Monday, July 13, 2020

No big surprise that Indigenous police force has never shot anyone

An article in today's Globe and Mail sings the praises of the Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service (NAPS), the small force that polices a population of 38,000 spread across 34 small, remote communities in Northern Ontario.
In particular, the article praises the fact that the snall force has not killed a single person in the course of its operations, and it (and the spokesperson for the force) put this down to its policy of building relations with the communities and its culturally sensistive policing mandate.
What the article (and the NAPS spokesperson) chooses not to mention is the fact that it has 203 officers to police those 38,000 people, an average of 187 per officer. Compare this to Toronto Police Services, for example, which has about 5,400 officers to police a population of 2.6 million inhabitants, about 481 per officer.
And the budgets? NAPS has an operating budget of $37.7 million, i.e. about $992 per inhabitant, or $187,700 per officer. TPS has a gross budget of $1,136 million, which equates to 437 per inhabitant, or $210,400 per officer. So, Toronto has a slightly larget budget per officer in a city which is orders of magnitude more expensive to live in, and about half of the budget per inhabitant compared to NAPS.
Now, I'm not saying that sheer numbers and money are the sole determinants of how many people the police kill in the line of duty, and I don't have a good idea of the level of crime (and particularly violent crime) the two regions encounter. But it just seems to me a bit disingenuous to say that the difference is all down to culturally sensitive community policing.
About 60% of the NAPS police force is Indigenous, so clearly they are going to have more in common with the largely homogeneous Indigneous population of the region than the Toronto police force, which has to deal with a veritable smargasbord of racial and cultural groups.
And finally, one other consideration: as far as I can make out, Canada-wide, there were 460 fatal interactions between the police and civilians over the 17 years from 2000 to 2017, i.e. an average of 27 per year. Over an average population over than period, that is about 0.00000079 deaths per person. Applying this to the 38,000 inhabitants under the protection of NAPS, and you would expect 0.03 deaths per year, or about 1 death every 33 years. So, not dissimilar to what we have seen.
So, is the Globe article cutting edge reporting on rampant racism and disparities in policing in Canada? Or is this just disingenuousness, and a lack of perspective and deep analysis.

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