Red Dress Day
Tan-Se. Hello. Today I wanted to share with you why myself and many other police officers will be walking with community members on Sunday, May 5th as we go out together to bring awareness around murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in Canada. My name is Inspector Kim Mueller and I'm the Officer of Indigenous Policing for the Alberta RCMP.
And every year we observe May 5th, Red Dress Day. This is a day where we bring awareness to the growing concern around murdered and missing indigenous women and girls files in Canada and North America, and why, as Canadians, we should stand up and take action to protect some of Canada's most vulnerable in Canada. Indigenous women like myself make up approximately 4% of the population, yet we make up over 16% of the female homicides and over 11% of the female missing persons reports.
It has been almost five years since the anniversary of the inquiry into the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls phenomenon in Canada, and the release of the findings and the 231 calls for justice.
The RCMP has taken great steps to address change in relation to the calls for justice. However, so much more needs to be done to protect our indigenous women, girls and LGBTQ+ who are most at risk.
I know that in my First Nation, like many other Indigenous communities in Canada, we are frustrated and demand justice for our stolen sisters. Today, I want to try to not only shed some light on this issue, but suggest ways that we can work together to create change.
In Alberta, between 2014 and 2024. We had 62 homicides of Indigenous women in RCMP jurisdiction, with a solve rate of just under 94% of those cases. I share this with you, not only to demonstrate that the Alberta RCMP is dedicated to these victims and their families, but also because there are several lessons around who are most at risk are who the offenders are and the relationship between the two.
We learned that there are many factors facing Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQ+ members of our community. They face poverty, lack of family support. They battle low self-esteem, often have limited job opportunities. They're battling a failing education system, lack of protection against violence, and often struggle with addictions. We also learned about our offenders. Most of the offenders were male.
They were likely to have been convicted of a violent offense in the past. They were likely to have a history of family or domestic violence. They were likely to have a criminal record, be unemployed. and in most cases, they were intoxicated at the time of the offense. We also learned a lot about the relationship between the victim and the offender.
More often than not, the offender is known to the victim. They are a spouse, a family member, an intimate partner, or an acquaintance. Only a handful of times did we see that the offender was unknown or a stranger to the victim. Now knowing this, we need to work together to create prevention and education tools in our communities. We need to create more awareness and safe spaces, healing circles for those impacted for the LGBTQ, indigenous women and girls.
And we need to instill our culture and community supports. We need to incorporate culture into our justice practices, our policing, our health care, and our education systems. We need to learn more about trauma informed approaches when working with vulnerable sectors, and we need to implement restorative justice practices in our communities.
Within the Alberta RCMP, we are trying to play our part. We are educating our staff on Indigenous culture and awareness, providing bias awareness training using a trauma informed approach and increasing Indigenous representation within the RCMP, which includes our recruiting and creating more committee opportunities within the RCMP. We're improving policies and policing standards around the investigation of domestic violence and missing persons files.
We know there are so much more to be done and that we must work with you, our communities.
In closing, know that your Alberta RCMP remains committed to working with our communities to honor, empower and protect Indigenous women, girls, and LGBTQ+. I hope to see you out May 5th as we create awareness around Red Dress Day. Thank you. Hi. Hi.