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Families await answers in three fatal shootings of Indigenous people by Winnipeg police this spring

People march in solidarity with the George Floyd protests across the United States in Winnipeg on June 5, 2030.

Eishia Hudson was an artist who loved sports, a 16-year-old girl raised by her grandmother in Berens River, north of Winnipeg, before moving to the city to live with her mother and siblings.

Jason Collins was a 36-year-old father of three children, full of life and love for his family and friends, a power-line worker who worked across the country. His daughter Tianna Rasmussen said he had a heart of gold.

Stewart Andrews, 22, was a young father to not only his one-year-old son, but two stepchildren he was raising with his girlfriend in Winnipeg.

All three were Indigenous, and over a 10-day period in April, all were shot and killed by members of the Winnipeg Police Service. After their deaths, Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Arlen Dumas said “First Nations have been dehumanized, mistreated and have been killed through WPS officer involved shootings” for years.

Five months later, their families are still waiting for answers as the province’s law-enforcement watchdog investigates whether police were justified in using lethal force.

Leah Gazan, an NDP Member of Parliament from Winnipeg, says it is no coincidence the three shooting deaths in April were of Indigenous people. The MP attended one of the rallies led by Eishia’s family in June, when supporters gathered, calling for an end to police brutality amid recent police-involved deaths of Black, Indigenous and other racialized people in Canada and the United States. Those rallies joined others across North America calling for police reform.

Ms. Gazan said Ms. Hudson was a 16-year-old girl who should have been given a chance to learn from her mistakes.

“We’re in a moment, we need to embrace this moment to make real changes, needed changes, and to ensure justice for Eishia,” Ms. Gazan said. “If people don’t find the death of a 16-year-old girl, for whatever reason, a complete tragedy, I think we need to ask ourselves why that is and I think part of it is the normalized violence that has occurred, that has been perpetuated against Indigenous and Black lives.”

Eishia Hudson. HANDOUT

Ms. Gazan pointed to the federal government’s delay in implementing an action plan in the wake of the final report from the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, which calls for, among other things, establishing an independent Indigenous civilian oversight body to investigate police misconduct as well as improving victim services for Indigenous women and girls.

Manitoba’s Internal Investigation Unit (IIU) director Zane Tessler says he’s received interim briefings on each of the three cases and is satisfied with the progress investigators are making but can’t give a timeline for when they would be completed.

The IIU, which conducts investigations into serious incidents involving police, will determine if there are any grounds for criminal charges against the officers involved, something it has done only once since it became operational five years ago.

The string of Winnipeg police shootings began on April 8 after 5 p.m. Police were called to a liquor store robbery allegedly involving a group of young who then stole an SUV from a parking lot, leading officers on a pursuit. The chase came to an end when the SUV, driven by Ms. Hudson, crashed into other vehicles at an intersection, where police then fired at her, according to Winnipeg police. Ms. Hudson was pronounced dead at a hospital. Four survivors, ages 15 and 16, were arrested and charged with robbery and possession of property obtained by crime.

Less than 12 hours later, Winnipeg police said they responded to a domestic call at a residence where they found Mr. Collins inside with a firearm, along with a teenager and a woman who appeared to be in distress. Police said they left the home to de-escalate the situation and the teenager escaped through the back door. Mr. Collins reportedly then confronted police outside where they shot him, according to police.

Nine days later on April 18 – with tension in the city high over those two shootings – police say they responded to a gun call, assault and an attempted robbery around 4 a.m. when they encountered Mr. Andrews and a 16-year-old boy.

At a news conference, Winnipeg Police Service Chief Danny Smyth said Mr. Andrews was shot when he confronted police. He was pronounced dead at a hospital and the 16-year-old was arrested and charged with several offences including robbery, possession of a weapon and firearm, pointing a firearm and failing to comply with a sentence.

Family members say they want to know why police used lethal force on Mr. Andrews, who they say was unarmed.

