This post is not meant to be argumentative. Due to the current political climate, we felt it was appropriate to educate others on the news rather than write an opinion piece. Please check out the additional resources that we have listed below to learn more.
Our spending represents what someone is prioritizing. If someone were to spend lots of money on fashion and beauty, then it’s obvious that we know fashion and beauty is their priority. If someone spends money on investments like real estate or stocks, we know they’re focusing on making money. The same happens when we analyze the budgets of regions (national, regional, municipal). While we approach a time where budgets are being scrutinized under the microscope and many regions and single-tier municipalities are moving towards voting on legislation on policing, it’s important to understand what our budgets look like. Around 30% of all taxpayer dollars ($162 million out of $560 million) went towards police in Halton this year and the TPS (Toronto Police Services) has a budget of over 1.1 million, more than the funding allocated for libraries, shelters and housing combined. These numbers demonstrate a priority of punishment over rehabilitation in our societies.
Why prioritizing punishment isn’t working:
In very simple terms, policing is part of a complex system that perpetuates racism in different ways. Police contribute to the prison complex system in America and are unable to de-escalate and deal with things like mental health crises. This issue plus personal biases and stereotypes can systematically put people of colour lives in danger. We have seen this issue in many cases recently in Canada: Chantel Moore and Regis Korchinski-Paquet are both examples of “wellness checks” gone wrong. Our data shows us this bias clearly: “Between 2013 and 2017, a Black person in Toronto was nearly 20 times more likely than a White person to be involved in a fatal shooting by the Toronto Police Service (TPS). Despite making up only 8.8% of Toronto’s population, data obtained by the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) from the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) shows that Black people were over-represented in use of force cases (28.8%), shootings (36%), deadly encounters (61.5%) and fatal shootings (70%). Black men make up 4.1% of Toronto’s population, yet were complainants in a quarter of SIU cases alleging sexual assault by TPS officers.” — This is the first sentence from the executive summary from an interim report done by the Ontario Human Rights Commissions. Clearly, the statistics show us there is something wrong here; but are they doing anything good?
The main purpose of police throughout history has been to preserve the safety of citizens and to maintain law and order. However, experts like James McCabe, a retired New York Police Department official who travels the country as a police staffing consultant, reaffirm that police don’t have a direct relationship with crime. Data shows that the raw numbers of police have declined over the past five years, and the rate of police officers per 1,000 residents has been dropping for two decades. At the same time, the violent crime rate has also dropped. One gang member told journalist Jill Leovy, who wrote about under-policing in Los Angeles in her 2015 book “Ghettoside,” while other people call emergency services when they have problems, in his neighbourhood they “pick up the phone and call our homeboys.” The issue of over-policing and under policing seems to contribute to the idea that police do not deter crime in neighbourhoods where there is a crime. It seems we are not funding for law and order and the safety of citizens. We are punishing black people disproportionately and funding the people who punish them.
This issue isn’t new and different ideas and solutions around the world are suggested to make black communities not feel victimized by the people who are supposed to be protecting them. Popular left-wing figures in politics like Bernie Sanders and Justin Trudeau have called for change or “far-reaching reforms” as Bernie put it in his letter to minority leader Chuck Schumer. Justin Trudeau has already promised body cameras as “only one measure amongst many, many things that we need to do to address systemic challenges in this country to racialized and Indigenous Canadians.” Trudeau’s body cameras are implemented to create transparency and accountability, just like civilian boards and more funded police departments which will help fund investigations and accountability.
However, many activists have called reforms like these ineffective. The popular #8CantWait campaign which claims to use research to create 8 proposals that will help save lives and restrict the use of force unnecessarily was criticized by Human Rights Watch for having reforms that were “minor and ineffectual changes”. The argument against reforms is that they simply aren’t enough — which has some merit. If you reflect upon past actions dealing with police brutality, they mostly consist of reforming and funding policies and programs. Some of the #8CantWait policies are already implemented in the biggest police departments, but they still don’t meet the standards outlined in international law. And while putting more money and reforms in place is still a valid solution to police brutality, many people have proposed a new idea.
