Defund the police? Disband? Abolish? What does it all really mean? How could we possibly live in a society without an agency to enforce law and order for our citizens? Who would keep us safe? Is this all just liberal jargon that shouldn’t be taken seriously?
The answer is no. It should be taken seriously — but not feared. Last week, Minneapolis city councillors unanimously voted to disband their entire police force as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd. Instead of a police force, Minneapolis will have a community-led public safety system. Their reasoning is that the current model was not redeemable, with Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota congresswoman, stating that it was “rotten to the root.”
The “Defund the Police” movement has been migrating into Canada, as well. Specifically, “Defund the VPD” has been sweeping social media over the last few weeks. While it differs from the Minneapolis decision to disband — that is, to tear it all down and build it anew — the movement calls to defund the police force.
Defunding does not mean abolishing the police force; rather, it focuses on the reallocation of funds to community programs in the hope that it will reduce the rate of crime and give more power to community members and specialists to solve issues before they become crimes. In many cases, and especially for black people, Indigenous people, and other people of colour (BIPOC) who have had the experience of police being a violent presence, law enforcement can only escalate a situation.
Rather than having police respond to everything, including mental health and addiction crises, defunding the police means redirecting funds toward preventative measures such as addiction specialists, social workers, and counsellors.
In an article from the website The Appeal discussing the decision to defund and redesign Minneapolis’s emergency response approach, it’s stated that “Law enforcement officers are not equipped to be experts in responding to mental health crises, often leading to tragic results — nationally, about half of police killings involve someone living with mental illness or disability.”
While many of the available statistics about police brutality are American, issues with policing are a reality in Canada, too. Earlier this month, a 26-year-old Indigenous woman was shot five times and killed by Edmundston police at her home after authorities had been called by the woman’s ex-boyfriend for a wellness check. Chantel Moore, a mother, was reportedly being harassed by someone in her home, and confided her worry to her ex-boyfriend, who then called the police, asking them to check up on her. Police stated that she emerged from her apartment wielding a knife, and that the officer shot her five times in self-defence.
In a response statement to Moore’s death, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the B.C. Union of Indian Chiefs, stated that “Inaction to dismantle the white supremacy foundational to policing has caused this to be one in a pattern rather than an exception, and I believe we need to tear down the systems that allow for the pattern to continue.”
Unfortunately, Indigneous deaths at the hands of Canadian police are not a new or rare phenomenon. While Indigneous people make up five per cent of the population, they account for one-third of people killed by RCMP, according to a report by the Globe and Mail. Violent encounters with police are normal for many Indigenous people in Canada.
Just last week shocking dashcam footage of First Nation Chief Allan Adam of Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Alberta being tackled by RCMP over an expired license plate tag was circulated on the internet.
It is just as bad as anything we’ve seen come out of America, and it is not rare. This is Canada. This is what Canada was built on.
In fact, the RCMP were created to control Indigenous people. In an article from Global News, Steve Hewitt, a senior history lecturer at the University of Birmingham and author of three books about the RCMP’s history, explains that the RCMP’s job “effectively, was to clear the plains, the Prairies, of Indigenous people. Ultimately, they were there to displace Indigenous people, to move them onto reserves whether they were willing to go or not.”
That is the root of systemic racism — which are policies or practices embedded in institutions that lead to discrimination against a certain group — in Canada. The RCMP have been a violently paternalistic institution from the get-go, and we cannot ignore this fact. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls’ final report states: “The RCMP have not proven to Canada that they are capable of holding themselves to account.”
Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can no longer ignore the reality of systemic violence toward Indigneous people by law enforcement. He has stated in a publicly released video:
“The videos and reports that have surfaced from across the country over the past few days are disturbing, and they bring to light the systemic realities facing far too many Canadians,” Trudeau said.
Statistics from the Tyee report that in Toronto, black people make up 37 per cent of victims killed by police. CBC News compiled a database of people who had died or were killed during a police intervention between 2000 and 2017, and after gathering information on race and ethnicity, found that black and Indigenous people were significantly overrepresented.
