Nunavik’s Police Violence Problem is Getting Worse

Illustration: Courtney Papigatuk

Jeannie May had just gotten out of a meeting when she saw a video of the police shooting in Salluit. 

Watching the video triggered May’s memory of a violent incident she herself had with a police officer a few years ago. Seeing this violence now on her phone was like living that brutality all over again. 

The video shows a police officer shooting Joshua and Garnet Papigatuk on Nov. 4, an incident that killed Joshua and badly wounded his twin brother Garnet. It has over a million views and caused a public outcry across Nunavik. When she saw the image of a police officer firing two shots at the twins, she stopped breathing. 

With her head pounding, May went home and vomited. 

In 2017, May was at her home in Kuujjuaq after a night out with her then-boyfriend. Both of them had had a few drinks, but her boyfriend was really drunk. 

“He was extremely agitated, he was punching my walls, walking up and down my hallways, huffing and puffing. And I was getting really afraid,” says May. 

Her boyfriend, Remi, had a temper which came out from time to time, and usually she was able to handle it on her own. This time was different. Scared for herself and for her kids who were asleep, May called the cops so they could get him out of her house. When they came, the officers said he seemed calm and fine, and refused to remove him from May’s house because she didn’t seem to be in any danger. 

“I got very, very angry. I was sitting on my couch, I stood up, and [Remi] was maybe five to seven feet away from my face. I pointed my finger at him and I said get the fuck out of my house,” says May. 

When she did this, the officer grabbed May’s finger, twisted her arm and slammed her face on the coffee table. He had his knee on her back, put handcuffs on her and arrested her. May says she broke her nose and her front tooth. 

“When he got me up, I was completely disoriented, in shock to the point where I did not even know what the fuck was going on,” explains May. The officer didn’t even give her enough time to put on a jacket or boots before taking her out on a –35°C December night. “When my warm feet touched the metal grill (of the stairs), my feet got stuck so that it peeled and ripped my skin off.”

When May saw the video of the Salluit shooting, she wanted to share her experience, and more so, help other people in Nunavik deal with the aftermath of experiencing police violence. 

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People within these communities in Northern Quebec are frustrated by the violence they see at the hands of police officers and the lack of changes made to the system despite how often tragedies like this happen. May made a post on Facebook to tell people that she is here to help if anyone wants support to file a complaint against a police officer. 

“I find there’s a big escalation of police brutality towards citizens — it’s out of control. We have to bring our justice, to take it back. The system isn’t working, it’s not our system,” says May. 

The heightened rate of police violence in Nunavik

Illustration: Courtney Papigatuk

Like May, many in Nunavik’s 14 Inuit villages have been deeply impacted by the police shooting in Salluit. 

Details of the incident are still vague aside from the fact that early morning on Nov. 4, the police got a 911 call about someone driving under the influence. When two officers showed up at the scene, there was an altercation between them and the twins. 

One of the officers then used a taser and pepper spray before taking out his gun and opened fire. 

Community members in Salluit mobilized immediately, organizing protests and vigils demanding justice for the twins. There was also a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the Papigatuk family which raised over $30,400 in less than two days. On Nov. 11, hundreds of people in villages across Nunavik gathered together mourning for the tragedy in Salluit, demanding transparency and justice in the investigation of the incident. 

Courtney Papigatuk is Joshua and Garnet’s cousin. She is a freelance artist living in Montreal who says everyone in the Salluit community is in shock. She feels scared and unsafe, especially around law enforcement. It’s a fear that was always there, but now it’s tenfold. 

“I think around Nunavik it’s kind of the norm to have your fair share of really tragic happenings in your life and family, and it’s really weird that it’s so normalized,” says Papigatuk. “It started with shock and grief, and now it’s like a mixture of grief and rage — rage that this keeps happening.” 

Following the community movement across Nunavik, Papigatuk is organizing a protest on Nov. 30 in Montreal from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. near Montreal Police Station 12 in Westmont to demand justice for the twins and raise more awareness about police brutality in Nunavik. Since she started promoting the protest, she’s gotten a ton of support and engagement. 

