Will council stay the course on its slow police reform?

Big number: $1.08 billion, the amount Toronto will spend on the police (after accounting for police revenues) in the 2021 city budget approved on Feb.18. That’s a zero per cent increase over 2020, but policing still remains the city’s second biggest spending area, after the TTC.

An audience of more than 18,000 tuned into YouTube last June to watch Mayor John Tory and Toronto council debate police reform and whether to cut the city’s police budget. It’s the most-watched meeting ever streamed on council’s YouTube page, and long-time councillors have told me they got record amounts of calls and emails ahead of the debate.

But that meeting, which followed a wave of Black Lives Matter protests and demands for police accountability, ended on a cliff-hanger. Instead of going straight to invasive surgery on police spending, the mayor backed a more cautious form of treatment.

And so a majority of council rejected motions to demand near-term police cutbacks, instead endorsing a Tory-led effort to develop a strategy for police alternatives that could lead to reductions to the police budget once implemented.

Seven months later, and with a new police budget just approved by council, now seems like a good time to follow up. How’s the patient approach going?

For advocates of reining in police spending, the good news is that at least the police budget will not grow in 2021. Last week, council approved a police operating budget with $1.08 billion in net spending. It’s the second biggest line in the budget, next to the TTC. Big, but it’s the same big as last year.

That’s nothing to sneeze at, especially when stacked up against other Ontario municipalities. An analysis put together for the Toronto Police Services Board comparing 2021 police budget increases for 16 other Ontario municipalities found the average increase proposed or adopted was 3.26 per cent. Toronto’s zero per cent increase is an outlier.

There have been other signs of progress too. Last month, council approved a pilot project where non-police crisis workers will respond to some non-violent calls. And at last week’s budget meeting, Coun. Josh Matlow passed a motion requesting a report on a next step: establishing more firstresponder services where people who aren’t cops show up to help people.

At the same meeting, Coun. Mike Layton found majority support for a motion calling for a feasibility review of transferring more responsibilities away from the police, including things like parking enforcement and traffic management.

But there have been some worrying signs too. Speaking on the budget last week, Coun. Frances Nunziata said she found it “very disturbing” to hear her colleagues talk about reducing the police budget. “What do you say to these families that have lost their children to gun violence — what do you say to them when they ask for more police presence?” she asked.

Her comments were echoed by deputy mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong. “This idea to take away funding from the police is fundamentally a non-starter,” he declared. Coun. James Pasternak also spoke about his concerns about “this attempt by back-door at defunding our police,” while Coun. Mike Colle issued a warning: “Please do not think for one minute we can do with less policing in certain areas of the city.”

It seems fair to wonder if this council will have the nerve to really follow through on its slow roll toward police reform. But the case for change remains solid.

Toronto’s police budget is gigantic. A year-over-year freeze doesn’t change that. Its size drew stark criticism from the members of the advisory panel council trusts to review its budget for equity impacts. The police budget, panel members wrote in a January letter, “does not support the city’s ability to pivot its spending towards operations that uphold the human rights of marginalized communities. It is also a failure towards the city’s commitment to confronting anti-Black racism.”

Meanwhile, there’s no clear correlation between the city’s crime rates and the number of officers on the streets. And one of the foundational documents undergirding the city’s approach to community safety, the Roots of Youth Violence report, does not make a single recommendation to hire more officers.

The evidence continues to suggest a major transformation of policing — and the police budget — is the right path forward. And the mayor and council have taken several careful steps down that path. But charting a course is easy. Staying on it is the hard part.

My best advice to the 18,000plus who watched the debate last summer: keep watching.