COUNCIL COMPROMISE ON POLICING MUST COME WITH COMMITMENT
To paraphrase an overused adage, a sign of a good compromise is when everyone leaves the table angry.
And indeed when it comes to how city council has grappled with demands for policing reforms, anger has certainly been on display.
If you missed it, councillors’ response to the issue, finalized in a lengthy motion this week before they began their summer break, came after an often gutting, multi-day public hearing in which 142 people expressed their views.
Many of those presenters shared painful stories of encounters with police, articulated their distrust of the institution, and demanded sweeping changes in how it should be deployed toward Black, Indigenous and other marginalized communities.
Viewed through that lens, council’s final motion, which largely calls for a variety of reviews, reports and consultations — along with creation of a new Community Safety and Well Being Task Force — is no doubt a disappointment.
Those who were looking for aggressive and decisive action are instead likely inclined to see a response of half-measures and lip service, built around more talk and bureaucracy. To those advocates, the city has missed an opportunity to seize on a rare moment of momentum when public eyes were finally fixated on systemic problems in how policing, race and poverty intersect.
In particular, there is frustration around the part of the motion in which council signalled its intention to shave
$11 million from the Edmonton police budget over two years to divert to social programs.
Through described as a cut, in reality this is a trim to what is still a significant police funding increase. Council will have a chance to revisit the move this fall, but should the intention be carried through, Edmonton police are still likely due all but 1.4 per cent of the $795 million they’ve been expecting over the next two years.
For this and other perceived shortcomings in the motion, including the lack of a declaration condemning street carding, some observers have been discouraged enough to call for activists to boycott the new task force.
“When you show that your political process prevents things that are concrete from happening, nobody has any faith, or at least I don’t have any faith, in (future) task force recommendations being respected,” said Ubaka Ogbogu, law professor at the University of Alberta.
While that’s certainly a valid fear, I think it’s also important to acknowledge a lot of positive potential in council’s response.
For example, the motion orders an analysis on whether more calls could be handled by social service agencies without a police presence.
The city will ask that the province create an independent agency to resolve complaints, rather than have police continue to investigate themselves.
Giving police the option to deploy officers without a gun and uniform will also be sought, while any misuse of bylaws around noise, jaywalking and loitering to hassle people will be reviewed.
Other constructive ideas are featured as well, but arguably the most important theme of the motion is a desire to better rationalize how community safety and social services are delivered.
The work of Reach Edmonton has helped to get players in this sector working more collaboratively in recent years, but overall I keep hearing that the system remains highly fragmented. In practice this means there are a lot of agencies trying to do a lot of good in a lot of different ways, but they too often work at cross purposes, duplicate efforts and compete for funding.
This is hardly a simple problem, but consolidation of some sort seems badly needed.
Unfortunately, the city can only do so much on its own.
“Because most of the funding there comes from the provincial government, we can try to influence that, but we can’t control it … though I do think as one of the funders we need to look at that,” Mayor Don Iveson said at a recent news conference.
As such, it was gratifying to see council’s motion take aim at this issue in a few different ways: mandating the new task force to look at how to better integrate social services; exploring the possibility of a “joint dispatch centre” for police and other agencies; and potentially transforming the Edmonton Police Commission into a broader agency responsible for public safety and human services.
I stress this because although there is a temptation to divert a whole bunch more money now from policing to initiatives like housing, crisis response and mental health, I don’t see much logic in doing that until the city knows — or has a system to figure out — exactly how best to spend it.
(On this front, I do hope activists take the opportunity to be at the table for these discussions and groups.)
I know this won’t be enough for some folks, who will see council’s compromise here as little more than politicians compromising their commitment to promote a safe and inclusive city.
Government does indeed move too slowly and tentatively, especially on complex issues involving the potential for political fallout.
Yet in this case, council has taken some important first steps that are, in effect, a promise to marginalized communities that decisive action will come when the analyses and recommendations are ready.
In that, the real test for the city will be to avoid any compromise on the follow-through.