Police attitudes toward Indigenous people in northwestern Ontario have received heightened scrutiny in recent months
. A pair of official reports have recently identified a culture of broken trust and systemic racism in the police force and civilian police board of Thunder Bay, 270 kilometres southeast of Sioux Lookout. In December, Ontario’s Independent Police Review Director Gerry McNeilly found that investigations into the deaths of nine Indigenous people in Thunder Bay were hindered by “racist attitudes” on the force.
“It’s very hard to watch a person from your group and your community being treated like that,” said Sylvia Davis, a teacher at Pelican Falls First Nations High School in Sioux Lookout, and a member of the nearby Lac Seul First Nation. “You wonder, ‘Why does this happen? Does this person view this child as a human?’ ”OPP spokesman Mike Golding said the force is assessing the officer’s behaviour in the case to determine whether a professional-standards investigation is warranted.
“The video is a snapshot – it doesn’t show the lead-in to the incident,” he said. “I’m saddened for a young girl that she’s so intoxicated that she’s in a public place putting herself and perhaps others in danger.”“Often you’ll see people in an intoxicated state in Sioux Lookout who look pretty rough from the get-go. So I’m cautious about making any statements about this case,” he said. “I think we should let experts in arrest procedure comment on those procedures.
“It’s the police that are put at the forefront of that and then what do they do?” he said. “There is no detox. So they take them to the detachment.”
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