Indigenous sensitivity training for Thunder Bay police - FAIL

Police officers in Thunder Bay, Ont., are being accused of verbally assaulting a facilitator who was delivering cross-cultural training on Indigenous issues, but a city official says it was all a misunderstanding. [...]

Police officers were "disruptive and dismissive" throughout the session, she said. They made a joke out of a question about what it would be like to have a child taken away to residential school. One officer twirled her hair while others spun around in their chairs during a discussion on genocide, the facilitator said. [...]

Officers accused her of lying about the statistics and asked her to for proof of differential police treatment of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, she said. That's when she shut down the session.

The facilitator "misinterpreted" the police response, he said. For example, police were laughing at a "sidebar conversation" during the session, "not really about the film at all."

"It happened during a week when there was an attack on police in the United States and six or seven officers were murdered and so there may have been some heightened sensitivity over that," he said.

Police in Thunder Bay, Ont., are under review by the province's civilian police oversight body for the way they treat the deaths of Indigenous people, a move that one expert calls unprecedented in Ontario.

"In terms of the actions of this relatively new police oversight body, this is precedent setting in the province of Ontario," said Akwasi Owusu-Bempeh, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in race, crime and policing. "It is the first time they have investigated an entire police service for institutionalized racism."

A letter from the agency saying it would launch an investigation to determine whether there was misconduct on behalf of police officers in the DeBungee case, as well as outlining the "broader systemic review," was sent to the lawyer for Rainy River First Nations in July.

The agency does not speak publicly about its investigations.

Two things prompted First Nation leaders to release the letter to CBC News on Thursday.

Rainy River Chief Jim Leonard said a CBC News story about alleged misbehaviour of Thunder Bay police during a race relations course "absolutely horrified him."

Police called the situation a "misunderstanding."

"I saw that as the last straw," Leonard said. "When a story comes out like that, when [police] continue to do what they've always done, it just infuriated me."