The Broken Trust report from last year first called for new investigations
The deaths of 13 Indigenous people in Thunder Bay between 2006 and 2019 are being looked into again by the Ontario Provincial Police.
Bill Dickson, a spokesman for the OPP, said Tuesday that the independent investigations are still going on. They are being done at the request of the province’s attorney general. The cases had already been looked into by the Thunder Bay Police Service (TBPS), but a report from last year said that they should be looked into again.
These new investigations have been given to OPP officers, and a major case manager in the criminal investigations branch of the organization is in charge of them.
Dickson said in a statement, “We plan to investigate the 13 tragic deaths in Thunder Bay using a victim-centered, trauma-informed, and culturally sensitive approach.”
He said that the new investigations could lead to new criminal charges.
“We think the families, friends, communities, and general public of the victims deserve to know what happened.”
Dickson refused to say more about which specific cases are being looked into again.
Darcy Fleury, the chief of police in Thunder Bay, told CBC News in the past that he was open to any new investigations and would help with them.
“If there are the problems that have been mentioned, I’m open to having them looked into again,” he said in an interview on March 22, just a few days after he was hired.
CBC News asked the TBPS for an interview by email on Tuesday, but hasn’t heard back yet.
In the confidential report, the coroner also looks into two deaths
The news on Tuesday comes just over a year after a team of investigators looked into how the TBPS looked into sudden deaths.14 deaths were asked to be looked at again.. The suggestions are in a confidential report that was leaked to CBC News and other media outlets.
The report also said that a coroner should look into the death of a missing person and the death of someone who took drugs.
It also said that 25 unsolved cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls from Thunder Bay should be looked at again.
The province’s oversight agency, the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, found evidence of systemic racism in the city’s police force in 2018. This led to the formation of the Broken Trust committee, which wrote the report.
The committee asked that the sudden deaths of nine Indigenous people be looked into again. Part of the process was to think about whether or not Thunder Bay police should look into other sudden deaths again.
Since that report, there has been a lot of change in the police service and its oversight board:Fleury was hired as the new police chief, and a provincially-appointed administrator has been in charge of the oversight board for the past year.