RCMP report paints all Indians as "Crime Organizers". MNN. Feb. 20, 2005. The RCMP, in its eternal quest for law and order, has redefined crime. Its ground-breaking analysis was published by the Research and Evaluation Branch of the RCMP. It's titled, "Aboriginal Organized Crime in Canada: Developing a Typology for Understanding and Strategizing Responses". The authors were E.J. Dickson-Gilmore, PhD. and Chris Whitehead of Carleton University, Ottawa. Their mandate is unclear. Using classic racial profiling techniques, they give the RCMP a set of labels that can be applied to anyone in their on-going quest to criminalize all aspects of Indigenous life. This is an old colonial game. Their zeal to cash in on the Indigenous monitoring scam is apparent. Dickson-Gilmore and the RCMP are promoting a definition of crime that is so broad. It includes everyone, including the Prime Minister of Canada, the President of the United States, Supreme Courts of both countries, the police themselves and the legitimate representatives of any government you care to name. This is how they did it. In the absence of any evidence of "Aboriginal organized crime in Canada", they were forced to re-define "organized crime". They wanted to justify what they were up to - Racial Profiling! Character assassination! For the past 2000 years, nulle criminenen sine lege has been established law. It means "there can be no crime without a law". This is a human right under modern international law, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the U.S. Constitution. No one can be convicted without a fair and public trial. This report is a wholesale lynching of the Indigenous people. Dickson-Gilmore wasn't going to let law get in her way. She was doing this work for the R.C.M.P. They always get their man. She made up her own definition: "Organized crime is ongoing activity motivated by political, social and/or economic conditions or ends (or some combination thereof), which is articulated through a network of both formal and informal co-operative social relationships whose structure is greater than any single member, with the potential for corruption and/or violence to facilitate the criminal process." This chunk of verbal diarrhea is found on "page 13" of her 43-page report. The RCMP should be embarrassed for sponsoring such sloppy work. They posted it on the internet at http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/ccaps/research_eval_e.htm. Shame! Shame! Were the authors hexed? This definition is garbage. All governments are "motivated by political, social and economic ends"! All governments use "a network of both formal and informal cooperative social relationships". All governments have a "potential for corruption and/or violence". This report is evidence of the kind of corruption it appears to warn against. I am shocked to learn what Dickson-Gilmore has been up to. She was my M.A. thesis supervisor at Carleton University. She has defined me, my family and friends as criminals without providing evidence. When she was hanging around Kahnawake gathering material for her PhD, she never indicated she felt this way about us. Last week she looked me in the face and smiled when I told her I'd seen her report. According to Edward Said and Albert Memmi, the colonizers suffer from a mental imbalance that prevents them from seeing the effects of their actions on their victims, even when they're tripping over the corpses. Dickson-Gilmore claims her expertise comes from her association with us. But her typology is wrong. It doesn't describe us. It describes the institutions of government in her country, Canada. This includes the illegal "band council" system that has been forced on us. Did she realize she was describing their criminal nature? Dickson-Gilmore admits there is no clear evidence of "Aboriginal organized crime" in Canada. She gives the R.C.M.P. "probabilities", "assumptions" and innuendo. What ever happened to "The facts M'am. Just the facts"? The real facts can't justify the increases in police salaries and programs they want. This is a $cam, folks! They're all out for $$$$$$$. They need CRIMINALS. Since they can't find them, they have to invent them. So Dickson-Gilmore invented four "Aboriginal organized criminal types". This makes the R.C.M.P. so happy. That's just about every Indian. They have the: They're missing the mother lode by looking for "criminals" in all the wrong places. Let's take a closer look at how Dickson-Gilmore's "criminal" types work out in the real world: (1) Activist/Nationalist Types "rationalize their participation in the newly defined "organized crime" as "an expression of their culture, history or rights". They do not see themselves as being bound by the laws of other nations. Oops! The Supreme Courts of Canada and the United States fit this definition. They do not recognize our Indigenous laws or institutions. They benefit from a "tithing system". Their pay comes from funds extorted from the people by Revenue Canada, the IRS and the courts. (2) Random/Opportunistic Types are infrequent participants in "organized crime". They are "motivated by the pressure of others who are part of their social network". They tend to be "less sophisticated and expendable" Uh oh!!! .... Like the writers of this report! (3) Activist/Opportunistic Types "often begin with some form of nationalist/activist motivations". Over time they "evolve into a much more selfish motivation". They believe "that compensation must fall to them owing to their importance in the nationalist and activist agenda". Hey! Why don't the R.C.M.P. go after Prime Minister Paul Martin and President George Bush? (4) Criminal/Opportunistic Types are unconcerned with nationalism. They "pay lip service to the activist nationalist positions". They are motivated by personal gain. They will seize any opportunity to gain it. So there you go! The R.C.M.P. can saddle up their horses and chase after the multi-national mega corporations. Eh? We shouldn't laugh. Let's not forget the historical connection between criminality and the institutions of the colonial governments. They violently forced their laws on us. They used murder, corruption and lies to feed their greed, to steal our land and to destroy our ways of life. Under international law they could never have gotten away with this. They would have been convicted for their criminal acts of imposing their sham band and tribal council systems and trying to destroy our traditional governments. Dickson-Gilmore doesn't say a word about the genocide that has been, and is being, committed against Indigenous people. She says nothing about the tragedy lived every day by the displaced Indigenous people in the West. She says Thunder Bay is a "prairie city". She overlooks the massacre of the buffalo, the starvation of the people, the callous attempts to stop our pioneering agricultural initiatives, the incarceration and killing of our leaders, the kidnapping of our children into residential schools where they were raped and killed? Dickson-Gilmore makes it sound as if we are primitive people who are having difficulty adjusting to cities. She doesn't talk about how we have been frustrated at every turn. Including by her report! She does not mention the recent murders of Indigenous youth by Saskatoon police. Nor does she say anything about the disappearance of over 500 [3000+ really] Indigenous women which the police refuse to investigate. She rattles on about the Aboriginal crime that she has no evidence of. She uses language incorrectly in non-sensical ways. What are we supposed to make of "precise incipience" and other hyperbolic nonsense? Or "requisite to a sound appreciation of the nature and degree of participation in organized crime activities among Aboriginal people in Canada that is necessary to contextualize Aboriginal crime in terms of its magnitude both as part of organized crime in Canada generally and within rates of crime and disorder among First Nations". There is no evidence that we are engaged in "organized criminal activity". Yet Dickson-Gilmore spends 43 pages talking about it. We are convicted by association. She makes people think that where there's smoke there must be fire. That's why this report burns us up. She defames us and our nations. Dickson-Gilmore smiled at me. She's trying to play both sides of the fence. She ends by saying the state should "move to real and ethical negotiations towards the realization of Aboriginal and treaty rights". This is too little, too late. After bashing us with unfounded, convoluted, multi-syllabic and defamatory innuendo, steam shoots from our ears. She managed to pull the wool over the eyes of her RCMP clients. They had the gall to publish her false and hateful diatribe on their website. What can we do about these destructive and defamatory lies? Kahentinetha Horn
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