. Rodney Levi (of the Metepenagiag Mi’kmaq Nation) and Chantel Moore (of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations) were both experiencing mental health crises when they were shot and killed by police in New Brunswick just a week apart in June, 2020. This was followed by the emergence of dashcam footage of Chief Allan Adam (of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Alberta), being tackled by an RCMP officer and a photo of his battered face as a result, and video of an Inuk man being knocked over by the opened door of an RCMP cruiser in Kinngait, Nunavut. The public outrage prompted by these incidents felt like a reckoning at the time.
The 10 recent deaths in question are no less tragic in their circumstances, and yet the national public outcry in their wake is noticeably absent. Six of the 10 deceased – all Indigenous men – were fatally shot by the police. Two of the 10 deaths – those of Jack Piche from the Clearwater River Dene Nation in Saskatchewan, and Tammy Bateman from Winnipeg – occurred after each of them was struck by a police car. Another death – that of Ronald Skunk of Mishkeegogamang – occurred in hospital after the 59-year-old was arrested by the OPP in Northern Ontario.
As police-reported crime has increased in recent years, calls to defund the police have become less popular. But the underlying problems have not gone away. Police intervention has become our default response to people in crisis. We know from the bloody history of policing and Indigenous people that such encounters often result in failure and tragedy. A 2019 report from the B.C. Coroner’s Office found that between 2013 and 2017, more than two-thirds of people who died within 24 hours of a police interaction had been in a mental health crisis. Around 20 per cent of this group were Indigenous, while almost 40 per cent lived in rural and remote areas.
A national inquiry could examine the need for better mental health responses for people in crisis. We also need to better understand the dynamics involved when police perceive a person as Indigenous and/or in crisis. One member of Hoss Lightning Saddleback’s community speculated that the teenager might still have been alive had he called a mobile-health service rather than the RCMP, and such a service was apparently called too late before Steven Dedam, a 34-year-old father and member of the Elsipogtog First Nation, was fatally shot by the RCMP.
There are also many questions that remain unanswered about police use-of-force guidelines. Should police really be firing at a vehicle they are chasing, as in the case of Joseph Desjarlais of Fishing Lake First Nation, who was killed by the Saskatchewan RCMP in September? Is shooting at an individual’s centre mass the appropriate response when they do not drop a knife?
There is a need for our federal leadership to implement and evaluate more holistic safer-community strategies. Small Indigenous police services continue to struggle, especially when other nearby police services can pay their officers much more. They are not the panacea the federal government appears to think they are: one of the 10 deaths, that of Joshua Papigatuk, was caused by the Nunavik Police Service.
There should be a federal and provincial recognition that health, addiction and housing services are as essential as policing, and deserve much greater funding and attention. Before colonialization restricted their ability to act, safety was a community responsibility for most First Nations. We need to return to, and modernize, this approach to prevent more avoidable deaths.