The dark, and very recent, past of Prince George still haunts the city

An investigative piece in the Toronto Star serves as a reminder of the disturbing revelations that came about in the 1990s and early 2000s, and how much we still don't know

December 15, 2022

Today’s newsletter has a content warning of sexual violence against children. Notice will be given if you want to read the first part before closing this letter. Crisis line phone numbers and websites can be found here.

First, the news:

Oh, and I got TWO emails yesterday and they were very nice (and informative!) So I will once again remind you that you can respond to this by simply replying to the email you get in your inbox! Love to hear from you (more on this tomorrow).

Our crime rate is through the roof. So: Now what?

On Tuesday I wrote about a report prepared for the city outlining the dire strait of policing here, which includes a police case load and crime rate wildly out of proportion with other major cities in the province. To give you a sense of things, here’s a graph appearing in the CBC article about this same report (co-authored by me) that indicates both population and individual case load per police officer. As you can see Prince George has the highest case load by far — and the lowest population.

Yesterday was council’s chance to here directly from the report authors and offer their reactions. Here’s the reporting in the Citizen, My Prince George Now, CKPG and CBC. You should read them all but here are the broad strokes:

  • Usually, the perception that crime is bad and getting worse in a city does not match the reality when you look at statistics. In Prince George, it’s actually the opposite, according to the report’s lead author: If anything, we don’t have a clear idea on just how bad it is.

  • There is no plan for how to fix this. The police are underresourced. There are lots of social agencies doing their best, but there is no coordination or overall strategy. We are not unique in this regard.

  • Council is… not happy. They described the report as “eye-opening,” and “very, very disappointing.” They also expressed — again — despair that they have been left in this situation and asked to pick up the tab when really, it should be the provincial and federal governments funding solutions.

In the end, no decision was made - yet. The report was received and the ask for funding additional police officers will be part of budget discussions early next year.

And while the recommendations presented to council talk a lot about focusing on specific community-policing and proactive policies, rather than a reactive model of arrresting, arresting, arresting it is worth noting the ask is still, largely, for more police, albeit ones targeted to specific areas like working with youth and outreach groups — and this, I think, should also be considered through the lens of the next story in this newsletter, which comes with a content warning, including sexual violence against children. Scroll down to read it — or if you are opting out, talk to you tomorrow.

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The dark, and very recent, past of Prince George still haunts the city

An investigative piece in the Toronto Star serves as a reminder of the disturbing revelations that came about in the 1990s and early 2000s, and how much we still don't know

“This an incredibly frustrating story. If the question was, “Were officers of the court, were authority figures, sexually abusing and assaulting underage Indigenous kids in Prince George, B.C. — well, we know the answer. I mean, a judge pled guilty to that almost 20 years ago.

“And in the process of his admission, we learned that it’s probably not just him and the cops are involved and you would think in a sane country that there would be moral outrage and that would lead to, ‘Now let’s find out who was involved and let’s make a clean break of this,” so we can move on with some kind of dignity and some kind of assurance that this is a safe place for the most vulnerable people — and it takes almost twenty years just to kind of nail down what everybody knew in 2004.”

Those words come near the endpoint of this episode of the Canadaland podcast, titled “Cops, Lies and Videotape.” They are spoken by host Jesse Brown in reaction to the reporting of Jessica McDiarmand, freelance journalist and author of the bestseller, Highway of Tears.

The pair are talking about McDiarmand’s investigation published in the Toronto Star, under the headlined “A video allegedly showed an RCMP officer sexually harassing an Indigenous teen. Then it went missing.”

First, the judge: In 2004, judge David Ramsay pled guilty to five charges of buying sex from minors, Indigenous girls between the ages of 12 and 16, as well as sexual assault causing bodily harm and breach of trust. As reported at the time:

“According to an agreed statement of fact read in court, "He picked the girls up on the street on different occasions, drove them to a rural area near the jail and paid them for sex."

“When one girl asked him to use a condom he slammed her head on the dashboard until she bled, then chased her when she ran away. He slapped her, sexually assaulted her, called her a whore and smiled, the court was told.

“Another girl was left naked near the highway and threatened with death if she told anyone.”

Ramsay was sentenced to seven years in prison and died of cancer while incarcerated.

This I knew.

What came after, as reported by McDiarmand, I did not:

“The allegations didn’t stop at Ramsay. Some of his victims, and others in Prince George, also implicated the police, alleging as many as nine RCMP officers committed sexual harassment and assault, engaged underaged youth in sexual acts and perpetrated other misconduct.”

From here a task force was formed, project E-Prevails. It doesn’t seem much came of it. A 2019 report from VICE News gets into some of that, beginning its story with a now-dead Indigenous woman who alleged she’d been picked up for sex and assaulted by an undercover officer in Prince George. The officer maintains his innocence and the allegations have not been proven.

Nor have the allegations documented by McDiarmand, which include videos alleged to portray officers harassing Indigenous girls about their breasts. The bulk of her story is about how those tapes went missing, how an investigation into how those tapes went missing went seemingly nowhere, and how nearly two decades later the RCMP is still in the process of looking — or not — into this. It also includes testimony from Dana Gerow, who grew up in foster care and recounts being sexually harassed by police in Prince George and says, “I still don’t trust the cops.”

It’s easy — and true — to say none of this is unique to Prince George. In the podcast, Brown remarks how similar the stories out of Prince George are to those of Thunder Bay, a city his team has reported on extensively. In the Star, Gerow remarks, “It’s not just (Prince George), it’s eveywhere,” about the harassment by police. But it still matters.

Think about what happened in the course of the 1990s in Prince George. We have allegations that multiple police officers were sexually harassing and assaulting Indigenous girls, and real questions documented by McDiarmand about whether the RCMP properly handled that investigation. We have the admission of a judge that over the course of nearly a decade, he repeatedly abused Indigenous girls, exploiting them and having sex with them. This is also the same decade that the head of the Prince George diocese resigned when in 1991 he became the highest-ranking Catholic official in the country to be charged with sex crimes, eventually convicted of raping students.

Gerow is the same age as me. We both grew up here. But while I have memories of being taught to call the police if I ever felt in danger, she has memories of being harassed by them.

These things shape us, and the things that shape us shape our city. There is a very, very dark side to the place we call home and that needs to be out in the open if we want to have any hope of moving forward.

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