'Can't do one-size-fits-all': Indigenous Policing Summit highlights need for community input

Indigenous policing leaders are calling for changes to the way policing is delivered in Indigenous communities, but say community members cannot be left out of deciding what change looks like.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Indigenous Policing Summit brought police leaders, Indigenous policing and justice partners, government officials and others together near Calgary on Monday and Tuesday to discuss how recommendations and lessons from the past can be turned into action.

For Insp. Dawn Blake, in charge of operations with the Tsuut’ina Nation Police Service, this starts with recognizing every community has different needs.

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“From a cultural perspective, because it’s so diverse across Canada, your experts are your community members. They’ve been policing this community long before police officers came along,” Blake said. “The community knows exactly what their community needs, and that’s why you can’t do a one-size-fits-all.”

Blake said police services need to listen to communities instead of assuming the same approach will work everywhere, which she learned herself after joining the RCMP and working in a northern Indigenous community.

“When I got there, I thought if I just teach everything that I’ve learned from the RCMP and the rules, the laws and the processes, then that’s that and we’ll have a great relationship. I took no time to get to know what it was that that community needed,” Blake said. “I came with my ideas, my perceptions, my focus, and I made no friends, and I’ll tell you, that was probably my biggest learning lesson in policing.”

That approach has since influenced changes at Tsuut’ina, including cultural training for officers and a program that pairs new officers with elders who can help them understand the community, its language and culture.

Blake said funding is another barrier Indigenous police services face when trying to provide essential services and programming.

Indigenous police services are not recognized as an essential service and rely on government grants and contributions, which limits their ability to provide the same programs and services as larger police agencies.

Teddy Manywounds, co-chair of the Tsuut’ina Nation Police Service and chair of the First Nations Police Governance Council of Canada, said community involvement is also important because many people do not understand how the current policing system works.

“An elder so poignantly said to me, ‘If people don’t understand how something works, it’s not going to work,’ so if I was handed a hammer and I didn’t know what a hammer was for, it’s just an object,” Manywounds said.