Police task force, housing initiative to combat opioid crisis on the Blood Tribe

The Blood  First Nation is planning to bolster policing and put money behind combating the opioid crisis on the reserve. Chief and council live streamed an announcement on April 17 to lay out an interdepartmental plan to address specifically drug trafficking and housing.

Chief Roy Fox said $1 million has been set aside to work on two immediate initiatives; a police task force and a housing renovation program to restore abandoned homes. 

“Some of the abandoned homes situated primarily in the townsites, are being used for illegal drug purposes and we will again utilize our own source revenues in renovating these houses so deserving homeless families can have adequate houses to live in. We will begin repairing an initial amount of houses and continue to rebuild as we negotiate with other governments towards additional funding,” Fox said. 

The task force will specifically focus on keeping drugs from being brought onto the reserve, according to Fox. He said police will also use trespassing laws more strictly to apprehend and/or expel outside criminal sources from the nation.

“We do a lot of our work kind of in the shadows and quietly but with this one, make no mistake, we are coming — this has gone on way too long, we are not hiding, we are not going to be sneaky about it — we are coming. This is our part to help the reserve,” said acting police chief Grant Buckskin. “I think that this is something that needs to be sustained until we reach a point within our community where we have healed enough and we can deal with that without having to go with such strong enforcement.”

According to Fox, the new initiatives should start by the end of this month with more than $1.5 million behind them. 

“We have utilized our own funds from various sources over the last few years towards alleviating the harm that our people have suffered as a result of drug abuse and dependency. We will again use our own sourced revenues in combating the resurgence of the drug abuse crisis and we will also leverage those amounts in convincing other governments to help in our fight to save our people,” he said.