According to an investigation done by the CBC in 2020, there were 17 police-related deaths in Nunavik between 2000 and 2018. The report found that the rate per capita of police-related deaths in Nunavik is 30 times higher than all of Ontario and just as high as Nunavut. 

Quebec’s Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes (BEI), the independent police watchdog, launched an investigation into the incident, sending five investigators to Salluit. The Sûreté du Québec is conducting a parallel investigation. The average time for a BEI investigation is around six months, during which investigators compile all the facts to create a narrative of the event, but the agency does not make a decision on what happens next. 

“We’re impartial in the way that we do the investigation, but we’re not the ones that are going to impose sanctions against the police forces,” said Jérémie Comtois, the BEI’s communications officer. “The Directeur des poursuites criminelles et pénales (DPCP) will take our investigations and they will analyze if they need to press charges against the police officers.”

Since 2016, the BEI has launched 36 investigations with the Nunavik Police Services (also including those under the previous Kativik Police Services). None have ended in any charges. 

Papigatuk says that it’s often “really young, inexperienced and insensitive cops; sometimes the cops that weren’t good enough down here [in Montreal] who are sent to work in communities in Nunavik. So you get the bad apples, the extra rotten ones, and that’ll fester into this really, really rotten system. And it’s growing.” 

“They’re violent people. They don’t come to serve and protect. They come to exert power over people they think are lesser. And it’s just a repeating pattern over the years.”

The Nunavik Police Services and Kativik Regional Government refused to provide a comment for this story as the BEI’s investigation is ongoing. 

Why are there so few charges against the police? 

Illustration: Courtney Papigatuk

Patrick Watson is a criminology professor at the University of Toronto studies policing and police oversight. He’s looking into why so few investigations of police officers lead to any charges. 

One of Watson’s research projects, ‘Charting the “Reasonable Officer,”’ explores police  reasonability during violent encounters with civilians. 

Section 25 of the Criminal Code says that police officers are allowed to use whatever force is deemed necessary within reasonable bounds for the completion of their work. Watson says that there is the implication that even if they’re not facing a violent threat, they can still employ violence and coercive force to “bring somebody into compliance with the law.”

“It’s also not the case that a police officer has to exhaust all non-lethal options before they resort to a lethal option, but they do have to have some sort of reasonable perception,” said Watson “It doesn’t have to be accurate, but it has to be reasonable of some imminent threat of either death or grievous bodily harm to themselves or a third party in order to be warranted to use lethal force.”

Watson also says that many prosecutors will not proceed on a case when they don’t think they will get a conviction. “They sort of operate on a very high threshold, and so they’re anticipating a jury, and they’re trying to figure out what a jury will say.” 

When these cases do go to court, there is a lot of leeway for police officers to prove that they perceived the individual to be a threat. What is considered reasonable is up to a judge or a jury — and Watson says generally, they do grant police quite a bit of latitude. 

With the case involving the twins in Salluit, Watson says he’s curious to see how the investigation will unfold, and specifically what perceived threat the officers involved saw in the situation to resort to using their taser, pepper spray and then ultimately opening fire at both unarmed men.  

In May’s case, there was never a BEI investigation into the arrest that left her with a smashed face. 

She had to file a complaint herself through Quebec’s Commissaire à la déontologie policière. It was an arduous process that took about five years from start to finish. 

“It was the beginning of my five years of hell,” says May. 

After the incident, May had a broken nose, a missing tooth, and developed severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She had to fly down to Montreal several times to get her tooth fixed (it wasn’t covered by the public healthcare system) which cost her thousands of dollars. May’s PTSD was so bad that she had trouble leaving the house and found herself extremely on edge and needing to defend herself. 

Without any idea how to file a complaint or navigate that system, the process was daunting. May has years of administrative and writing experience with knowledge of how to work through bureaucracy, and even then, filing a complaint was extremely complicated. She had to compile every single piece of evidence, medical bills, and fly down to Montreal where she was interrogated by an investigator for five hours. 

In the end, she got the final decision report earlier this year in February which stated that the officer was penalized for neglecting her health and safety but not for using unlawful force. The judge concluded that the officer used reasonable force against May and arrested her lawfully. 

