Aboriginal policing-Set up to fail?

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The new president of the First Nations Chiefs of Police Association says the government of Canada has intentionally set up First Nation police services for failure.

Wes Luloff, chief of the northern Ontario Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service, the largest First Nation police force in the country with 100 uniformed officers and 30 civilian employees, was elected president of the national association in May. He was speaking at a two-day conference on Aboriginal policing that was hosted by the southern Alberta Siksika Nation on July 30 and 31. Siksika is trying to regain its own police service after funding was pulled on April 1.

Luloff told the conference audience that the 10-year-old Aboriginal policing policy was "designed to fail" because it delivered "inadequate funding" to First Nation police departments.

"There's no support services for our officers," he added, "and that's where they're set up to fail."

First Nation police rely on outside police for detailed criminal investigations and most other police functions beyond simple peace-keeping and routine patrols. Most do not have a criminal investigation division or the personnel and facilities for any other advanced police work. Luloff said great technical advances have been made in investigative techniques, but no move has been made to allow First Nations forces to take advantage of those advances. He mentioned DNA testing and the use of a sex offender registry as examples of such new developments.

Other support services for the officer on the beat are also missing in most First Nations forces, he added.

"First Nation police officers probably have the hardest job to do in the policing profession," he said. "For example, we don't receive money for coach officers so there are no coach officers. Most of the coaching our officers receive is done by telephone. And many officers become disillusioned by this lack of training."

He noted that the RCMP is not beset by such funding woes.

"If the RCMP was in your community and had 10 officers to do the job, you'll take over with two officers," he said. "If you take over policing in an area that had four officers doing the job, you should gain four officers and that's not happening. The RCMP is growing. If we're taking over responsibility for policing from them then their numbers should be decreasing in size and that's not happening."

The best reason for having Aboriginal officers working on First Nations is that the officers will have a better understanding of the community and will be able to defuse situations that might explode without the right approach, he said.

"The RCMP and others have been around for 125 years and they still haven't got it right. If they'd got it right there wouldn't be First Nation police services starting up," he said, later adding, "In the last several years, our First Nations cops haven't shot anybody. People have been shot in our communities, but it was the OPP."

He sympathized with the Siksika community for its troubles with the federal government, saying the government shouldn't be so quick to criticize when problems arise as a result of under-funding.

"The Aboriginal Policing Directorate [the section of the federal attorney general ministry that oversees First Nation policing] is talking about a summit. They want to set these standards without first providing the foundation for it. I say 'Provide the foundation first, then look to quality control,'" he said. "They always talk about auditing us. We've got to audit them. Why haven't we audited them and said, 'You aren't fulfilling parts of the agreement.' We should start challenging them."

Liberal Senator Thelma Chalifoux, a Metis woman appointed to the Senate by Prime Minister Jean Chretien, attended the entire two days of the conference. She spoke on the first day.

Saying reserves were "concentration camps" in the recent past, she noted the concept of Aboriginal people policing their own communities was a lierating idea.

"When you ook at the reservation system at that time, our people were not allowed to leave without permission, they were not allowed to buy anything without permission, they were not allowed to have company without permission. What does that sound like?" She asked for ideas on how to break that old system.

"It's happened a little bit but our people have gotten so ingrained after generations of being within that system that it's very difficult to break out. Very difficult. This police commission and your police forces are really the beginning of the framework to break out of that old system. This is why this meeting is so important and this is why I thank the chief and Siksika councillors for bringing forward this meeting because now we have the beginning of the framework to break out of the system, the oppressive system that's happening."

She advised the assembled police officers and politicians on how they could take on the system and improve the quality of the service they provide.

"Since being in the Senate, I've found that really our MPs and our ministers don't have any power at all. They're there for two years or three years and as the system changes, so do they. But it's the bureaucrats that have the power and it's the bureaucrats we have to challenge. Why would they want to let their job go when some of them make over $200,000 a year? They say that Indian Affairs spends $6 billion a year on reserve. They're wrong. The majority of that money goes to the salaries of the bureaucrats in the department. In about 1972, we did a bit of a survey through Indian Affairs. We found out that five cents out of every dollar ends up on the reserve. That's all. It was done a few years ago but it hasn't changed a bit. And yet we are branded by the general population who are saying, 'My goodness, we're giving these people all this money and nothing is happening,'" she said. "Look at the police commission-$800,000 to run a whole police force on the resrve here. That's an absolute disrace to the Canadian government. They expect us to do the same work as other police forces that make twice as much money as you do. What, are we supposed to be volunteers again? Are we supposed to lay down and say 'Thank you, thank you?' I don't think so."

Chalifoux said the Siksika police should not have been shut down.

"In my opinion, the tripartite agreement that was made between the feds, province and Siksika Nation is an absolute disgrace. It was not honored. It was not even considered. The feds and the province met and totally left out the third partner. They didn't even know what was going on because they were not even consulted," she said.

Political action is the only way to reverse that decision and improve the government's commitment to First Nation policing, she said.

"What is the strategy that you must use to assert your independence? Number 1, in my opinion, you must get involved at the political level. If you're a government, if you want self-government, this is the time to really begin looking at negotiating government-to-government. Not bureaucrat-to-government, but government-to-government. Our chiefs should never meet with the bureaucrats. Our chiefs and our councillors are elected people. They should be meeting only with elected representatives. That's what governments do. Your bureaucrats should meet with their bureaucrats," the senator said.

Siksika council lawyer Will Willier told the conference that the Alberta government produced an inadequate report on First Nations policing in the province that was critical of First Nations police administration. That report was relied on in policy development and was a contributing factor in the demise of the Siksika service, he said.

The Cardinal Report, compiled by Native MLA Mike Cardinal, was released in June 1998. It appeared just months after the Alberta government was criticized during an inquiry into a tragedy on the Calgary area Tsuu T'ina First Ntion where a mother and her child-Ty and Conie Jacobs-were shot dead by an RCMP officer on the reserve.

"Stemming from the Jacobs inquiry, Mike Cardinal was commissioned to do this report. Now from there, it was a very specific report that the government was trying to cover their own backside, to put it plainly. It was never meant as an in-depth report," Willier said.

At the bottom of page one of the report is a cautionary note, saying the report was hastily prepared and not extensively researched. Willier seized on that admission by the report's author to discredit the report in its entirety.

"He's almost apologizing that he didn't have very much time or very much money to do this report," he said. "We have to take a step back from this report and this cautionary note and we have to look at Mike Cardinal himself. While he may be First Nations, I do not believe he has any kind of police training or any degree in criminology or administration of police services or anything that could possibly be relevant to policing in Alberta. As a result, you have someone who is untrained in police procedures, in police administration, conducting this review with not very much time or very much money and that formed the basis for the policy of the Alberta government's position on First Nations policing. That to me is wrong. It's not even a legal concept. It's a common sense concept. This is wrong. It was meant to cover their backsides after the Jacobs inquiry. What the Jacobs inquiry did point out was there was a lack of equipment, possibly a lack of training and there is a lack of money."

Willier said the Alberta program that provides training for Aboriginal police officers, PORT or Police Officer Recruit Training, lasts 16 weeks. The RCMP basic training is 24 weeks. Training in some municipal police departments is 28 weeks, he added.

Less training for Native cops fits a pattern, the lawyer argued. They also get considerably less funding to do the job.

"One of t