Mr. Andrews’s mother, Carmel Nasee, told The Globe and Mail she became worried for her son when his girlfriend called her around 5 a.m. that day to ask if she had heard from him. Ms. Nasee, who lives in God’s Lake Narrows First Nation about 550 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, spent the morning calling hospitals and jails looking for her son until she heard on the news that a 22-year-old had been shot and killed by Winnipeg police.

God’s Lake Narrows band councillors visited her not long afterward to confirm Mr. Andrews had been killed. She said her family has been kept in the dark by police and IIU investigators ever since. She found out from the funeral director her son was shot three times.

Jason Collins. HANDOUT

“We miss him so much. Wishing every day that I can hear his voice. It hurts so much,” said Ms. Nasee, who is now caring for her 13-month-old grandson Nicholas. She says she hasn’t been able to grieve yet, distraught with trying to figure out how to move forward without her son and without answers.

The 16-year-old friend who Mr. Andrews was with the day he died paid a visit to the family when they were Winnipeg, said Mr. Andrews’s grandmother Benita Wood.

“He said [Mr. Andrews] never had a weapon, that’s what he told us. He said Stewart was a good guy, he didn’t deserve to die like this. He said the cops shouldn’t have even shot him,” Ms. Wood said.

William Hudson says his family is planning a vigil this weekend at the intersection where his daughter Eishia was killed. Since her death in April, Mr. Hudson has organized rallies in Winnipeg to bring awareness to the justice he wants to see for his daughter and and “all the other lives.”

“What happened here in Winnipeg should be not only news in Winnipeg, it should be all around Canada, even around the world. This is a problem that we have with Indigenous people and it’s not being noticed enough,” Mr. Hudson said, adding he misses the fun he used to have with his daughter, like embarrassing her in front of friends.

The IIU has investigated at least 24 officer-involved shootings in Manitoba since 2015, according to information on its website. Eighteen of those investigations have involved the Winnipeg Police Service and the deaths of 10 individuals, all of them males between the ages of 22 and 44 except for Ms. Hudson. At least eight of the 10 shooting deaths have been individuals who are Indigenous or from other racialized groups.

In 2017, an IIU investigation into the 2015 shooting death of a 39-year old father of two girls by a Thompson, Man., RCMP constable resulted in a recommendation of charges against the officer. The officer was acquitted of manslaughter and criminal negligence causing death, but was sentenced to probation for criminal negligence causing bodily harm.

Manitoba’s director of the Chief Medical Examiner’s Officer, Mark O’Rourke, said inquests into the three April deaths will presumably be called, but only after the IIU completes its investigations, which he expects will be sometime next year. Most provinces in Canada, including Manitoba, are supposed to call an inquest when a person dies in custody or from use of force by a peace officer.

Stewart Andrews. HANDOUT

In 2016, Manitoba Justice Anne Krahn presided over a medical examiner’s inquest into the death of Craig McDougall, a 26-year-old First Nations man who was shot and killed by Winnipeg police on the front lawn of the home he shared with his dad, sister and nephew in the summer of 2008.

Corey Shefman represented the McDougall family at the inquest, where the judge also examined if systemic racism played a role in Mr. McDougall’s death. Specifically, Justice Krahn heard evidence of differential treatment of police witnesses and family witnesses by officers and investigators following the shooting of Mr. McDougall, including how his father, Brian McDougall, and uncle John were handcuffed and forced onto the ground next to where Craig McDougall lay dying.

“It is about the way the Canadian state treats Indigenous people and Indigenous bodies and the lack of care and we see this in the justice system,” Mr. Shefman told The Globe, pointing to the eight years it took to hold the inquest and the “criminal” treatment of innocent witnesses such as Brian McDougall.

In her report, Justice Krahn said she found no evidence of systemic racism or discrimination but some of her 16 recommendations included implicit-bias training and Aboriginal awareness programs for officers and protecting witness rights during police investigations.

