Quote:
Originally Posted by zhan lin
I partially agree. It's not about skills, though. It's about willingness to step up out of the comfy state of mind that you are an "untouchable" agent of Law, put your stuff together and start preventing the crime. What I am trying to say be closer to the grassroots and share the life of your community and act not only by the orders from above. I used to deal with cops being a security person, although many of them were very friendly, but it felt that they were acting as part of the closed clan per se and not as representatives of common people. In my mind it's the crux of the matter. The rest is applicable.
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That's part of the nature of policing in North America. They are trained that the criminals are their adversaries, and then trained that entire segments of the population are potential criminals as opposed to people.
One thing that I do see clearly, is that those who have fond memories of the police (almost always white people, but not every time; older native people have shared a couple positive stories too) knew police not as a law enforcement detached from their neighbourhood, but as residents of their neighbourhood and people they would see in and out of uniform and both of them would get to know each other as people.
Today, in my city at least and likely also Winnipeg, the police live in new suburbs or rural white areas, where they have few native friends, so their only native friends are among the dozen or so native police officers on the force which they might rarely work with. Their job involves them going into the city, having confrontation after confrontation with, usually, native people, and then going home. Native people have the inverse: they're living in neighbourhoods that are largely poor and native, and police to them are a group of white uniformed men who arrive in a car, scream at them, sometimes arrest them, and then leave.
It's no wonder there's a breakdown of trust. Both sides are seeing the other as adversaries more than humans. This on top of the fact that we're already asking the police to take on far, far more than they were originally intended to do. I don't think many officers went into policing as a career thinking "I'm going to be an amateur psychologist/marriage counsellor/healthcare practitioner 90% of the time!" but here we are. I know that quite a few cops have actually quit the force here, and a few have also been fired or demoted for their behaviour.
Thunder Bay's police chief has admitted the same thing as yours: there are racists in the force, there is structural racism in policing, but we're working to change that. It takes time to change this. But the commitment at the top is there, and that's an important step to take. Kind of ironically, she's the police officer I've met and talked to the most. (Her predecessors were practically invisible.)
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