Revisiting the Core Principals of Public Safety:
Simply put, most activists are proposing (or demanding in some cases) that we, as a society, hit the ‘reset’ button on public safety measures that have caused an over-reliance on law enforcement. Resetting our public safety measures means something different according to each person but there are two main ideas.
Defunding the police would consist of taking a large percentage of the budget allocated towards police and distributing it elsewhere. Referring back to budgets, our budgets show a system of punishing those who commit crimes; but let’s flip the table. Let’s imagine a society that prioritizes rehabilitation and rooting out the causes of crime: homelessness, lack of youth support and addiction and so much more. If we take the $15 billion we spend in policing and put them towards funding drug addiction programs or local shelters we might be able to help reduce crime from the roots and not need so many police. We can also take this money and hire social workers to help respond to mental health crises or homeless people, where force is usually unnecessary in most circumstances. The Stanford Experiment is a great example of why social workers and people without weapons are often a better solution then police. The experiment had shown that the guards would humiliate and psychologically abuse the prisoners, and the prisoners would rarely ever object to the harm. However, 24 hours before the experiment, the ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’ were middle-class college students, not figures of authority. If in 24 hours, normal people started to psychologically abuse for simply being in a position of power, then many years of being viewed as a figure of authority may cause inevitable outcomes. The experiment proved the theory that figures of authority might abuse their power unnecessarily, and hurt others for no particular reason. (There is an argument that the Stanford Prison Experiment was debunked — take a look. It argues that the ‘guards’ already knew what the outcome was supposed to be, undermining the social experiment’s legitimacy altogether.) There is evidence to prove that police officers need a sense of superiority. For example, the infamous 40% statistic from an old study claimed that 40% of police officer families experience domestic abuse. Defunding the police recognizes a fundamental issue of excessive force and systemic causes and attempts to root it out, addressing the deeper layers of crime rather than the surface level.
Abolishment is similar to defunding, but it calls for other actions that will demilitarize, disarm and even sometimes dismantle police. However, it usually doesn’t mean the full dissolution of police. Despite what the phrase abolish the police might convey, most abolitionists don’t want to fully eliminate police. They just want to revisit the idea of ‘emergency services’ and what types of services might be. Common themes include: Reducing the police force considerably; funding and creating models that use mental health workers and prohibit police; crisis Intervention and Mad co-lead support teams; remove surveillance-style policing and demilitarize police and communities; address the connection between policing and the prison complex system; decriminalization of survival-based crimes and/or non-violent crimes. However, the definition of abolition can change person-to-person and doesn’t mean that everything that was mentioned needs to happen for us to ‘abolish’ the police.
Canada’s future will be marked by these ideas and our response to police brutality will be crucial for our upcoming years. It’s not wrong to want to maintain a powerful, strong police force. But funding a police force that demonstrates bias should concern the citizens of Canada. It’s hard to imagine we marched in the streets to fight against the funding of police. But we marched the streets for a carbon-neutral country, a country where women don’t fear sexual assault and to stop the construction of pipelines into First Nations territory. Are we a nation that prioritizes punishment or rehabilitation? It’s a question that will characterize 2020.
Additional Resources:
Take Action:
General Resources:
Micah Herskind, Medium (Resource Hub)
The Issue:
Mapping Police Violence: Download the database
Police Use of Force Project: Here is an Analysis. Here is the Full Study. Here is the Website.
Washington Post: Their own database of police shootings and the trends found with their own recordings.
Anna North, Vox: How racist policing took over American cities, explained by a historian
Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative: Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020
ACLU: School-to-Prison Pipeline
Eric Schlosser, The Atlantic: The Prison-Industrial Complex
German Lopez, Vox: The war on drugs, explained
Drug Policy: Race and the Drug War
German Lopez, Vox: The controversial 1994 crime law that Joe Biden helped write, explained
Solutions (Articles on police abolition and reforms):
Vox: 4 ideas to replace traditional police officers
Edward Ongweso Jr, Vice: ‘Defund the Police’ Actually Means Defunding the Police
Tasha Amezcua, Ejeris Dixon & Che J. Rene Long, Truthout: Ten Lessons for Creating Safety Without Police
Peter Jamison, Washington Post: This California city defunded its police force. Killings by officers soared.