The treatment of Indigenous people by city police has been scrutinized before. The 1991 Aboriginal Justice Inquiry report, co-commissioned by Senator Murray Sinclair, who was Manitoba’s only Indigenous judge at the time, looked at the relationship between Indigenous people and the province’s justice system, following the 1988 shooting death of John Joseph (J.J.) Harper by Winnipeg police and the 1971 beating death of Helen Betty Osborne in The Pas by a group of white men. Some of the 296 recommendations from the inquiry focused on the need for civilian oversight for police, particularly when it comes to misconduct and serious incidents, and employment and recruitment strategies to increase Indigenous representation in police organizations.

It took the Taman Inquiry report in 2008 – which examined police misconduct in the 2005 death of Crystal Taman, a 40-year-old mother killed by an off-duty Winnipeg police officer who was drinking and driving – and several years more before changes were made to the province‘s Police Services Act, which now includes the oversight body of the IIU.

The province began a review of the act last year, which is near completion, said Glen Cassie, a public affairs specialist for the province. The final report, which was originally expected at the end of March, will provide a gap analysis in all areas of the province’s policing, including governance, oversight and service delivery, the spokesperson said.

This article was first published in The Globe and Mail on August 29, 2020.

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Why are Indigenous people in Canada so much more likely to be shot and killed by police?

Chantel Moore’s mother Martha Martin, centre, participates in a healing walk from the Madawaska Malaseet reserve to Edmundston’s town square honour Moore in Edmundston, N.B. on Saturday June 13, 2020. (THE CANADIAN PRESS / Stephen MacGillivray)

An Indigenous person in Canada is more than 10 times more likely to have been shot and killed by a police officer in Canada since 2017 than a white person in Canada.

A CTV News analysis reveals that of the 66 people shot and killed by police in that time frame for whom race or heritage could be identified, 25 were Indigenous.

That’s nearly 40 per cent of the total. Adjusted for population based on 2016 census data, it means 1.5 out of every 100,000 Indigenous Canadians have been shot and killed by police since 2017, versus 0.13 out of every 100,000 white Canadians.

“It’s totally alarming,” Assembly of First Nations National Chief Perry Bellegarde told CTVNews.ca via telephone from Ottawa on June 17.

“This is not acceptable, it’s not right in 2020, but the trends are there.”

The disparity doesn’t stop there. Citing Statistics Canada data and various academic studies, a 2019 report from the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA) found several other ways in which the Canadian justice system disproportionately targets Indigenous Canadians, including:

  • Indigenous Canadians are 11 times more likely than non-Indigenous Canadians to be accused of homicide
  • Indigenous Canadians are 56 per cent more likely to be victims of crime than other Canadians
  • In 2016, Indigenous Canadians represented 25 per cent of the national male prison population and 35 per cent of the national female prison population

“Why is it that we’re 4.5 per cent of the population in Canada as First Nations people, but yet the jails are full of our people?” Bellegarde said.

Those who study the intersection of Indigenous Canadians and Canadian-style policing say the answer to that question cannot be found in what happens as cases make their way through the criminal justice system. Nor can it be found in what happens after police arrive at the scene of an incident, or in what happens as officers are dispatched.

The issues that lead to Indigenous Canadians facing overrepresentation in the Canadian justice system have roots that stretch years, decades, even generations into the past, experts say – and will never be addressed if attention isn’t paid to injustices in other parts of the system.

“The conversation needs to be about systemic racism, and the continued colonial constructs that set up too many of these highly dangerous encounters,” Norm Taylor, an executive adviser who has worked with police leaders and provincial governments on issues related to community safety, told CTVNews.ca via telephone from Oshawa, Ont. on June 17.

A SYSTEMIC PROBLEM

Taylor was one of the 11 experts on policing in Indigenous communities who put together the CCA report, which found that the current Indigenous overrepresentations in the justice system are directly linked to historical mistreatment of Indigenous peoples.

They’re also tied to the worse outcomes faced by Indigenous Canadians when it comes to poverty, mental health, addictions and other socioeconomic factors that are considered risk factors for negative encounters with the justice system.

