RCMP is losing Indigenous officers and some former Mounties blame racism in the ranks

By her eighth year in the RCMP,Const.Kerri McKee of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewanthought she was used to the insults and small acts of aggressionthat came with being bothan Indigenous woman and a police officer.

That was before the now-retired Mountiehad to remove an intoxicated passenger from a Greyhound busparked at a gas station off a highway in Newfoundland and Labradoron her own. The backup she called for, she said, was a long time in coming.

McKee said the man tried to steal her cruiser, kicked her, puther in a chokehold and threatened to kill her.

"I called for backup, and backup was going to be,I don't know, however long," she told CBC News."It was like, 'Oh yeah, we're busy,we're busy,' so I had to deal with it myself."

She said sheonly got the man to letgo by biting into his forearm.By the time backup did arrive, she had broken ribs, a black eyeand a larynx so damaged she was unable to speak for more than a year.

An Indigenous exodus

McKee made it through her career, retiring as a constable in 2019.

But data shows that Canada's national police force is failing to retainIndigenous officers.

Following a request by Hamilton Centre New DemocratMP Matthew Green, the RCMP reported that 102 members who identify asIndigenous have left the force in the last three years.

The document also shows that the RCMP increased its net count of officers who identify as "visible minorities"and officers who do not self-identify as either visible minority or Indigenous.

The loss of so many Indigenous RCMP officers doesn't surpriseErick Laming, a PhD student at the University of Toronto's Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies.

Laming, a member of theShabot Obaadjiwan First Nation, has spent a lot of time interviewing Indigenous people in northern Ontario. He said the RCMP's fraught relationship with Indigenous peoples is acting as a drag on recruitment and retention.

"If you don't trust the system, then you don't want to be a part of it," he said."That's a huge barrier right there."

Alongside the RCMP's historic involvement in Canada's residential schools system, Lamingsaid, recent high-profile episodesof police violence such asthearrest ofAthabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam last yearandthe shooting death of Chantel Moore ofTla-o-qui-aht First Nation make manyIndigenous people extremely reluctant to consider careers in law enforcement.

"Any one incident can take it back 20 to30 years in terms of building that trust in the community," he said.

'Prairie-N-word'

Jonathanis anotherretiredIndigenous RCMP officer;CBC News has agreed to usea pseudonym because he said he fearsrepercussions at his current job. He said the racist cracks started the day he applied for the job, as he was being fingerprinted for a standard background check.

"One member came into the cell block and said, 'What did he do?'" hesaid. When the officer was told he was applying to join the force, Jonathan said, the Mountie"rolled his eyes and walked out of the room."

He said he's heard plenty of racist remarks over his career with the police, including "members taking humour in the term 'Prairie N-word'" or saying "Newfoundland had it right when they wiped out their [Indigenous]population" while he was within earshot.

Jonathan and McKee saidthey know of RCMP members who have left the force in recent years to join Indigenous police services a more inclusive and, often, more lucrative line of work.

"I was kind of stuck in it," McKee said, adding she had"thought about going to a different police force" but felt she had tostickwith the RCMP because she was a single mother caring for two children.

A '60s Scoop child herself, McKee said shespent years on the force with colleagues who never wanted to hear her talk about residential schools, who called her uneducated or slapped her down with racistslurs.

"It's hard for us," she said of Indigenous RCMP officers of her generation. "But we kind of snowplowed ... we're trying to make it easier for the ones coming up behind us."

The data presented bythe RCMPpaintsa picture of a police force struggling to connect with Indigenous and minority communities.

The 2020-21 fiscal year saw only 337 Indigenous applicants attempt to join the RCMP,and only 17 of them were selected to attend the force's Depot Division for training a 50 per cent drop from 2019-20.

Meanwhile,only 4.3 per cent of visible minority applicantsmet the bar for Depot training, while nearly a fifth of 1,540 applicants who did not self-identify as either visible minority or Indigenouswere clearedto start training.

"What we're seeing is a complete disconnect between people actually trying to access federal public-sector jobs like the RCMP and their ability to actually get accepted into the police training college," said Green, the NDP MP who asked for the numbers.

"What I want are for equity policies to be applied across all federal jobs."

'There may in fact be some systemic issues'

For months, the RCMP has spoken about how it has created a new equity, diversity and inclusion strategy, although it has not disclosed it publicly beyond a few paragraphs on its website.

The Mounties are also drafting a new entrance exam for potential recruits.

Nadine Huggins, the RCMP's executive director for human resource policies, strategies and programs, said the majority of officers who leave the Mounties do so after a satisfying career, butshe had no specific breakdowns or explanations about why departures for Indigenous members are higher than they are for other groups.

"If in factthey are leaving the RCMP for Indigenous police forces," she said, "it's not a terrible thing for them to be leaving with the expertise they are developing through the training and the experience that they're getting in the RCMP."

Hugginsacknowledged that"there may in fact be some systemic issues" preventing access to Indigenous and minority groups. "We have to turn over a lot of stones" in examining them, she said.

However, she also said the force only has a "voluntary" exit interview process for departing members. "We don't necessarily have any sort of systematic approach to looking at them."

Although it wants to increase the overall number of Indigenous applicants and their presence in the force, there is also no specific target or quota. "Our goal is as many as we can attract, as many as we can promote, as many as we can retain throughout so that they retire with a full career and a full pension," Huggins said.