The penalty for the neglect was a three-day suspension without pay. 

“I just felt like, what was the whole point? I couldn’t read that (judge’s decision) for a while,” says May. 

A few years back, there was a study done by Remi Boivin which looked into the different types of complaints filed in Quebec against the police. 

They quickly found a very successful type of file, which was the third-party complaints. This is when someone who was not a victim of the police behaviour but someone who witnessed the incident files a complaint because they felt the incident was unlawful. These complaints were extremely successful in being carried forward into court. 

In 2023, the provincial government passed Bill 14 which updated the Police Act and removed the ability for citizens to make a third-party complaint. Human rights groups called this move a “historical setback” for police ethics and public safety. 

Even when the trial does not end in a conviction, Watson says that it’s important for these matters to go to court because it’s often the only public account of the events. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant. It’s worth the cost, and it’s worth the investment…especially when we’re seeing real problems with faith and trust in policing,” he says. 

Since May went through the process of filing a complaint which was accepted and then went to a criminal trial, this information is public and the whole account of the incident is meticulously documented from both perspectives. When the BEI investigates an incident, however, they do not publically release the facts of the investigation, which can be frustrating for the communities impacted because they are left in the dark about what really happened and is (often) why there are no charges. 

“How does a cop get away with killing a human being, and then he’s just relocated to another community to continue being a police officer?” says May. “How does that rule work? If I kill a guy, I’m going to have to suffer for the rest of my life? Why don’t they?”

For Papigatuk, it’s “sickening” that police officers who killed people can still work, let alone continue to work in the same community in which they caused harm. 

“I think what punishment looks like is jail time, or at least suspension…they’re obviously not well-equipped for different situations with a culture and environment that they don’t know. (The system) really needs rewiring; these people need to be better chosen for their jobs. I think we need Inuk people,” says Papigatuk. 

“We should have our own services made by us, for us, we should have people who are from the communities, who can speak the language.” 

Police accountability is key is building citizen trust

Marc Alain, a criminology professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, studies police accountability systems in Canada and other countries — specifically citizens’ trust towards the police. 

He has looked into Canada, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Germany. 

In Alain’s research, he asked people across the five countries if they were witnessing or personally experiencing a bad experience with a police officer, would they know how to denounce the behaviour? Ninety per cent of the people said no.

Alain explains that having a trustworthy police accountability system that citizens understand and know how to navigate is essential to build trust in the police because they can feel reassured that if something were to go wrong, it would be taken seriously. The BEI, on the other hand, is underfunded and doesn’t have the necessary leverage to change the police culture in Quebec, he says. 

“The idea is to carefully examine the police powers, and to make sure that the counter powers are as strong as the police power themselves,” says Alain. “And of course, in order to do that, you have to invest money in not just establishing these accountability systems, but make sure that people know about them, trust them, and see real results of these kinds of investigations.” 

Accountability doesn’t always have to mean holding police officers legally or criminally culpable. Sometimes it can mean getting an admission that something wrong happened — that a mistake was made and harm caused. But even when it comes to individual complaints filed, up to 90 per cent are rejected, meaning it’s unlikely to even start a conversation about what’s not working.

Papigatuk says that these communities need peacekeepers, not police who are ill-equipped at de-escalating situations. 

“We’re not a Western culture, we’re not made that way. We’re very recently colonized. The most recent in Canada — these towns have only been around since the 60s. Why are you imposing these structures and systems that we still don’t use and understand completely, that don’t work for us?”

There’s a great demand across the country for alternative policing models that prioritize de-escalation tactics and social conflict resolution rather than a crime-fighting mentality, which is more often than not what the police resort to even when the situation doesn’t demand it. 

“We train our children to take accountability for their mistakes, to own up for their mistakes, but when a corporation or a police service in our society that has pecuniary interests on the line makes a mistake, they refuse to take any acknowledgement because they’re concerned about the type of damages that might be rewarded because of these things,” says Watson. “And I think that’s just such a poisonous outcome for everyone involved.”