Joining the Circle: Identifying Key Ingredients for Effective Police Collaboration within Indigenous Communities

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key ingredients, techniques, challenges, and opportunities for police professionals to engage in effective collaboration within Indigenous communities. The consultations and data gathered for this paper identify how police involvement in information-sharing and collaboration with various Indigenous human service sectors can help reduce barriers, establish trust for police, and reduce violence against women and girls.

Objectives & Outcomes

This project was driven by several objectives originally outlined in the proposal, and reinforced during preliminary and interim reporting activities to Public Safety Canada. They include:

• Identify areas of police policy and practice requiring improvement;
• Identify successful models of multi-sector collaboration that reduce violence against Indigenous peoples;
• Determine key ingredients, traits and skill-sets that contribute to positive police-Indigenous
• relations;
• Prepare recommendations that support the development of tools and resources for police (and other human service professionals) to use in improving collaborative opportunities to reduce violence against Indigenous people.

The objectives for this project were designed to help produce three intended outcomes. These include:

• Enhanced awareness of key challenges in police-Indigenous relations, together with the identification of key mitigating strategies and tactics;
• Improved understanding of, and commitment to, adopting multi-sector collaboration within an Indigenous context;
• Knowledge of opportunities to reduce violence against Indigenous people through effective multi-sector collaboration.

Actionable Recommendations

The key deliverable in this paper is a list of actionable recommendations that government stakeholders, police administrators and frontline professionals can implement in order to effectively collaborate with Indigenous communities in a way that reduces violence against women and girls. Appearing in no particular order of importance, the following recommendations are inspired by the findings of this report.

1) LEADERSHIP 

Efforts should be made to encourage senior police leaders to initiate a paradigm shift within their organizations to align and prioritize strategic planning, resource allocation, policies, procedures and practices with multi-sector collaboration efforts. Leadership commitments to this transformation process will contribute to medium and longer-term outcomes in community safety and well-being.

2) MANAGEMENT

Police organizations should focus on engaging mid-level managers in building pathways to effective police collaboration within Indigenous communities. Both the literature and interview process single out mid-level management as the place where high-level commitments and frontline experience seem to disconnect. Having mid-level managers involved will close this gap, and bring much-needed support for frontline officers making efforts in communities to effectively collaborate.

3) EDUCATION 

Police educators, with the support of Public Safety Canada’s First Nations Policing Program, should pursue development of imbedded coursework in cadet training around multi-sector collaboration, problem-solving, and upstream service mobilization within Indigenous communities.

4) TRAINING 

Public Safety Canada, in partnership with Indigenous educators and policing stakeholders, should develop a robust police training program and corresponding campaign to be implemented Canada-wide and at all levels of police organizations. Training should focus on Indigenous history, colonialism, residential schools, the 60’s scoop, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action, and findings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Training strategies might include experiential learning, virtual reality, survivor stories, usage of self-reflection, and the KAIROS blanket exercise^Footnote6. Proven approaches to the delivery of such training should be incorporated to present the relevant history and experience without undermining the very spirit and intents of both collaboration and reconciliation. 

5) UPSTREAM PROCESS 

Police organizations should empower and enable police officers to detect vulnerability to violence upstream, and support client service access before violence occurs. The most effective efforts in crime prevention, violence elimination, and community safety are when vulnerable individuals and families are supported before crisis occurs—not after. Police are in very advantageous positions to detect risk upstream, and by collaborating with service partners, open up opportunities to support individuals at-risk of violence. To act on this, police need support and encouragement from leadership to get involved, and collaborate upstream.

6) CULTURAL COMPETENCY 

Police professionals at all levels should be assessed for cultural competency, in a manner co-created by Indigenous and police stakeholders. This competency should be embedded and continuously supported throughout the life of a police career.

7) MEASUREMENT 

Police organizations should develop a measurement structure used to track police involvement, challenges, solutions, and positive outcomes in collaboration within Indigenous communities. Ongoing monitoring of these data can help identify opportunities to build capacity, troubleshoot, and strengthen collaborative commitments police make to Indigenous communities.

8) POLICY 

Police organizations should establish longer postings of officers in Indigenous communities. By the time most police officers have created positive relationships, are able to problem-solve, and are contributing to improvements in the community, they are transferred. Too often, important police relationships with communities come to an end when an invested officer transfers out. 

9) RECRUITMENT 

A criterion for candidate assessment should be their willingness to see collaboration as a vital tool in law enforcement, their interest in Indigenous community engagement, and their ability to see themselves as an asset and support to individuals who are at-risk of or who have been exposed to violence.

10) SHARED OWNERSHIP

Police planning, measurement, accountability, and reporting should be pursued through a framework of shared ownership between police, their authority (e.g., provincial government), and local Indigenous communities. This provides an opportunity for both police and their human service partners, to become mutually accountable for the safety and well-being outcomes in a community. A shared ownership framework would help build leadership support required to overcome difficult challenges in multi-sector collaboration. It would also contribute to increased capacity for police and Indigenous human service partners to generate a collective impact on violence against women and girls.  

11) IMPLEMENTATION 

In the spirit of collaboration, police themselves should have a nationally and provincially-coordinated and collaborative approach to implementing these recommendations, and learning from one another during the implementation process.

https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/2019-jtc/2019-jtc-en.pdf