Last February in a public panel discussion Professor Cressida Hayes reminded the audience of the 2004 incident in which then-premier Ralph Klein was asked to comment on funding for AISH (Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped) and responded by saying, "I'm sure none of you want to talk to me about AISH, do you? No, because you're normal. Severely normal." In recounting the incident Hayes reminded the audience how normal-centric services and mentalities are in Alberta. Recent acts of violence serve to remind us how ill-equipped institutions such as the Edmonton Police Service are in dealing with issues beyond the normal.
Two months ago an 18-year-old aboriginal man was abducted on Jasper Avenue by a group of men. He was taken beyond city limits, beaten, burned, had racist symbols carved into the flesh of his back and then abandoned, left to make his way to a farmhouse to get help. The people at the farm took care of him as they waited for the police to arrive. His mother says that dealing with the police left her son re-traumatized. A family friend says that the police have treated him "as if he was the criminal" because they suspect the violence was related to gang retaliation. The young man and his mother are now currently working with the Wicihitowin Justice System Action Circle, which is part of the larger Wicihitowin: Shared Responsibility & Stewardship organization, designed to create a dialogue with the EPS to change how police handle first contact with aboriginals.
In Alberta over the last five years, 23 Somali men have been brutally murdered. The last case was in late November 2010 when 23-year-old Robleh Ali Mohamed was shot in the head in broad daylight. When asked by the CBC about steps the EPS is taking to solve the crime, Constable Ken Smith, a community liaison officer with Edmonton Police said, "The police aren't there when it happens. We need people to come forward to us and tell us what happened." The Alberta Somali community is not satisfied with how the EPS is handling the case. There is a petition circulating asking for the Alberta government to form a task force to find ways to solve the murders. So far it has over 2000 signatures.
Last month Shannon Barry, a lesbian, was violently attacked while walking home from Whyte Ave with some of her friends. Barry was beaten so badly she needed reconstructive surgery. A 14-year-old boy has been charged in the assault. Within 12 hours of a photo of her bruised and dazed appearing on Facebook her friends formed the Community Response Project with over 800 members to react to the brutal crime and incompetence of the Edmonton Police Service. The attending officer the night of the attack failed to file a report until five days later, after CBC Edmonton's Charles Rusnell broke the story.
Barry has said that since news of the assault broke she has received messages from over 150 people from all walks of life sharing their own stories of being attacked and systems in place offering little or no satisfactory service.
At the end of the first Community Response Project meeting, held in the cramped, partially flooded Pride Centre basement—which had been broken into a few days earlier—Barry donated a modest sum to the Centre, which had been donated to her by a group in Jasper who heard of her attack. Barry said that she could not, as an individual, accept the donation considering the state the Centre was in. Barry's generosity is noteworthy considering that she will be out of work for a while due to the attack, and that, historically, women earn less than men, and lesbians earn less than their heterosexual counterparts.
While each of the violent attacks—be them physical, verbal or systemic—warrant their own specific understanding in terms of the personal, societal and systemic issues at play it is important to pull back and see the incidents of violence in context of each other. When you do so it is clear that difference is still under attack in Alberta.
Despite initiatives such as the EPS Chief's Community Advisory Council—meant to "foster a climate of safety, security and mutual respect" in diverse communities—in all the above cases there is a dissatisfaction with the systems in place to deal with the violence. Instead, it is community members and grassroots organizations that are coming forward to provide support, work to achieve satisfying versions of justice and address larger issues that result in violence. While the work and effort of community members like Shannon and organizations like the Wicihitowin group, the Somalis who have started the petition and the Community Response Project should be applauded, it's fair to ask what the implications of private citizens and small organizations using their limited resources to meet the needs that the organizations are funded to provide are. In what ways are communities subsidizing the bad work of government funded institutions like the EPS which put forward a proposed budget of $238.6 million for 2010 (an 11 percent increase from the previous year)? In what ways could those funds be reallocated for more truly community-based, approaches to justice? How would establishing such approaches help alleviate some of the work of the EPS, thus enabling it to do a better job of serving the public without increasing its budget and turning Edmonton into a more-dysfunctional police state?
Overwhelmingly there seems to be a desire to rethink justice, be it the violent attackers who are arguably avenging their own sense of order, or the victims of such attacks who want more than just jail time for those that hurt them. In Edmonton, as across Alberta, the fallacy of normal continues to be obliterated as we grow more diverse. As this continues, more work needs to be done to understand how race, class, orientation, gender and other factors intersect not only to prevent further acts of violence but also to learn how to properly deal with incidents when they occur. In 21st-century Alberta, nothing should be considered normal.
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