A new vision of public safety
Halifax police won’t be getting an armoured vehicle after all. The $300,000 it would have cost will instead be put toward anti-Black racism initiatives. Just for good measure, Halifax council also voted this week to put another $89,500 toward programs for diversity, inclusion and public safety.
It’s not a lot of money, and it’s just one medium-sized city. But the direction is clear: away from spending tax dollars on giving police the latest expensive gear, toward better funding for social needs.
Suddenly, politicians who once ran in fear of being labelled “anti-police” are scrambling to get in front of a growing movement to reshape police forces. From Los Angeles to Toronto, there are proposals to cut police budgets and funnel the money into social services.
In Minneapolis, where police killed George Floyd and set off a continent-wide movement against anti-Black racism and police violence, the city council has endorsed the most radical move — to disband its police department and “dismantle policing as we know it.”
The movement for change is, as we have argued before, long overdue. Back in 2016, Toronto made an abortive move to trim its ballooning police budget by $100 million over three years, but the politicians backed off in the face of an upsurge in gun violence and warnings from the police union that public safety was at risk.
This time must be different. Those who want a different model of policing use various slogans — defunding, dismantling, or simply reform. The best may be the one suggested by U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, who may well end up as Joe Biden’s running mate. She talks about “reimagining how we do public safety.”
By whatever name, it need not provoke fear among people worried about being left defenceless against violent criminals. “Who ya gonna call?” is a reasonable question — and any serious proposal for change must include a core force well-equipped and highly trained at responding to serious crime.
Nor can change come overnight. Alex Vitale, one of the leading U.S. proponents of “defunding” and author of “The End of Policing,” says this: “I’m certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I’m talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so we can dial back our reliance on them.”
Put like that, it means rethinking our notions of what constitutes public safety as a whole. And making sure that policing makes all communities feel safe.
It means accepting that traditional reform measures, such as more and better training of existing police forces, haven’t worked in the past and aren’t likely to produce far-reaching change.
It means rethinking how useful it is to prosecute so many “crimes of poverty,” such as minor theft and shoplifting, which consume vast amounts of police, court and prison resources but which would be better fought through social measures. Arresting, trying and jailing addicts who feed their habits through petty crime, for example, is futile as well as cruel.
It would mean rethinking what tasks are best left to armed police, and which ones would be better performed by others with different training and skills. As crime rates have plummeted in recent years, police have taken on a host of jobs they aren’t particularly good at, like crisis intervention with people in mental distress.
Too often, that has ended in tragedy simply because police have weapons and use them when threatened. By now it’s obvious that others — such as social workers and nurses — should be on the front lines in situations like that.
It would also mean reversing the trend toward militarization of police, as Halifax did this week. And even rethinking whether all police should be armed at all times. Police have insisted that all on-duty officers, even those in schools, must be armed in case they’re called on to respond to an emergency. But is that really necessary, especially when police in Canada so rarely find themselves in a situation where they must actually use their weapons?
Can it all work? Can a more community-focused model of public safety deliver on that promise without leading to more crime or putting police themselves in danger?
American reformers are encouraged by the example of one small city that actually abolished its police department. Camden, N.J., took that step in 2013 because the old force was rife with corruption. It set up a new force with a focus on community involvement and outreach; violent crime since then is down sharply and relations between police and the Black community are less fraught.
Of course, every city is different and the differences are even greater between U.S. and Canadian policing. But surely the general direction of change must be similar in both countries. Money now lavished on expensive police forces should come under much closer scrutiny, and other social priorities should get a lot more attention.
The challenge will be to make sure change happens when the streets are no longer filled with protesters. Politicians should keep their nerve, and voters should support them in making tough choices for better, smarter public safety.
The challenge will be to make sure change happens when the streets are no longer filled with protesters