Anyone who attended one or both days of the community hearings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) that were held in Thompson March 20-21, which was difficult for many people to do, as the hearings happended mostly during working hours, or who caught some of the proceedings on Facebook or who saw or read coverage on CBC, APTN or here in the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, should have been, at the very least, dismayed by evidence given about how RCMP and other police forces sometimes treat the families and friends of those who have gone missing or been killed.
When Dawn Anderson was found dead ouside her home in Leaf Rapids in November 2011, police had already identified her, pronounced a cause of death and had her body taken away in a body bag in the back of an RCMP pickup truck before they even notified her brother Keith that they had found her head and that he needed to look after the four- and seven-year-old children she left behind, whom officers had left home alone to fend for themselves when they unceremoniously removed Dawn's body from the scene. The cause of death was given over the phone by the medical examiner from Winnipeg, despite the fact that there was a local doctor in Leaf Rapids. And once the invetigating officers had decided that Dawn's death was the result of exposurre due to intoxication, they didn't even bother to protect the scene, even though the inside of the house had been in disarray, with a cracked TV and a phone ripped out of the wall.
Witnesses who gave testimony about their experiences on March 21 had similar examples of police dismissing their concerns, telling them to give up their search for missing loved ones or not keeping them apprised of the status of the investigation.
Ask yourself how you would feel if one of your loved ones had died and was carted off before you even had a chance to say, "Yes, that's my sister." If it seems inconceivable to you that police would behave that way, or that a death investigation would be wrapped up in basically a matter of minutes, the chances are that you are not Indigenous, since the very fact that there is an inquiry into MMIWG travelling from one end of Canada to the other indicates that police have not taken killings of and cases missing Indigenous women seriously enough for far too long.
Even if you aren't Indigenous, the stories from Northern Manitoba told to the national inquiry should be cause for concern. As Canadians, we should expect that the standards of policing available to us should be comparable whether we live in a major metropolitan area or a small northern community. The idea that any of us may not receive the justice we deserve because the policw who are supposed to serve and protect us are instead brushing off our concerns because of common prejudices that pervade our society should be abhorrent if we believe in equality. The very least we should be able to expect from our legal system is that it actually will begin from the presumption that all of us are equal in the eyes of the law and equally deserving of a thorough investigation when there is a possibility that we have been victims of a crime.
