The latest RCMP shooting of a young Inuk in Nunavut has left a community stunned, while renewing calls for greater police accountability and demands for Inuit involvement in investigations of serious police incidents.
“The community is quiet and silent at this point,” Cathy Towtongie, a longtime Rankin Inlet politician and an elderly Inuk woman, told The Star in the wake of the incident that began not far from her home.
“Just shocked and scared. We are stunned by the loss of a life, a young person whose future was bright. “
Over the weekend, RCMP in Rankin Inlet, on the west shore of Hudson Bay, responded to a “riot of intoxicated men,” an RCMP news release said Sunday.
A man “obtained a rifle” and fired at the police officers, according to the statement. The man then took a truck at gunpoint and drove to the outskirts of the city where it was contained, the RCMP said.
“The Manitoba RCMP Emergency Response Team was deployed to assist and was involved in a shooting with the man,” the statement said. “A 22-year-old man was later pronounced dead.”
Towtongie says the man’s family is well known and respected in Rankin Inlet, a community of nearly 3,000 people about 500 miles north of Churchill, Man.
The veteran politician has been one of many members of the Legislature who called for increased police oversight in recent years.
Currently, when a serious incident involving RCMP occurs in Nunavut, the Ottawa or Calgary police are usually called in to investigate.
But outside law enforcement agencies investigating the conduct of local law enforcement have not been best practice in other parts of Canada for decades.
Instead, civilian-led investigations are the norm in most Canadian jurisdictions. Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, for example, opened in 1990.
A Star 2018 investigation showed that police-related deaths in the territory were nine times higher than in Ontario.
And an investigation by CBC North last year said the rate is 14 times higher than it was in 2010.
The Inuit have been calling for a review of the RCMP’s approach to the territory for years.
Last year, Towtongie and other MLAs passed a bill that gives the government the option of hiring a civilian agency to investigate serious police incidents.
That bill allows the inclusion of local Inuit elders and knowledge holders in investigations, but does not make it mandatory.
When asked in a Star press request why that option was not exercised in this case, the Nunavut Justice Department said that it is “currently working on the necessary regulations for sections of the Police Act to come into effect. .
“In anticipation of its entry into force, the department is currently in discussions with various civilian oversight bodies to provide these important oversight services for Nunavut,” the department added.
“While capacity has been a concern for some civil oversight organizations, our discussions are ongoing and have been positive. These discussions remain a priority for the Department. “
Towtongie said the bill does not go far enough because local Inuit knowledge holders must be involved in such investigations.
“We want holders of specific traditional knowledge to participate in an independent review committee,” he said.
“They are the ones in our community, when families are in trouble, who they turn to for advice, guidance and prayer.”
Institutional investigations are technical and “there is no curative touch,” he said. Even the city’s mental health workers are from the south, “strangers in our community,” he added.
Adam Arreak Lightstone is an MLA in Iqaluit who has also lobbied for more police oversight.
“I am disappointed that the government continues to use the Ottawa police to carry out this investigation even though we passed that legislation,” he told the Star from his office in the Legislative Assembly in Iqaluit.
“I look forward to the day when Nunavut can have its own civilian-led oversight body,” he added.
Stephanie Boydell, Acting Executive Director of the Nunavut Legal Aid Agency, agreed that an oversight body created by Nunavut would be crucial in restoring confidence in law enforcement services in the territory.
“One concern even with these southern civilian oversight bodies is that many of the members and investigators are former police officers and are not ethnically diverse,” Boydell told the Star.
“We have a lot of white men as representatives.”
Boydell said such agencies would not understand the cultural and historical context between the Inuit and the RCMP, which includes the RCMP’s assistance in forced relocations and other colonial efforts.
“Transparency and the appearance of bias is important and a big problem here, especially given the damaged and strained relationship between the RCMP and some communities,” he said.
Boydell said the family of a young Inuk who was shot by police was represented by a legal aid attorney in a forensic investigation conducted in Gjoa Haven last month, about 400 miles north of Rankin Inlet.
It was the last case in which police shot an emotionally fragile and vulnerable young man with a firearm, Boydell said.
“Within minutes of the arrival of the police, the young man was shot,” he said.
The jury considered that death a homicide. The officer who shot the man faces one charge of battery for an incident in another community in Nunavut.
Recommendations from that research, as well as other research, include more cultural training for the police and the use of respected members of the local Inuit community.
“Over and over again we are seeing these recommendations come to light and nothing really happens,” Boydell said.
In another investigation in 2014, a distraught Inuk youth was found hanging by his belt in police cells, despite the protocol to remove the belts from prisoners. A Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, who was on relief in the Igloolik community in North Baffin from Toronto, testified that the only training he received in advance was a warning that “residents (of Nunavut ), when intoxicated, they become hostile and combative, without provocation. “
Another investigation in 2017 heard that officers assumed an Inuk man suffering from a stroke was drunk. He later died in cells, without treatment.
The coroner’s investigation into the recent Rankin Inlet shooting death has yet to be scheduled.
Reference-www.thestar.com