WINNIPEG — An aboriginal group wants a review of racism in the Winnipeg Police Service, based on the handling of 911 emergency calls made by two Metis women who were murdered last year.
“We feel the action of the operators was systemic racism,” Marti Ford of the Aboriginal Council of Winnipeg said Thursday.
Sisters Doreen Leclair and Corrine McKeown were found stabbed to death in Leclair’s home in February 2000 after making a total of five calls for help. Ford said transcripts of the calls — in which operators are heard suggesting the women shouldn’t have let their killer in and that the parties involved had been drinking — prove the racism allegation.
“If we look behind the references to drinking, the references to victim-blaming . . . all of those things just demonstrate to me a racial stereotype and also blaming victims, that they’re somehow responsible and that they should protect themselves,” Ford told a news conference.
But Chief Jack Ewatski of the Winnipeg Police Service repeated Thursday that racism was not found to be part of the problem in the deaths of McKeown and Leclair.
The police service conducted its own review of the incident, which was then reviewed by the RCMP and provincial justice officials with the aid of an outside prosecutor.
