Post-verdict, a need for broad change
Jeffrey Monaghan lays out three steps that would show police want reform.
Tuesday's verdict clearing Ottawa police officer Daniel Montsion in the killing of Abdirahman Abdi has sparked renewed attention toward racialized police violence. In recent months, we have seen an unprecedented level of acknowledgment regarding systemic violence and racism in policing and criminal justice institutions, with corresponding calls for fundamental changes. In light of growing calls for change and certain signals of openness from police and political leaders, here are modest steps that can be taken in Ottawa that would signal a desire for substantive change.
1. Defunding police, which is perhaps better articulated as redirecting police funding.
Policing scholars who have tracked the past 30 years of downloaded responsibilities frequently lament that most police services render cops into “social workers with a badge.” The point is that a wide range of police work is not crime-fighting and does not require the skill sets that are characterized by police institutions. The area where police are most ill-equipped is dealing with issues of neuro-divergence.
The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) needs to immediately commit to transferring response resources to teams of mental-health workers who are better equipped at responding to the large and growing level of these calls. Somerset Coun. Catherine McKenney recently commented: “I would take five mental-health workers in this ward over an
NRT (Police Neighbourhood Response Team) any day.” While these units are increasingly of lip service to police services, there remains a lack of concerted action to resource and empower teams. Ottawa Council needs to immediately take steps to resource these teams, drawing on existing skills in the city. Moreover, these teams should be co-ordinated with, but autonomous from, the police dispatch system.
2. Identify further areas of decentralization.
Mental health should be only the first step to transitioning responsibilities; an entire range of police functions do not require armed police officers. Specialized fields such as fraud investigations, all manner of cyber crimes (where police culture is the biggest barrier to recruitment), community-based work, drug interventions, dealing with homelessness, tending to a range of regulatory offences — the list can be extended.
In many respects policing is an antiquated institution: a relic of 19th-century disciplinary techniques and, in today's society, an institution that dispenses violence disproportionately against marginalized and racialized populations. Criminological research has long suggested that policing is a poor instrument for crime control, particularly relative to other social policy instruments.
Creating specialized intervention agencies can be a first step toward moving resources away from policing and toward areas such as housing, public health, poverty relief and social supports, all of which provide higher levels of overall well-being, less crime and social inequality, and less punitive approaches to social problems. For readers interested in the rich empirical work that underlines these claims, Francois Bonnet's recent book, The Upper Limit, on the lesser eligibility thesis is a good start. Council and the Ottawa Police Service should immediately take steps toward modernizing our approaches to these diverse social harms. 3. Dispensing with bad apples.
Situations where bad cops remain on duty are perhaps the most damaging current dynamic to police legitimacy. These are by no means new dynamics. Issues of police impunity and ineffective oversight capacities have been subject to wide criticisms, most recently compiled in the Independent
Police Oversight Review directed by Hon. Michael H. Tulloch.
Recently, Mayor Jim Watson has put forward a recycled proposal to empower police chiefs with the ability to suspend officers without pay and expedite termination of employment for serious offences. This represents a bare-minimum undertaking and should receive the full, vocal support of OPS leadership.
Even more meaningful steps need to be embraced by political leaders at all levels to undo the pernicious power of police unions. A practical starting point must involve a reinterpretation of disciplinary powers to embrace a zero-tolerance approach for findings of misconduct. Particularly with modernized, smaller police services, officers who engage in — or are perceived of — misconduct should, at the least, be moved to non-policing municipal entities or relieved of their public-service employment all together.
Together, these mark practical steps that would signal an interest in transforming policing and criminal justice systems in ways that are attuned to calls for great racial and social justice. In some respects, these are only modest first steps. But these could be meaningful steps nonetheless.