“If you look at your sample, in the vast majority of those cases, you’re going to find … they’re people with a host of risk factors operating, and the system has failed them,” Taylor said.

“In many instances, the subject will hold similar contempt for the health-care system, child welfare, schools and any other elements of the state-run human services, because the system has not served them well. It has not served their families well.”

The CCA report also concluded that moving away from these approaches and improving Indigenous health and well-being can best be achieved by adapting policing approaches to meet the needs of Indigenous communities, focusing on relationships and building trust rather than law enforcement.

Many of these themes are echoed in the recommendations in the 2019 report from the inquiry examining the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, which are aimed at adding new mechanisms to ensure policing agencies meet the needs of the communities they serve.

These ideas may sound prescient now, as calls to defund the police gather steam across North America, but they’re hardly new. Academics and Indigenous leaders have been touting them for decades, and many police leaders have more recently followed suit.

“Officers are doing the job that is asked, and often they’re doing it under difficult and high-risk circumstances,” Taylor said.

“One of the questions we have to be asking is ‘Is it the job they should be doing? Are they adequately prepared to deal with all the intercultural mistrust? Do they even have the skills to provide a trauma-informed perspective?'”

‘KEEP PUSHING’

Advice along these lines – which Taylor describes as “more about public health than … about policing” can be found in report after report after report presented to governments going back to the last century. While some parts of the country have slowly been moving in this direction, Bellegarde said the continued deaths of Indigenous Canadians at the hands of police are proof that much more needs to be done.

“The complacency of governments for lack of implementation of these reports and the recommendations therein is killing our people,” he said.

Specific starting points for action could include making policing an essential service on reserves, guaranteeing stable funding levels for community leaders to rely on, Bellegarde said, as well as creating civilian police oversight bodies for communities that use the RCMP, increased screening for racial biases during the recruitment process, adding more Indigenous representation in positions of authorities and potentially redirecting some police funding to dedicated mental health response teams.

Although pushing for these changes has long been an exercise in frustration, Bellegarde said he is hopeful that the current wave of protests for justice reform will bear fruit.

“We have to take advantage of the groundswell of support. We have to keep pushing harder,” he said.

By Ryan Flanagan, CTVNews.ca, published Friday, June 19, 2020

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Senate suspends Lynn Beyak over refusal to remove racist letters about Indigenous people from website

A picture of Senator Lynn Beyak accompanies other Senators’ official portraits on a display outside the Senate on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Sept. 21, 2017.

The Senate voted Thursday to suspend Senator Lynn Beyak from the Red Chamber over her refusal to remove racist letters about Indigenous people from her website.

Senators voted on division – meaning, without unanimous consent – to adopt the recommendations of a Senate ethics committee report calling for Ms. Beyak to be suspended without pay for the remainder of the current parliamentary session. Ms. Beyak has rebuffed repeated demands to remove five letters posted to her Senate website that have been widely described as racist toward Indigenous people.

The ethics committee report, released last month, also recommended that Ms. Beyak apologize to the Senate and attend − at her own expense − “educational programs related to racism toward Indigenous peoples in Canada.” In the case that Ms. Beyak refuses to remove the letters, the committee called on the Senate administration to do so.

The vote came after Ms. Beyak asked her fellow senators to reject the ethics committee’s recommendations, calling the penalties “totalitarian.” She stood by the letters, saying her website has become a “positive public forum” since posting them.

Ms. Beyak said the Senate should only scrutinize the speech of a senator if it’s “contrary to law,” warning that the decision to suspend her could set a risky precedent for others.

“If the Senate does not respect this legal bright line, then every activist senator will become fair game for political opponents, including interactions in the office, in the home, in the bedroom and at church.”

Carolyn Bennett, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, said the Senate did the “right thing” by suspending Ms. Beyak and committing to take the letters down.

“It is truly sad that Senator Beyak still does not understand the gravity of her actions nor her role as a parliamentarian to lead by example. It’s not about political correctness − this is about racism that hurts people,” Ms. Bennett said in a statement Thursday.

