Kenora Police Service Chief Dan Jorgensen - a good cop doing a tough job slowly reforming the force.

When I first got to Kenora I’d heard many people talking about the Kenora Police Service and how they do their jobs when it concerns Aboriginal people.

I wasn’t allowed to work for the first 3 years so I spent quite a long time simply driving around Kenora doing nothing in particular.  After hearing a few more stories about police brutality in town, I started following Kenora Police Service cruisers around town.  I’d never get in their way because obviously that would be obstructing justice, but it isn’t illegal either so I did it for a long while… at least 8 months or more.  Quite often I’d be following a cruiser around downtown and they’d all of a sudden speed off on a call with their lights flashing and sirens blaring.  Obviously I couldn’t follow at their speed so I’d make educated guesses as to their destination and got it right almost every time – either Minto Ave, Minto Bay, Minto Crescent or Cambrian Drive.  In these areas there’s a high concentration of Aboriginal people living.  Quite often I’d be parked a hundred feet away from the police cruiser, with my lights off simply observing and watching.

I never witnessed outright police brutality but many times saw the offensive attitudes of officers getting up in people’s faces, pushing and shoving handcuffed people necessarily, and generally how brusque and rude the officers were when dealing with aboriginal people.  Race relations and equality between the police in Kenora and Aboriginal people is very bad, and in dire need of someone to fix it.  Practically every Aboriginal person I know has a tale to tell of unpleasant dealings between Kenora Police Service and an Aboriginal person.

For instance on one occasion, a physically big and strong Aboriginal guy I know was at Shooter’s bar quite intoxicated.  After getting out of the bar, the police were dealing with him for some reason I cannot recall.  Being intoxicated, he was getting quite belligerent and resisting the officers who were trying to take him to the drunk tank.  Eventually it took four officers to put on handcuffs.  He was put into a cruiser and driven to the area between Home Hardware and the baseball field opposite A&W fast food restaurant.  The four officers, one of whom was a female officer, dragged him out of the cruiser and proceeded to beat and stomp him silly for about ten minutes.  Whilst he deserved to go to jail for being drunk and disorderly in public, that didn’t give the police the right to throw him to the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back and beat him with their nightsticks and kick him in the face repeatedly.  That’s not a rumour – that happened.

Another example of police brutality towards Aboriginal people was the case of a teenage girl, whose grandfather is the recently retired Justice of the Peace Joe Morrison.  The girl was picked up by Kenora Police Service for being intoxicated in public and was taken back to the cells at KPS.  The girl was of slight stature… less than 120lbs.  One of the officers at the KPS HQ who outweighed her by at least 50lbs went into her cell and proceeded to beat the daylights out of her.  The idiot forgot to search her before putting her in the cell.  The victim pulled out her cellular telephone and called her grandpa Joe Morrison, who immediately came to KPS on a rampage.  Being a Ontario Court Justice, he had a lot of sway and got his granddaughter released immediately.

Then obviously there’s the case of Max Kakegamic, an Aboriginal man from North Spirit Lake who was murdered by an officially unknown suspect.  You can read about the story from a CTV interview with the main suspect Justin Carambetsos, who whines about being afraid to walk the streets in Kenora.  In a nutshell, the Kenora Police service were found to have lied under oath and obstructed justice, which resulted in the investigation into Justin Carambetsos being dropped.  He subsequently started legal action against Kenora Police Service for $5million.   The KPS officers who were found guilty of witholding evidence by the Board were not prosecuted for that crime – one resigned, and the other was demoted.  It’s a glaring example of the inequalities of the judicial system in Kenora.

The officer who brought the misconduct of Officer’s White and Favreau to light was Deputy Police Chief Dan Jorgensen.  After Chief Curtis retired, Dan Jorgensen became Chief of Police and since then has made a huge effort to improve relations with Aboriginal people in Kenora.  There are still many blatantly racist and predjudice officers working for Kenora Police Service, and it will take a long time to weed that out.  But unfortunately that might never happen because Kenora Police Service is due to be disbanded in favour of the Ontario Provincial Police.  All of KPS officers will still be policing Kenora as OPP – the difference is there won’t be an officer in command of them who is dedicated to erasing racism from the police and improving Aboriginal relations in Kenora.  Without Dan at the helm, these same racist KPS officers will still be strutting around on power trips with attitudes to match, making life hell for any Aboriginal person in Kenora unlucky enough to get in their crosshairs.  It really sucks because there are one or two front-line officers who aren’t racist, who are approachable, and don’t have bad attitudes, but it seems that they are in the minority in Kenora at present.

The only way that could ever begin to change is if more Aboriginal people desired to become police officers and joined the Ontario Provincial Police (if it gets the contract for policing in Kenora).  The other way that could change is with a police force specifically for the Aboriginal community, but as that isn’t going too well at present because of a mixture of racist caucasian officers and ass-backwards management.

Logic states that the more Aboriginal people in uniform, the less incidents of brutality towards Aboriginal people will be seen.  Let’s hope that happens one day in the near future.