Saskatoon's police chief says there's "no balance" in a report alleging that police in Saskatchewan are mistreating Indigenous women.

On Monday, the New York-based organization Human Rights Watch released a report detailing dozens of stories of alleged abuse. The organization heard accounts of overly intrusive strip searches, excessive use of force, racial profiling and sexual harassment.

Saskatoon Police Chief Clive Weighill says the report is "one-sided" because many police forces spoke with Human Rights Watch during its research, but none of the efforts being made by police forces to address these issues were included in the report.

"There's no balance, so when the reader sees this they think everything is operating like it was 20 years ago, and that's not the case," he said.

He said the Saskatoon Police Service "is probably the leading agency in Canada on the way that we deal with missing and murdered Indigenous files."

He pointed out the memorial recently erected in front of the police headquarters.

Cree artist Lionel Peyachew's statue honouring missing and murdered Indigenous women sits outside Saskatoon Police headquarters. (Dan Zakreski/CBC)

Weighill added the force has been doing "intensive" cultural sensitivity training.

"All our officers are very, very familiar with colonialism, with the White Paper, with the Sixties Scoop, with the contemporary issues that are facing our Indigenous population here in Saskatoon," he said.

"We've done a lot of things in our service here and we talked to [Human Rights Watch] on this but they didn't mention any of this. It's all just been the very negative things that they've dug up."

Call for civilian oversight

One of the main recommendations from the report is for the province to establish an independent, civilian special investigation unit to look at reported incidents of serious police misconduct. Saskatchewan is one of five provinces that doesn't have such an independent, civilian unit.

We have spent a lot of time and effort across the province to attract a reflection of our different communities and we're struggling. - Marlo Pritchard, Weyburn police chief

In response, Weyburn Police Chief Marlo Pritchard, who is president of Saskatchewan Association of Chiefs of Police, said there are a number of oversight bodies in place already, like the Public Complaints Commission.

But the report points out that in many cases, the commission delegates the investigation to the municipal police service in question.

"The present oversight structures are no guarantee of independent investigations and accountability," says the report. "Both investigations and disciplinary action may ultimately be determined internally by the implicated police service."

Weighill said an independent, civilian body "brings a lot more credibility" for the public to a complaint review.

"We would certainly work with any independent body," he said.

Recruiting issues

Pritchard said recruiting more women and Indigenous people to join police forces has been a challenge. In Weyburn, Sask., he estimated about 20 per cent of officers are female and 10 per cent are Indigenous.

"We have spent a lot of time and effort across the province to attract a reflection of our different communities and we're struggling," he said.

"I think policing is not a profession of choice at this time — and it's not just from those diverse communities, it's from everybody."

Pritchard said the Human Rights Watch report would be discussed at the next meeting of Saskatchewan police chiefs "to see what can we learn from this and where can we go from here."