Outgoing chief agrees system is broken
Another idea comes from the Indigenous community — unarmed, trained safety officers who work on daily supports that build trust. Could something like it work in a megacity?
Protests in Toronto and around the world, which sprang up after a Black man named George Floyd died begging for air while pinned to the ground by a Minneapolis police officer, suggest the time for a close look at new ideas has arrived.
“There are times, and we’re hearing this consistently from Black and Indigenous people in our community and elsewhere, that having a uniformed police officer with a gun — of course there’s some situations where you will need them — but there are some situations where just their presence escalates the situation,” said Matlow (Ward12, Toronto—St. Paul’s).
“We cannot be obtuse to those voices. We have to understand that that is real.”
Matlow asks whether police should be the first to respond to calls when somebody is in mental-health distress or to deal with someone who is homeless or struggling with addiction.
Maybe youth workers should be the first to be called when the situation involves vulnerable teenagers, instead of sending in a uniformed police officer with a weapon, and the power dynamic that brings with it, Matlow suggests.
Coun. Gord Perks (Ward 4, Parkdale— High Park) believes there is a pressing and deep need to reform safety and security from the ground up. Should 911 calls, for example, be reorganized? Do police need to attend all the calls they attend now? Do they need to attend overdose calls?
“A notice of motion from two members of council is a good way to open the conversation, but I think we have a lot more to talk about in the days or weeks coming before we land on how to do it,” said Perks.
Coun. Ana Bailao (Ward 9, Davenport), chair of the planning and housing committee, believes a lot could be achieved by putting the potential savings of a 10per-cent police budget cut into better housing and programs for youth. She warns it won’t be easy. “We’ve been down this road of transforming the police and how we police in this city, and there’s been significant resistance,” she says.
Meanwhile, police seem to be conducting a not-so-subtle public relations campaign to shore up support for more funding.
“The number of people that call my office sometimes that say: ‘We called police for this or that, and they told me they don’t have enough people, to call my counsellor …’ ” says Bailao. “This is the game that’s being played.”
Asked whether police do this, a spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service said they receive two million calls annually. “We only refer the public elsewhere if the question is misdirected,” according to Allison Sparkes.
Alok Mukherjee has long experience when it comes to attempted police reforms.
He served as chair of the Toronto Police Services Board from 2005 to 2015. He is a distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University and the co-author of “Excessive Force,” a book about policing in Canada.
He points out that there have been numerous attempts to reform the service and to reduce the cost of policing. The victories have been hard won and, for the most part, temporary.
An attempt during the 1990s to revisit shift-scheduling in order to save millions of dollars was unsuccessful, Mukherjee said.
In 2005, the police budget was reduced 10 per cent by imposing a freeze on new hires, controlling overtime and with some fiscal juggling, but the measures taken were unsustainable over the long term. Bill Blair, who was then the police chief, agreed to a comprehensive review of the model of policing in order to identify longer-term changes.
“It took several years for him to complete that review … Basically the report back from the chief was that ‘our system was pretty good,’ ” said Mukherjee.
“There was a lot of murkiness and — call it resistance, or call it reluctance or call it unwillingness — to think of a new paradigm for policing.”
Later, under then mayor Rob Ford, city departments and agencies were ordered to reduce costs by 10 per cent. That was achieved in the police budget through efficiencies and reduced program costs, but the reduction was neutralized by wage gains won by the police union during collective bargaining, Mukherjee said.
“We were continuing to use almost exclusively a highly paid, armed, uniformed police officer for just about every function, and we started talking about the need to seriously examine … whether there were other ways to deal with those functions,” said Mukherjee.
The city of Toronto is not required to rubber-stamp whatever budget the police board approves, says Mukherjee. But if it does move to cut the budget, the police board could appeal the move to the Ontario Civilian Police Commission (OCPC), on the grounds that the city has failed in its legal duty to provide adequate resources.
Previous police chiefs have threatened to do just that. Mukherjee was a member of the OCPC in the 1990s.
“It has gone through incarnations and it doesn’t have as much muscle as it used to in the old days,” he says.
The protests have made it clear that the community is demanding a higher level of scrutiny of police budgets, and a close look at what the core duties of an armed police officer should be is in order, says Mukherjee.
“As a city, we should be thinking of an integrated model of community safety and not conflate community safety with policing.”
Mike McCormack, head of the Toronto Police Association, called Matlow’s motion to defund “grandstanding.”
Outgoing Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders agreed this week that the current model of public safety is broken and needs to be fixed.
Speaking on a Toronto radio show, he said a young Black man with a gun in his hand is a symptom of anti-Black racism and questions have to be asked about what drove him to violence.
About 300,000 of the calls to police each year are for people in crisis or for mental-health issues and that number is growing annually, according to police spokesperson Sparkes.
The reasons behind those calls have to be addressed and a new system put in place to respond, before reducing police capacity, otherwise public safety could be negatively impacted, according to a Toronto police statement.
Voices outside city hall are also calling for reform. One program getting a lot of interest is the Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) mobile response team in Eugene-Springfield, Ore., says Toronto lawyer Annamaria Enenajor.
The team responds to calls for help with everything from grief counselling and suicide prevention to help with housing issues and substance abuse. It also provides rides to social services. Each team is made up of a medic and a nurse.
“Crisis calls should be treated as health issues, not crimes,” Enenajor.
A team like CAHOOTS would replace the police response, and also include social workers with training on de-escalation, and there would be no weapons.
Another alternative could be unarmed, trained safety officers, like those in Kwanlin Dün First Nation in the Yukon, suggests University of Toronto sociologist Akwasi Owusu-Bempah.
The officers, and a land steward, patrol in conjunction with other law enforcement, including the RCMP and bylaw officers. They receive five months of training and do not carry weapons. They can be dispatched through an emergency call or through a non-emergency number.
The role of the safety officers, not unlike armed neighbourhood officers with Toronto police, is to support the day-today safety of citizens, and to build and maintain trust and a positive relationship with citizens and external partners, according to the First Nation’s website.
Such a program should be tailored to fit the needs of the community it serves, said Owusu-Bempah. “I see this as a reversion back to the more informal forms of social control of yesteryear,” he said.
Caitlyn Kasper, a lawyer with Aboriginal Legal Services in Toronto, said the problem with police services is that they have historically been used by governments as tools of oppression. They are also ill equipped to de-escalate situations and provide basic help, particularly when it comes to Indigenous people, she said.
Instead of spending money on police, governments, she said, must shift funds to strengthening Indigenous community supports and increasing access to housing, education and employment opportunities. The approach must be based on traditional knowledge, be victim-based instead of prosecution-centred, said Kasper.
Funding Indigenous-led solutions is the way to address “direct and intergenerational trauma from colonialism,” and “will increase overall wellness and keep our communities safer.”