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Iain Scott introduced our guest speaker, Bonnie Emerson, who is co-president of “Sleep in Heavenly Peace”, a non-profit organization that builds, delivers and installs beds with bedding for children in Winnipeg who do not have a bed. Their motto is “No kid sleeps on the floor in our town!”. Bonnie Emerson is a proud Indigenous woman from Winnipeg's North End, a committed community advocate, and a police officer. She is a Senior Manager leading the Winnipeg Police Community Support Division, which encompasses Diversity Relations, Indigenous Partnership, Crime Prevention, Victim and Volunteer, School Engagement and Auxiliary Cadet Sections. She has been actively involved in community, non-government organizations and boards, for over 3 decades, working to address poverty, employment, conflict resolution and safety and wellbeing. In 2019 Bonnie was selected (along with 22 other people from around the world) to participate in a 3 month Rotary Peace Fellowship at Chulalongkorn University’s Rotary Peace Centre in Bangkok Thailand. This experience has allowed her to network and build bridges from a global to a local perspective. She is committed to creating unlikely partnerships for the furthering of positive peace and making system changes from within and outside our systems and structures. Bonnie began her presentation by telling us who she is and a bit about her career. She grew up in Winnipeg’s north end in an era when police officers were peace keepers. Coming from an indigenous family, she decided she was going to help people. For about 25 years, she worked in the police service in the core area, in uniform. After 9 years, seeing the same things – poverty and challenges - she became somewhat frustrated and began thinking that there had to be a way to help. She worked in the north end, downtown, working in areas of morality and undercover drugs, where she was shocked by what she saw – the amount of money, exploitation and drugs – but it made her a better person as a police officer to see that – and to have candid conversations with people as a police office – without judgement. Based on those important relationships, information networks were built. Following this, she went into the commercial crimes area and learned how “white collar’ crime affected what was happening on the street. Next area she went into was into “community” where she rode a bicycle, making her a police officer that was approachable and friendly. The conversations that she had there provided her with another “aha moment” – looking into policies that affected supervising shifts to take care of officers whose work put them in harm’s way as they tried to help people, but was having a bad effect on their personal lives and their own mental health. She then worked on getting a promotion. She worked downtown, the north end, the community support unit, investigation …... and kept being promoted. In the north end, she ran a kids group, which involved indigenous elders in partnership with police and positive role models on the internet. She was then transferred and promoted again, and the police service allowed her to continue to volunteer with the kids group. At this point she was in a plain clothes position (i.e. not in uniform). After 3 years of doing this, people forgot that she was a police officer. Parents and kookums (grandmothers) identified Bonnie as just a helper. Then a couple of times people realized she was a police officer and that changed how they viewed her. She was suspected of being racist or doing something “bad”. Now, when she identifies herself, she starts by mentioning her various involvements in the community’s committees and ends with saying that she is a police officer. She also learned, in working with community groups, that there are differences in interpretations of certain terms that academics and police use. For example a term like “student assessment” or “threat assessment” meant something like 40 hours of social work consultations to school educators but in police terms, it meant “Let’s just look at a couple of parameters and get this done!”. When Bonnie was a Staff Sargent, Rotary’s David Newman approached her boss about having her apply for a Rotary Peace Fellowship. She applied, even though she never expected to be selected. She had to convince people how non-violent conflict resolution was related to police work. She used 8 weeks of her holidays and the police service allowed her to use 6 (which is unheard of in the Winnipeg Police department) to attend the three month long Rotary Professional Development training at Chulalongkorn University’s Rotary Peace Centre in Bangkok, Thailand. There she met the 22 people from around the world taking the same course and some of them shared their perceptions of Canada and it was not what she thought. Canada is valued and appreciated in peace work, but there are some parts of Canada’s history that she never learned in school. For example, Louis Riel was considered to be a traitor when Canadian history was taught in elementary schools during the 30s, 40s and‘50s, but now he is being hailed as one of the fathers of Manitoba. During her fellowship and studies at Chulalongkorn, she learned the language of academics and peace keepers and was able to use this in the context of her work when she returned to Winnipeg. She now has partnerships globally and locally with community workers. (Apparently 30 years of policing was not sufficient credibility for doing peace work in the community, but going on a Peace Fellowship was.) Bonnie has done some training in Indonesia - Mediation Beyond Borders International (on mine mapping and conflict resolution tools), sits on the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) Policing with Indigenous Peoples (PWIP) Committee working on a national framework for police response to mass assemblies and demonstrations (i.e. to rallies and protests, which was the focus of Bonnie’s research project at Chulalongkorn). The committee is looking at how police services across Canada can implement non-violent conflict resolution. Bonnie also sits on the Training Commission, which trains police officers. She has learned that Canada’s residential school system was studied and used by South Africa to develop apartheid. She feels that how Canada will change by learning from the past, coupled with the current training of police officers will provide an example of how we can change in a peaceful, non-violent way. Bonnie is currently a member of the Rotary committee that screens candidates for Rotary International’s peace programs and she encourages other people from Winnipeg so that we have other Canadians who are part of this global network. Following her presentation, Bonnie was asked by PDG Ed what “reconciliation” means. Her response was that the word reconciliation means different things to different people. In Bonnie’s opinion, reconciliation means a post-colonial case study and Canadians repairing some of the harms that were done in the past. Jagdish questioned whether the recent legalization of marijuana in Canada has had an effect on street drugs. Bonnie’s lengthy response covering various street drugs as well as prescription drugs, coupled with the fact that Manitoba’s health cards do not include a photo of the card owner, led this scribe to believe that not much has changed. Lloyd thanked Bonnie for her presentation. |
