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British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Michael Tammen on February 18 that Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers made “grossly offensive, racist and dehumanizing” remarks about Indigenous women and violated their Canadian Charter Rights and Freedoms rights during policing of a blockade of Coastal GasLink pipeline construction. The finding came after Indigenous land defenders filed an application to dismiss charges against them due to police conduct during their arrests in 2021.

The three land defenders are: Sleydo’ (Molly Wickham), a wing chief of the Gidimt’en Clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation; Shaylynn Sampson, a Gitxsan woman; and Corey Jocko, a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) man from Akwesasne.

After more than a year of court proceedings, Tammen found that police breached the land defenders’ Section 7 rights (protecting life, liberty and security of person) during a raid, by breaching multiple structures to make arrests without having a warrant for entry. The land defenders had refused police entry and warned them that they needed a warrant prior to the breaches and arrests.

Despite this, Tammen did not throw out the land defenders’ convictions, but said that they — along with another activist — will receive a reduction in their sentences because of the finding. Tammen had found the three guilty last year of criminal contempt of the court for breaking an injunction against disrupting work on the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

Police defend extractive capital

Tammen’s findings are yet another in the litany of abuses carried out by police operating in the RCMP’s infamous Community-Industry Response Group (C-IRG). Since renamed as the Critical Response Unit — British Columbia (CRU), the unit works in the service of the extractivist industry to put down Indigenous and environmental resistance. It is a secretive unit, and little is known publicly about its structure or operational procedures.

The court case heard disturbing details of RCMP behaviour, including extreme violence and racism.

One RCMP officer  an Indigenous person who had been arrested as a “big fucking ogre-looking dude”.

Officers were also heard making degrading comments about symbols worn by Indigenous women to honour murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. One officer , “Do they have fucking face paint, too? They’re not orcs?”, referring to Sleydo’ and Sampson wearing red dresses and red paint handprints on their faces.

The court heard that the RCMP deployed snipers as part of its “lethal overwatch” strategy against land defenders. Sergeant Ryan Arnold of the RCMP’s Emergency Response Team testified that “We were there to provide lethal-force overwatch for the tac [tactical] team to go hands-on with people who need to be arrested.”

Another officer, Corporal Sebastien Pilote, suggested sending a police dog into the structures occupied by the land defenders.

Tammen police conduct as “extremely serious” and “involving racism directed towards Indigenous women … a group that has been systemically disadvantaged through all sectors of the criminal justice system for generations”.

“The comments about the red face paint were not made by a single officer and were not a one-off occurrence.”

He noted that police made multiple “offensive and discriminatory comments” in November 2021, and that it “is potentially a sign of systemic attitudinal issue within the C-IRG”.

Apologies rejected

Tammen also rejected apologies made by senior RCMP officers during the proceedings, finding that they were insufficient remedies for the damage the racist comments had done.

Following the decision, the three defenders, along with their lawyer Frances Mahon, Chief Na’Moks and Chief Woos, hosted an Instagram live discussion.

Mahon noted the uncommon nature of these findings within the Canadian colonial court system: “The court found that the conduct of the police officers abused the court’s process.

“This is an extraordinarily rare finding, and it demonstrates how serious the police officers’ misconduct was,” she said.

“In particular, it was a rebuke to the C-IRG members who thought it was appropriate to say the most egregious, racist things about beautiful Indigenous women when they thought nobody could hear them.”

Sampson reminded participants of the colonial nature of the RCMP, which was “created to take our children from our territories and put them in residential schools. They were created to keep us off our territory.”

This work continues today, Sampson said. “They remove us from our land; they criminalise us; they put us through years and years of court battles in a system that was made to undermine our hereditary governance structures.” 

While the findings are certainly a public relations blow for the RCMP, there should be no illusions that it will change their behaviour. C-IRG/CRU officers have not been charged for their actions, the unit has not been disbanded — as human rights advocates have — and it still operates as a security force for private capital.

More generally, there is no oversight and — which communities need and want — for police in Canada.

The court case against Sleydo’, Sampson and Jocko will resume on April 3 to set a date for their sentencing.