By Allyson Widdis
A newly expanded Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police initiative to improve relationships between police and members of minority groups may be good news for Centretown, which is one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the region.
The plan, called Partnership in Action, is meant to foster a better police understanding of some of the issues minorities face.
“This is a big time for change in the world,” says Sgt. Michel Hébert of the regional police’s Diversity and Race Relations unit.
“It’s time to put mechanisms in place to get closer to the community.”
As part of the plan, representatives from various minority groups, including the Somalian, South Asian, Jamaican and Aboriginal communities, met with police for a roundtable discussion Nov. 4 to plan the agenda for the Partnership in Action Assembly at the end of the month. That assembly will map out ways of putting ideas from the roundtable into practice.
The main issues are hiring practices, how officers interact with the public, and how involved the police are in cultural events like Fête Caribe and Aboriginal powwows.
Ahmed Ismail, volunteer co-ordinator for the Somali Centre, says it’s important for officers to “work closely in a civilian way” by getting to know the neighbourhoods and the people in the areas they patrol. This will make their understanding of the community’s needs much clearer so that problems can be averted before they arise, he says.
Those problems, such as violent confrontations between police and minority groups, are what prompted the Partnership in Action initiative to first emerge in the mid-1990s. An incident response protocol was proposed to help police deal more fairly with these critical situations of escalating tension and conflict.
But Hébert says, at the time, many minority groups were not ready to accept the protocol, and police weren’t confident that the protocol was the solution they were looking for.
Several years later, the expanded plan calls for a proactive stance of building positive, trusting relationships between police and traditionally marginalized groups, in an attempt to defuse tension.
In Centretown, increased community involvement by police could mean lower crime rates and more harmony among ethnic groups.
It will also be beneficial for recent immigrants trying to adjust to Canadian laws, says Peter Lo, a mental health counsellor and outreach worker at the Somerset West Community Health Centre.
He says Chinese immigrants, for example, may not feel comfortable approaching police when they are victims of crime because they don’t know how they will be treated.
“The government in China is a communist government. They have different views of police and of police processes,” Lo says. “And also (the immigrants) have language problems which make it difficult for them to communicate.”
Lo suggests having more minorities on the force acting as liaisons.
Sgt. David Pepper, director of community development for the regional police, says if the initiative works, each person will feel more connected not only to police, but to their communities.
“The biggest frustration is this takes time,” says Pepper. “Changing the police is not something that happens overnight, and getting the community to be mobilized in a common direction is not something that happens overnight.”
Pepper adds that Centre-town residents should see every change as a positive one.
“The strength of bringing together difference for a common goal of living in harmony is something people value,” he says.