The Vancouver Police Department indeed has a bloated budget at $315,278,000, and recently rejected a one per cent budget cut. Meanwhile, finance minister Carole James’s new financial plan has slashed funding for numerous social programs, including an almost five per cent cut to mental health policy and research, and cuts to First Nations initiatives, public transit, and anti-racism efforts and hate speech preventative programs — not to mention the nearly 10 per cent cut to the Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation. Even more concerning is the three per cent cut to the Independent Investigations Office, a civilian-led organization that manages death and serious injury cases against police.
The reality is that social programs, especially mental health and drug prevention programs, could be the key to cutting crime. Law enforcement is a reactionary measure against crime, utilized only after a crime has taken place, and after someone has decided, out of necessity or otherwise, to commit a crime. Currently, we have police responding to mental health-, homeless-, and drug-related crises. Advocates, including Albert Cyr, retired psychologist and former chair of Ontario’s mental health community advisory committee, say that these could be better handled by mental health specialists.
Many people worry that defunding the police means totally abolishing them, but that’s not what the movement is advocating for. Sure, there are instances where the police are necessary, but what we really need is crime prevention programs and appropriate responders for situations that may become problematic.
Some preventative measures include having a crisis intervention team to intervene in situations of public intoxication, where instead of arresting that person and putting them in jail for the night, they get that person to their home where they will be safe. It could also look like training friends and neighbours in de-escalation techniques for cases of community conflict. Someone having a mental health or drug crisis could be responded to by a mental health or addictions specialist.
The point of having these initiatives is to build a more responsive community — a community that learns how to take care of one another, instead of having a police force there to dominate, divide, and control. The presence of police implies that we, as a people and community, are unable to manage ourselves and need to be managed and controlled by an external and, frankly, violent force. The reasoning behind the defund police movement is that when people feel a sense of belonging, when people are fed, housed, employed, and their needs are met they are less likely to be in desperate situations that lead them to commit crime.
Defunding police doesn’t have to be immediate — in fact, that’s not realistic — but we need a gradual reallocating of funds toward services that are better equipped to meet individuals’ needs. MPD 150, a Minneapolis-based initiative to defund the police, states that the history of police in marginalized neighbourhoods shows that they have disrupted communities, that increased policing does not reduce crime, and that police have a history of violence against these communities.
This is true in Canada as well — just take a look at the Starlight tours conducted by Winnipeg police in First Nations communities. These tours were an act of racism. Indigneous people who were targeted while intoxicated would be taken outside the city limits and forced to walk home, often in below-freezing temperatures. It’s estimated that at least 76 people were taken on these “tours.” As well as Winnipeg, at least three people in Saskatoon have been suspected of dying from this practice. You don’t need to be a professional to know that this is not the appropriate response to someone who is publicly intoxicated.
Whether it’s a mental health crisis that needs intervention, a wellness check, or overdose prevention, there are countless ways that the community can help prevent and respond to problems in their neighbourhoods, rather than calling in a police force with a history of violence and racism. Defunding the police just makes sense.
Alex Vitale, American professor of sociology and author of The End of Policing, stated in an interview with the CBC that there is a “problem of structural racism in American policing, and that is the decision by elected officials to turn the problems of black communities into policing problems.” He lists issues such as mental health, mass homelessness, and poor youth behaviour:
“So unless we address those structural decisions, tinkering with the attitudes of individual officers just isn’t going to make a difference. … Instead of trying to turn police into social workers, maybe we should just hire social workers. We should let communities identify the kinds of public safety challenges they have and give them a chance to develop non-punitive, non-coercive solutions to their problems, rather than turning them over to a force that has often not really acted in their best interest and that relies primarily on tools of violence and coercion to get things done.”
While Vitale was speaking from an American context, the issue of police discrimination and systemic racism is readily apparent in Canada as well. Haleluya Hailu, a black Grade 11 student from Burnaby North Secondary School described how the presence of police at her school has been a source of intimidation, rather than one of safety or security. She is quoted in a CBC article as saying that “If you want to get rid of gangs and drugs, having a 30-year-old dude in a bulletproof vest isn’t going to stop that. I’d rather see students making connections with counsellors, teachers, and educators who are there firsthand dealing with these students more actively and every day.”
