Posted by SunDog on January 22, 2004 at 08:25:24:
Police made racist comments at Ipperwash.
-CTV News Staff
Ontario's provincial police association is apologizing for racist remarks made by two officers during the 1995 Ipperwash standoff. The officers were recorded making insulting comments about natives.
On the tape, two officers are heard talking:
Officer #1 -- "We had this plan, you know? We thought if we could get five or six cases of Labatts 50, we could bait them and we'd have this big net and a pit."
Officer #2 -- "Creative thinking."
Officer #1 -- "Works in the south with watermelon."
In another section:
Officer #1 -- "Is there still a lot of press down there?''
Officer #2 -- "No, there's no one down there. Just a big fat fuck Indian."
The tape was made by police officers posing as media to get better access to the protesters at Ipperwash. It was recorded a day before protester Dudley George was shot dead by a police sniper.
George and two dozen other natives were protesting the desecration of ancestral burial grounds at Ipperwash Provincial Park. Though none of the protesters was armed, George was shot by OPP Sgt. Kenneth Deane and bled to death as his sister and brother drove to a hospital. The police association offered its apologies.
"The association and its members, past and present, deeply regret both the tone and content of the remarks on this tape made by two of our members," association vice-president Ed Kinnear said Tuesday in a release.
"We do not condone the remarks and we do not accept them as being representative of the views of the vast majority of men and women who are members of the OPPA. On behalf of all our members, we are very sorry and offer our apologies for these hurtful remarks."
One of the officers caught on tape was reprimanded for his remarks but is still with the force. The other retired in 1998.
Sgt. Deane was convicted of criminal negligence causing George's death. The George family has maintained Ontario's Conservative government under former premier Mike Harris had played a role in ordering police to use force to have the native protesters removed from the park. Murray Klippenstein, the lawyer for the George family, wonders why the tape was kept secret for so long and was only unveiled through an Access to Information motion."I think it's disturbing that it's taken eight years for this sad, difficult news to come out," he told CFTO News.
NDP MPP Marilyn Churley says the comments show the depth of the racism problem in the provincial police. "We've always said the whole thing stank... But to hear these racist comments from the OPP, it's obvious something really rotten was going on there," she told CFTO News. When the Tories were ousted from provincial in October, 2003, George's family settled a civil suit against Premier Mike Harris and several members of his former cabinet that very day. The family accepted a $100,000-settlement from provincial police plus undetermined legal costs George's family has also always demanded an inquiry to find out why George was killed and why there were more than 200 heavily armed officers at the protest. The Ontario government announced last November an inquiry would be held.