Front Burner - What ‘defunding the police’ means for Indigenous people

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

Last Thursday, a 26-year-old Indigenous woman was killed by a New Brunswick police officer. Chantel Moore was shot five times during what was meant to be a wellness check. Her death is one of several recent incidents of police violence against Indigenous people in Canada. As the Black Lives Matter movement shines a light on police brutality and calls into question the power and even necessity of police services across the world, today we talk about what defunding the police means for Indigenous people. CBC’s Angela Sterritt reports from Vancouver.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Josh Bloch. She was a really loving, kind, and gentle person. And we really feel that that was not necessary, to shoot her five times. It's really hard to comprehend why he would do that.

Nora Martin, the great aunt of Chantal Moore, a 26-year-old Indigenous woman who was killed by a New Brunswick police officer last Thursday. She had just moved into a new place days ago, and a friend concerned about her safety called police asking them to check up on her. Moore's death is one of several recent incidents of police violence against indigenous people. A car door is not a proper police tactic. It's a disgraceful, dehumanizing, and violent act. The Black Lives Matter movement

has shone a massive light on police brutality and called into question the power and even necessity of police services across the world. Yeah, I just stood with a total of nine members of the Minneapolis City Council, and we committed to dismantling policing as we know it in the city of Minneapolis. Yesterday, we focused on what divesting from the police

really means when it comes to fighting anti-Black racism. And today, we're talking about what defunding the police would mean for Indigenous people. CBC reporter Angela Starrett joins me now from Vancouver. This is Frontburner. Hi, Angela. Welcome back. Hello. Thanks for having me. I want to start off with Chantelle Moore,

and it's been almost a week since she was killed by a police officer. But before we talk about her death, just tell me a little bit about Chantelle. How do her family and friends describe her? Yeah, so Chantelle Moore was 26 years old. She was a mother to a five-year-old daughter that she was just in the midst of reuniting with since she'd been taken care of by Chantel's mother. Her family calls Chantel kind and gentle. She was no threat to anybody. I've never known her to be aggressive or mean to anybody.

And she has a big family that loves her. Chantel, as we knew her, was a very beautiful young lady inside and out. Her sister, Melinda Martin, called her bubbly and a little joker. Hi, everybody. Chantel Moore posted this video two months ago. It's of her celebrating her 26th birthday. I'm going to read that later because I'm going to cry. She was born in New Brunswick but was raised in part on

Vancouver Island in her Toloquiet territory and she spent a lot of time with her grandmother in Port Alberni. Now according to one of her siblings she lived in Port Alberni for the past four years and been saving up to move back to New Brunswick to be closer to her daughter Gracie who'd been living with her mother. Melinda, Chantel's sister, said she was in good spirits. She was excited. The night before she died, she called her sister saying she was off to see her mom and daughter and was feeling proud. But around 1 a.m. that night, Moore's grandmother, Grace Frank, got a call saying her granddaughter had been shot dead. So there are reports that the officer was there by himself, shot five times. And yeah, a very tragic incident considering what she was going through, what she was preparing for in her life at that time.

And it seems like the officer says that they were called to do a wellness check and arrived at her apartment and then Chantel was shot five times. What do we actually know about what happened? So it is alleged that a man who was dating Chantel Moore had called police to ask police to check on her well-being as he feared someone was actually harassing her. There's talk about some sort of Facebook messages going back and forth. There will be an independent review of the shooting with the aid of the New Brunswick's investigative and forensic teams, according to the Edmonton's force.

This, though, of course, the knowledge or the understanding that there was a call made to look on Chantal, make sure that she was know, she was safe. It's something that the family, as well as the Indigenous Services Minister, feels shocked and sick about, you know, that she may have been calling the police to protect her. But she ended up, of course, dead. And the police say that she emerged from her apartment with a knife and attacked the police officer. from her apartment with a knife and attacked the police officer. And this is one of the things that Quebec's independent investigation office is going to be looking into to determine if that is in fact true.

That's right. That's right. We've heard that from police. We have not heard any other witness reports of that, but hopefully more about that will come out in that independent review. Moses Martin is Chantelle Moore's great-uncle. It's hard to understand how she's being described by police. I would think there could have been or should have been some de-escalation of, even if she had a knife, she's a tiny little lady and a trained police officer.

