Today Canada’s Minister of Indigenous Services expressed his disgust with a number of incidents of police showing excessive force when dealing with Indigenous and racialized people that appeared on social media this week.
Marc Miller said he, “Watched in disgust yesterday a number of these incidents.” stressing that a car door is not a proper police tactic, referring to the incident in Nunavut where an RCMP officer rammed his vehicle door into a suspect he was arresting.
Miller says these incidents show disgraceful, dehumanizing, and violent acts. He says he doesn’t understand how someone dies during a wellness check, referring to the 26-year-old Indigenous woman shot by police during a “wellness check” in Edmundston, N.B. this week.
He says when he first saw the report, he thought it was some morbid joke, and that he along with many Canadians and Indigenous peoples living in Canada are “pissed and outraged” at this pattern of violence that keeps repeating itself.
Miller says he cannot speak for Indigenous peoples, but he says the proof is there, you can see it, and it is palpable and painful. He says police in Canada serve Canadians and Indigenous peoples of Canada not the opposite and that is something he says Canada needs to reckon as a society.
Miller spoke to the unrest in the United States, describing it “disgraceful”, and more a reason than any to follow through with each independent inquiry into these incidents and to bring justice forward.