The DefundVPD, or Defund the Vancouver Police Department, movement has created a living document describing the intentions behind the movement. Part of their statement explains that investment should be directed toward education, mental health services, housing initiatives, income security, harm reduction programs, conflict resolution services, and other community-oriented and -based support systems. They explain that “The VPD have a history of terrorizing marginalized people, especially in the DTES, and disproportionately target black and Indigenous people. Meanwhile their budget constitutes 21 per cent of the city’s operational budget.”
The Defund VPD Instagram page also provides links to a number of news stories regarding inappropriate behaviour by Vancouver police officers, including a case from 2018 where two VPD officers were accused of wide-scale harassment and inappropriate behaviour, including verbal and physical abuse, after raiding an overdose prevention site. It was not the first time the community had issues with the officers; Pivot, a legal society that focuses on poverty and social exclusion, stated that they received a total of 22 complaints against the officers in question.
An article from Pivot’s website concluded that people from racialized and marginalized communities don’t feel comfortable bringing their concerns forward or filing formal complaints. They also stated that only three out of 522 complaints against Vancouver police in 2016/17 led to internal discipline.
Clearly, the Vancouver Police are ineffective in breaching the gap between marginalized and racialized groups and themselves in a healthy way. They have not built trust with some of the most marginalized and at-risk people, who they have sworn to serve and protect, and this will arguably cause these groups to become more marginalized and be put at further risk.
Abbotsford isn’t immune either. In fact, they too have had corruption allegations, including a breach of trust guilty plea from former officer Christopher Nicholson in 2017, who was originally slapped with “six counts of obstructing justice, three counts of breach of trust, and one count of conspiracy to traffic a controlled substance,” according to an Abby News article. The article states that in February 2005, the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner (OPCC) was looking at 148 allegations of misconduct against not just Nicholson, but 16 other Abbotsford police officers.
Seventeen officers. 148 allegations. This is not an individual issue, this is a systemic one.
While there have been no calls for defunding the police in Abbotsford, there are a number of organizations that could be funded, such as Archway Community Services, which deals with reports of racism, educates the community on racism and how to respond to it, and has a gang prevention program called In It Together. They offer addiction and counselling services as well. It is worth noting that Archway Community Services has to reapply for funding for these programs on a regular basis by writing up proposals in an effort to receive grant money from the government. This means that the continuity of these services is not a guarantee. Other community-based initiatives that could help assist at-risk or marginalized populations are SARA for Women, and Cyrus Centre for youth.
Clearly, concerns from marginalized communities about policing issues have been widely documented in Canada; there are only a handful listed here. It is incorrect to write these issues off as anomalous cases or that these complaints were from criminals or drug addicts. An officer’s job is to serve and protect — there is no designation after this about who they serve and protect. Yet it appears that some lives are given more value than others when it comes to policing.
Being violent toward marginalized or vulnerable populations only shows officer insensitivity, and an inability to properly protect all citizens and address issues of marginalization in an effective way.
Someone being an addict, or sex worker, regardless of thier skin colour, does not make them any less of a human. They don’t deserve to be written off as criminals; they are people who need protection just as much as anyone else. Further criminalizing their actions, mistreating them, and ignoring their struggles will only serve to make existing problems worse.
People need community support, properly trained professionals, and resources if they’re in difficult situations, not a police force that treats them unjustly and then isn’t held accountable for their actions. When a disproportionate amount of these people are black, Indigenous, and people of colour and are dying, we have an even bigger problem that needs addressing immediately.
Illustration: Anoop Dhaliwal/The Cascade
Darien Johnsen is a UFV alumni who obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree with double extended minors in Global Development Studies and Sociology in 2020. She started writing for The Cascade in 2018, taking on the role of features editor shortly after.
She’s passionate about justice, sustainable development, and education.