You know, it just doesn't make any sense. To me, it's a senseless killing. So Chantelle Moore's death isn't the only disturbing news involving Indigenous people and police recently. There was a video of an RCMP officer hitting an Inuk man with the door of a pickup truck during an arrest in Kinnigat, Nunavut. He begins to stumble through the slushy street and that's when an RCMP truck sweeps in from the right side of the video. The officer opens his door and he strikes the man with it, knocking him off his feet. That recently surfaced.

And then in a separate incident, Athabasca Chippewan Chief Alan Adam also came forward with an allegation of assault by Alberta RCMP. Chief Adam says his wife was forcibly arrested. He was next. It was just like a tight team match where one officer holds me by the arm and the other officer comes and just bridges me right across the side of the tree. And he released this photo from the day after the incident where his face is bloodied, his eye is almost swollen shut. And these incidents have been met by these really strong statements of concern from the prime minister. We have obviously all seen and been deeply alarmed by the pictures.

We need to do more. We need to take significant measures to move forward. From Indigenous Service Minister Mark Miller. I watched and discussed yesterday a number of these incidents. And from Public Safety Minister Bill Blair. Does the response from these politicians surprise you? I mean, part of me goes back to when I covered the Maxwell Johnson story, the grandfather and his granddaughter who were handcuffed and detained outside a BMO bank when it was suspected that they were engaging in fraud,

which was found to be false, so they were falsely arrested. Max says the situation was humiliating as dozens of people walked by and stared at them both while the officers questioned them separately. She was crying, she was scared. Not being able to talk to her was the hardest part, and the worst part was seeing her in cuffs and both of us not knowing what was going on. And a minister came out and said, this should never happen. So you do see this often when you hear of incidents that are without question,

have undercurrents of racism or discrimination or violence. You hear politicians coming out and giving very concerned and strong statements that this should not be going on in Canada. So I don't think this was any surprise. I think the Indigenous Services Minister coming out and the way that he said he was he was he used the word pissed very upset that this has happened i don't understand how someone dies during a wellness check when i first saw the report i thought it was some morbid joke i'm pissed i'm outraged but so so strong statements but i don't think this is uncommon from what we hear in politicians when we hear these very overt cases of systemic racism. And of course, part of this is happening in the context

of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has really sparked these conversations all over the world about what to do about police violence against Black people, against Indigenous people, and people of colour. And of course, there are people with multiple identities within there. Yesterday, we talked about what divesting or disbanding police means through the lens of anti-Black racism. And I wonder what that idea of defunding the police means to Indigenous communities. What are you hearing? Indigenous communities? What are you hearing? I mean, I'm definitely hearing from Indigenous community members,

especially those in the urban centres, saying, yes, defund the police. So, in other words, pull back some of their funding, put some of those resources in other places. Look at the way at, quote-unquote, abolishing the police in terms of not creating a society of anarchy, but ending policing as we know it um you know and so hearing a lot of uh the echoing of what black community members in canada have been saying about you know we need to put their resources in other places where they're so much more needed the police should not be taking care of social service calls the police should not be taking care of social service calls. The police should not be

taking care of mental health issues. You know, all these different conversations. In the Indigenous community, you know, for many years, I've been hearing about not even just to address, but to take concerns of Indigenous people that they've had with police seriously. There was a report that came out in 2013 by Human Rights Watch, and there's been many other reports of the same nature. It was called Those Who Take Us Away. And that is how the Carrier people in the Delkath language say police, those who take us away. Because the police, the RCMP, are the ones who took them away

from their family homes and brought them to residential school. Not only that, but if parents made a fuss and said, please do not remove my child and, you know, refuse to give them up, that parent would be arrested and taken to jail. The police have also played a part in the 60s scoop in modern-day foster care regimes. And the police have also, especially in places like North and Central BC, been accused of racial discrimination and violence. There's been multiple deaths of Indigenous men in the Central region of BC at the hands of police. And so what I've been hearing for years on social media and in person from advocates,

from Indigenous people, is that their calls to be heard that this is happening have fallen on deaf ears. People are saying, well, what did you do to deserve that? You know, we know that you have trauma and we know about the history and we know that, you know, you have drug and alcohol issues. I mean, these are the conversations that I've been hearing that are still alive in Canada today and so you know when you look at what happened to for example to Alan Adam and you have the police saying that this was justified you know the RCMP saying the incident was captured on an in-car video system. In a statement, Wood Buffalo RCMP said the members' actions were reasonable and that Adam had resisted arrest.

