(CBC News) – The Wagmatcook band council in Cape Breton is not renewing its policing contract with the RCMP after a resident was shot by a Mountie last year.
A one-year contract, beginning April 1, has been awarded to the Cape Breton Regional Police.
Brian Arbuthnot, Wagmatcook’s director of operations, said Tuesday that the shooting death of John Andrew Simon just over one year ago damaged the community’s trust in the Mounties. The RCMP’s contract expires at the end of March.
Simon, 44, died Dec. 2, 2008.
The RCMP said officers responded to a report of a domestic dispute at his house after a neighbour called 911. After negotiating for 90 minutes, an officer shot Simon.
An investigation into the shooting by Halifax Regional Police and the RCMP found that the officer acted appropriately.
Arbuthnot said that the band had hoped the investigation would result in charges against the officer who shot Simon.
“In fact, the opposite happened. The message was delivered rather coldly and there was no information given and it was a rather difficult time,” he said Tuesday.
“I think that over Christmas-time, those things were reviewed again around the whole idea of trust. Can we trust this police service? The council made the decision today, it was the first agenda item and that was what they decided.”
Arbuthnot said that one sergeant and four officers with the Cape Breton Regional Police force will be dedicated to policing Wagmatcook.
The band will meet with the regional police and representatives from the Nova Scotia Justice Department on Wednesday to finalize the details of the contract.
I am a 7th Generation Black Canadian with 36 years of policing experience. I have also been involved in Police/Relations since 1970.
There are nine major areas of people activity that we work in on a daily basis. Economics, Education, Entertainment, Labour, law, politics, religion, sex, and war. They are connected like a pizza.
This discussion is about law. Law enforcement to be specific. There seems to be a false assumption that white police officers cannot police non-white communities successfully.
This assumption is false.
There are two statements that apply to this discussion:
1. Whenever we generalize we lose accuracy. If someone complains about a group;
(E.G. Women, Non-white people, or white people) the person making the complaint is not accurate in their statement. The correct process is to name the person, describe the incident that the complaint concerns, and give your name. The race or gender is not important. The behaviour should be the focus.
2. Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being tripped over. People are very aware. They know when they are being deliberately abused or someone has made a mistake involving their language, culture,gender, or race.
Noting the above, white police officers are just as capable of policing non-white communities as non white police officers from that community. There is usually better results if the police officer knows the language and culture of the community that they police but it is not required.
Having a mind set that sends black police officers to the black community; First nation police officers to the first nation community; East Indian Police officers to the East Indian Community and Chinese police officers to the Chinese Community is a very narrow minded view.
That approach condemns white police officers and assumes that non-white police officers will treat the community with respect and dignity. That is not always the case.
The negative approach is to send the non-white police officers into their own community and they can deal with the problem. The naive approach is to expect the non-white criminals to confess to their criminal acts once they see a police officer that looks like them. The mistaken belief is that a person who is black for example is tuned into all other black people. That would be equivalent to saying that a white police officer from Moscow can police white people from Vancouver because they are both white.
The majority and ruling people in the RCMP are white males. Because of this fact when a white police officer messes up that police officer is judged as an individual. When a female,or visible minority police officer messes up the whole group is judges.
JohnnyG does this on a regular basis in his comments. This is not an accurate or credible approach.
Police officers have power and a uniform. This does not atomically give them respect. Respect has to be earned. The policing of reserves can be done. Respect can be earned. There is a great deal of historic and present conflict in the nine major areas of people activity involving first nations people that makes policing difficult but not impossible.
Police officers can only officially control the activity of law.
Calvin Lawrence
CGL Consulting
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It will be interesting to see if the Cape Breton police will be pressured to provide natives for the band. Correct me if I am wrong, but this is probably their first band contract. I wouldn’t imagine they have too many natives on the force.
I wonder if the band is OK with whites policing them? I wonder if they considered this….?
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The native hiring program driven by the Federal government has been a failure. In the infancy of the program, some native hires were in Depot for 2 years because they could not pass, and the Federal government through its whipping boy the Commissioner insisted failure was not an option. Therefore you had the radical change of being “hired” as a cadet rather than a regular member. This enabled them to get rid of people to a greater degree.
When the Natives were promised that the RCMP would recruit, train, and have Natives policing Natives who could be sensitive to cultural issues, they failed to advise them that it could be a Mic Mac onto a Blood reserve in Alberta. Whoops, just another “outsider” to them. More political pandering without studying the underlying problem and forming a concrete solution path.
I remain unconvinced that the local, self generated native “peacekeepers” that some BC/Alberta reserves employ are a solution either.
One of the reasons that RCMP recruits were seldom within a Province of their childhood homes was to remove the possibility of corruption or favoritism with friends or associates. Regular transfers were also supportive of the concept of independent policing and becoming too cozy with the local population. With the Community Policing bandwagon being the preeminent solution with almost everyone, something has to fall from the table.
There is support for the concept of specialized training for officers working in areas with high concentrations of Natives or other ethnic enclaves. Having poor native recruits or local “party” associates policing your reserves are certainly not the panacea everyone is looking for. It seems that the general attitude is that law enforcement is most desirable, except when applied to “me” or “my group”.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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I agree with your parting observation, NFAR. Apparently the Wagmatcook band council agrees with you too since they pulled the plug. And that’s the beauty of living in a democracy where citizens and their elected representatives get to make choices. Sure, it has lots of faults as Winston Churchill observed, but it’s still a way ahead of the alternatives. Do we always choose wisely when we cast a ballot? Probably not, but the choices are ours rather than someone else’s. And if we (or the Wagmatcook band council) gets it wrong we can and will revisit any number of given issues whenever the future requires it. Hopefully we eventually get it right. KBO.
So I wish the band council success in making new policing arrangements. And I won’t be losing any sleep tonight over the change. Nor I suspect will the RCMP detachment in question. KBO.
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If the Cape Breton police don’t work out, the obvious solution is to hire their own “in house” department. It would definitely cost more, and be more burdensome. For anyone who dosen’t know the bands are much smaller in Atlantic Canada than out west, and aren’t the size of Dakota Ojibway or Slave Lake ect.
The irony here is that quite often the native cadets the tribal forces send to Depot make better cops than the ones the force seems to hire. I know of one instance where a Tribal female flunked her mid-term exam twice and got sent home. She returned to visit troopmates and she said the force was going to consider returning her wearing an RCMP uniform. The thing is, had this been a caucasian they would never be allowed to ever return to Depot. There is getting kicked out of Depot and being able to return and then there is really getting kicked out. But, because this girl was “tribal” it didn’t count and being a failure wasn’t an issue…
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Meh, The officer made a stupid mistake by going into the residence when he saw SIMON without the gun. Brave but stupid. Either way once confronted by a weapon pointed at him, there really wasn’t much choice. Shoot or be shot. At least that’s what was thought.
If they don’t want the RCMP then so be it. A police force can’t operate under the expectations of every outcome working out. With high risk situations things will go wrong. That is a given.
They’ve made it clear that the community wanted revenge, not justice. The family even continually claimed not to know things that were already told to them. There’s no honesty there. This is based on an emotional response. I think the RCMP are better off not policing this community.
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Do they have another option when they have an issue with the Cape Breton Regional Police and terminate their contract?
Hot debate. What do you think?
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