The ethics committee’s recommendations came after a year-long probe by Senate Ethics Officer Pierre Legault, which found that Ms. Beyak breached two sections of the conflict-of-interest code by posting the letters on her website. The report said the letters imply that Indigenous people are lazy, opportunistic, inept, incompetent and greedy individuals who milk the government.

“Posting racist letters is incompatible with upholding the highest standards of dignity inherent in the position of senator. Senators are expected to protect Canada’s values and to represent the underrepresented, not to publish material on their Senate websites that denigrate them,” read the report.

Ms. Beyak posted the letters to her website to demonstrate that she had support for a speech about residential schools that she gave to the Red Chamber in March of 2017. In that speech, she said residential schools did “some good” for Indigenous children. However, many suffered widespread physical and sexual abuse and thousands died from disease and malnutrition.

Ms. Beyak was appointed to the Senate by then-prime minister Stephen Harper in 2013. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer kicked her out of the Tory caucus in January, 2018 after she refused to remove the letters from her website.

The Globe and Mail 

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In Saskatchewan, Indigenous people are worried that a new trespassing plan may stoke racial tensions

Debbie Baptiste, mother of Colten Boushie, holds a photo of her son during a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on February 14, 2018.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

  • The Saskatchewan throne speech last month included a reference to changing trespassing laws to ‘better address the appropriate balance between the rights of rural landowners and members of the public’

A Saskatchewan grandmother who was confronted by a farmer with a gun says changing trespassing laws probably won’t stop crime but could increase racial tension.

Angela Bishop, a Metis lawyer, was driving on a rural road in Alberta in September with her two grandchildren who are visibly Indigenous. They were looking for a place to get out, stretch and go for a short walk during a long drive to Edmonton.

She noticed a vehicle driving up behind her, so she stopped.

A man got out and started to yell at her to get off his road, she said, despite her attempts to explain why she was there. She said she spotted a gun inside his vehicle.

Terrified for her grandchildren, Bishop said she tried to drive away — but the man pursued her.

She eventually pulled over, called law enforcement and requested a police escort. Officers told her that, in fact, it was a public road and she could be there.

As a rural land owner in Saskatchewan, Bishop said she can sympathize with frustration about property crime, but a life is more important.

“My concern would be that they believe they are legally entitled to take the law into their own hands,” she said from Quintana Roo state in Mexico.

The Saskatchewan throne speech last month included a reference to changing trespassing laws to “better address the appropriate balance between the rights of rural landowners and members of the public.”

The government said in an emailed statement that Justice Minister Don Morgan is prepared to meet with Indigenous people to discuss their concerns.

The province has already sought public input on whether access to rural property should require prior permission from a landowner, regardless of the activity, and if not doing so should be illegal.

A lawyer representing the family of Colten Boushie, an Indigenous man fatally shot by farmer Gerald Stanley in August 2016, said she is worried the Saskatchewan Party government is engaged in political posturing which could stoke racial fear.

A Saskatchewan farmer was acquitted in the fatal shooting of a 22-year old Indigenous man. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Liam Richards

“Indigenous people aren’t feeling safe that the authorities or the police are going to protect them or that they are not going to be shot at,” Eleanore Sunchild said from Battleford, Sask.

“It seems like there’s more of an approval to take vigilante justice in your hands, and if you are an Indigenous victim, nothing is going to happen to the non-native that shot you.”

Stanley was acquitted of second-degree murder after testifying that his gun went off accidentally. He said he was trying to scare away young people he thought were stealing from him. The Crown decided not to appeal.

Sunchild said the throne speech sends the message that the farmer was right to shoot the Indigenous man and that trespassing fears are justified.

Sunchild wonders what advice she would give her own children if they have car trouble or need help on a rural road.

“Do I tell them to go ask a farmer? I don’t think so.”

Heather Bear, vice-chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, said the Boushie trial and provincial response have many Indigenous people feeling afraid.

The Canadian Press

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