He has since been charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. And I don't feel that the conversation has been alive yet about ways to defund the police. It's been just trying to raise awareness and trying to bring attention to this situation that's pointing out to equality. Well, I saw that you actually posted on Twitter asking for people to, who support the idea, people within the Indigenous community who support the idea of specifically defunding the police to get in touch with you. What kind of response did you get to that tweet? I mean, I definitely had a number of Indigenous people write to me from all over Canada

who had said, you know, I want to talk to you about the police abusing me or causing me harm or racially discriminating against me, brutalizing me. I heard multiple accounts of that. One of the people in the back seat didn't have her seatbelt on, so she shuffled to put her seatbelt on and we pulled into the park rail parking lot. And by that time, there were at least four or five police cars surround us. It happened in the 90s, but the pain has stuck around. And the cop opened my door and pulled me out of the driver's seat by my hair, threw me on the ground with a gun in my face, asking what gang was I affiliated with. And the people who I think are on that thread, who are saying, yes, I believe in defunding the police, you know, are saying the same thing that

that I think sort of the discussions that we're hearing around Canada right now, that it's about putting the resource in other places, looking at how the police has responded to homeless people. So looking at housing, look at how the police have responded to the opioid crisis. So look at a safe drug supply. The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's Inquiry has said, look at Indigenous women who don't feel safe to call the police because they're not believed. You know, look at what happened for the Picton Farm. For years and years and years, women were not believed when they said there's a serial killer on the loose. So this has been brought up historically,

and I think today a misnomer I guess is that some members of the public are thinking you know this is about anarchy this is about taking away all the funding of police where I think the rhetoric is more about how can we pull back some of their funding and look at ways that we can protect the citizens in very different ways than we've traditionally seen with the police and the RCMP in Canada. Well, and a lot of people right now around the Black Lives Movement and around the calls for defunding are calling specifically to reinvest in, as you said, mental health services and social work, that this shouldn't be the work that police officers do. I'm curious to know, though, I wonder for Indigenous communities, whether that also

might have some complications to it, because of the history between Indigenous communities and mental health resources and social workers? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, when I started to see people saying, all this money needs to go to social workers, you know, it was sort of like, record scratch, like, wait, what? Because, you know, for Indigenous people, the social workers are the ones who work hand in hand. And they still do today with the police to remove children from their homes and place them in residential schools, in non-Indigenous homes or in foster homes. And so, you know, we heard from the National Inquiry that we need to have an end to birth alerts. A mother sobbing as police officers apprehend her newborn baby girl in hospital.

Apprehensions like this happen often following something called a birth alert. A notice placed on the mom's medical chart to protect babies considered at risk. So that goes back to the hospital, right? The hospital being a part of this system where Indigenous people aren't treated equally as the rest of Canada and are in fact having to face violence from many of these institutions. So I think for Indigenous people, this has always been a conversation about deconstructing colonization. How do we take a, you know, I'll put it in the words of the head of the National Enquiry, Marion Buller, who says a decolonizing approach aims to resist and undo the forces of colonialism and to reestablish Indigenous nationhood.

This colonialism, this discrimination and this genocide explains the high rates of violence against Indigenous women, girls, 2SLGBTQQIA people. An absolute paradigm shift is required to dismantle colonialism in Canadian society. Right? So unpack that and think about how that fits within the parameters of policing, right? It really is attached to every single institution in Canada. And when we're talking about defunding the police, we're talking, you know, normally about the police relationship to the mayor, to the city, to the province and to the federal government. When we're talking about Indigenous communities, we're talking about the RCMP, we're talking about the federal government.

