Report on troubled Thunder Bay police board brings hope but also doubt amid warning change will take time
CBC
Community leaders and stakeholders in Thunder Bay, Ont., say they are watching carefully for the police service's next steps in the wake of a major report tabled to the police oversight board Thursday night.
The report, written by a nine-member expert panel over a year, calls for urgent and transformative action, saying "status quo and quick fixes are no longer tenable." It built upon hundreds of recommendations previously issued to the Thunder Bay Police Service (TBPS) and the Thunder Bay Police Services Board (TBPSB), with their implementation being "uneven" at best.
"This report shows how this service's leadership continues to refuse to accept responsibility for its failures and shows no signs of changing," Deputy Grand Chief Anna Betty Achneepineskum of Nishnawbe Aski Nation said in a news release.
Achneepineskum has previously called for the TBPS to lose its powers to investigate major criminal cases in the city and for the service to be disbanded.
"The path forward for real change must begin with remorse and acceptance of responsibility. It is essential that TBPS senior management and the board recognize the expert panel's warning that they can no longer continue with the status quo," Achneepineskum said.
WATCH | CBC's Logan Turner speaks to Alok Mukherjee, chair of the police board's expert panel:
The 200-page report — which the expert panel calls a "roadmap to real change" — included 10 action items, such as the development of a regional policing model, adding a new deputy chief position to oversee Indigenous relations, and improving labour relations and outstanding human rights complaints.
It also calls on the Ontario and federal governments to come to the table and provide resources to improve the quality of policing and community well-being in Thunder Bay.
"Inadequate investigations, mishandling of cases, and failure to address urgent issues are not a result of being underfunded; they are a failure of leadership," Achneepineskum said.
"Without leadership accepting responsibility, it is impossible to expect that serious issues such as systemic racism can even begin to be addressed."
The independent expert panel was created in March 2022 amidst reports of low officer morale, human rights violations, and investigations into criminal misconduct by officers and leaders in the force.
Shortly after the panel was formed, a leaked confidential report detailed serious deficiencies in sudden death investigations of Indigenous people in Thunder Bay and called for the reinvestigation of 14 cases, including some as recent as 2019.
While the report emphasizes long-overdue changes are needed, members of the police board and its governance committee are already warning that could take time.
"People in the community need to understand the balance between actually achieving real things and believing that we can achieve everything immediately," Malcolm Mercer, the board administrator, said in an interview with CBC News after the report was filed Thursday.
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