Regina police chief welcomes MMIWG report

By Nathan Meyer

Regina Police Chief  Evan Bray said Monday that the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) report was not an easy read.

Bray addressed the media Monday afternoon and welcomed the work the MMIWG committee had done.

“I’ll be the first to acknowledge that we’ve gone through challenges in terms of relationships in community,” said Bray. “We see this as a real important and tangible piece of work in terms of building a better system, better justice system, better policing services.”

Bray said police are already working on a number of the recommendations in the report, such as building a better relationship with the Indigenous community, creating more Indigenous cultural training for officers and the existence of an elders advisory committee.

The chief also addressed issues of sex trafficking in Regina and noted that the issue is a priority to police.

Another recommendation by the MMIWG report was more Indigenous representation in police services. Bray said the Regina Police Service is actively working on that goal.

“(We’re) finding ways to try and make a better process,” Bray said. “A better service is always going to be enhanced when you can bring in someone with lived experience and can tell you, ‘Here’s why this doesn’t work.’

“We have to look at it understanding that we all have played a role in this. Oftentimes it’s that lack of willingness to understand, the closed mind, the ignorance that will prevent us from getting better.”

Bray remains confident that the police are able to change.

“I say this with no disrespect to other agencies or other professions, I think policing does a good job to open itself up to be transparent in an effort to get better,” he said.

Bray said it would be naive of him to say there wasn’t work to do and police are going to break down the recommendations to see what else can be done.

“There are a lot of things that I think we will see ourselves reflected in some of these recommendations,” he said, “and then there’ll be other things where we think that, ‘Yeah, that’s something we definitely have to look at because right now we aren’t doing something in that area.’ ”

— With files from 980 CJME’s Lisa Schick