So these are systems that have policed Indigenous people since the inception of colonization. And so this is all what Indigenous people are talking about. We need Indigenous rights. We need our Indigenous sovereignty recognized. And that comes down to their relationship with the land. can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

You brought up the national inquiry to missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and it so happened that the last week, the week that Chantal Moore was shot and killed, was the one year anniversary of the report issued by that inquiry. And they released 231 recommendations. And many of those recommendations are focused quite specifically on policing, on adequately funding indigenous policing and sort of rethinking what that would look like. Among them, a special investigative task force to rebuild trust between Canada's police services and Indigenous peoples. Is there a sense that these calls to

action have been taken seriously by the government? Well, the first answer that comes to my mind is no. You know, there's an action plan that was supposed to be put in place by the federal government. And I found it interesting before this interview right now, I had a look at some of the National Inquiry's recommendations as they relate to police. A lot of them do have to do with actually putting more funding into the police, but for a specific goal of Indigenous policing. So more Enoch police officers in Nunavut, having more capacity for investigative tools and techniques

to investigate sexualized violence, including sexual assault kits, for example, more trauma-informed questioning techniques. You have to remember, for Indigenous people, you know, this isn't just about police violence against them that they're talking about. This is also about them not being believed or them being ridiculed when they're talking about their family members going missing or being murdered. So in that report, you know, I saw calls for the police services to engage in education about the history of Indigenous people. We've heard from people who are talking about calls to defund the police that training isn't working. We've seen that they've had training and Indigenous people are echoing this. The vpd before what happened to

maxwell johnson already had a training the new recruits already have some form of training about the history of indigenous people and their oppression anti-bias and anti-racism training another thing that that they really pointed out was that civilian oversight bodies with jurisdiction to audit police services and to investigate claims of police conduct. And this is what people like Marion Buller of the National Enquiry have been calling for in their calls to action is we need to have a civilian oversight body that is actually independent from the police and actually has done some consultation with Indigenous people instead of a group of experts deciding what's best for them or what they want.

Based on the evidence that we heard, we believe in the importance of self-determination and Indigenous-led solutions and services. Earlier this year, the Correctional Investigator of Canada, Yvonne Zinger, called for urgent action to address the over-representation of Indigenous people in Canadian prisons and jails, which he said had reached historic heights. The stats show the proportion of Indigenous people in prison is now more than 30%. That's one in three inmates.

There's been a decline in the overall number of people in prisons since 2010, but Indigenous populations in prisons has increased by 43.4%. How do you see that failure fit into the issue of defunding the police and this broader discussion we're having about policing of Indigenous communities? When we're talking about over-incarceration, I mean, it depends when you're talking about federal or provincial, but it does get very complicated because it goes back to what people are talking about when it comes to this holistic view of all the institutions.

And when you're talking about the cycle of violence that comes from colonization. A lot of the inmates that I interviewed, indigenous inmates that I interviewed in prison had been, you know, brutally abused in residential school and grew up very poor. And it gets really, really easy when you see the numbers and you look and you untangle everything that this all does point to systemic racism in Canada, which stems from colonization. And it all sort of ties in hand in hand. It really struck me looking through the recommendations from the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, just laying out just how long this conversation has been going on between Indigenous communities and the Canadian government, that there's a very long story, obviously, preceding the moment that we're in. that there's a very long story, obviously, preceding the moment that we're in.

Do you see this moment kind of sparked by the murder of George Floyd? Do you see it as possibly changing what that conversation looks like? I do. I mean, part of me as a journalist wants to remain very skeptical and be like, oh, yeah, you know, another black person, another person of color, another indigenous person has had to die violently for people to sort of go, oh, this happens in Canada, you know, for people to sort of have this moment of wokeness. And so I'm seeing conversations that I honestly do feel very refreshing and I feel heard. As an Indigenous person, as an Indigenous reporter,

as someone who's pushed these stories for literally decades, refreshing, but also a little bit heartbreaking that it takes this for people of colour, Indigenous people, and Black people to be heard

when they're saying there's racism in Canada. Angela Starrett, thank you so much for speaking with me. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. That's all for now. Today I want to leave you with one of the tributes from the funeral of George Floyd at a Houston church on Tuesday. His death by police sparked Black Lives Matter protests all over the world. If we get to see tomorrow I hope it's worth all the pain This is Neo singing the Boyz II Men classic

It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday. To yesterday I'm Josh Bloch. Thank you for listening to FrontBurner. And I'll take with me the memories To be my sunshine after the rain It's so hard to say goodbye.