Manitoba is forming an integrated police task force to review the cases of murdered and missing women, many of them aboriginal.
Manitoba Attorney General Dave Chomiak, Winnipeg Police Chief Keith McCaskill and RCMP Assistant Commissioner Bill Robinson made the announcement Wednesday.
The new unit will be reviewing dozens of cases of missing women and unsolved murders of women.
The unit features: three RCMP officers, two RCMP analysts and four Winnipeg police officers.
"We all want answers and we all want closure and we all want a safe community for everyone," Chomiak said.
Calls for the task force have been growing within the aboriginal community since two more women were found dead on the outskirts of Winnipeg.
"We recognize that there is a lot of sadness, anxiety and fear out in the communities," Robinson said Wednesday.
"The public want this. The police want this. We want to make sure that if someone is operating in our community in a fashion that is causing the deaths of multiple women, we want to get to the bottom of it."
Last Thursday, police found the body of 18-year-old Hillary Angel Wilson about six weeks after they found her friend, 17-year-old Cherisse Houle, dead in a creek.
Police say there are about 20 missing aboriginal women in Manitoba where they suspect foul play. However, the Native Women's Association of Canada says adding murdered women to the list puts the number at more than 70.
"All these unsolved murders isn't right," Brittany Genialle, a friend of Wilson's, told CTV Winnipeg. "They just get away with it 'cause they dump their bodies in the outskirts. It's not right. No innocent girl deserves to die."
The association estimates that there are more than 500 cases of missing or murdered aboriginal women across Canada, the majority in the West.
Merle Greene, executive director of Mother of Red Nations Women's Council of Manitoba, calls the issue "a crisis."
"I really don't believe the issue has been taken seriously," Greene told the Canadian Press.
Raven Thundersky, whose sister was murdered in 1981, said the task force is a long-time coming and she hopes that it will devote the manpower needed "to start investigating some of these cold cases that have been sitting on the shelf collecting dust for decades."
In an interview Wednesday on CTV's Canada AM, Thundersky said there is a culture of distrust that exists between the aboriginal community and police that needs to be broken if the perpetrators are to be caught.
"I think there's a thick wall between society and law enforcement agencies because there is no trust on either side," Thundersky said.
"And I think one of the things that needs to happen is that we need to start bringing that wall down so that we can work together and start trusting one another so that we can start putting a name and a face to the person or persons responsible for some of these murders."
The Native Women's Association of Canada says there are about 520 cases of missing or murdered aboriginal women in Canada, with most of them from the western provinces.
