Defunding conversation bogs down meeting
Hung up by technical difficulties and procedural arguments, the Halifax police commission meeting Thursday failed to get to a couple of the weightier items on its agenda.
Scheduled to begin at noon, the virtual meeting was delayed by at least a half hour while technicians attempted to get all the participants connected. Then a discussion about a late-arriving staff motion, a potential amendment to it and deferral of debate on a subsequent replacement motion bogged down the meeting, which ended after three hours.
The issues of body cameras for police officers and how Halifax Regional Police and the RCMP are progressing on Wortley report recommendations ended up being postponed to the July 20 meeting.
“It was compromised by the limitations of the technology and the fact that we had three members that couldn't get on the Microsoft Teams platform today, even though they were on there just the other day when they did the runthrough and everything went perfect,” said Deputy Mayor Lisa Blackburn, one of three Halifax regional councillors on the board of commissioners.
The substance of the meeting kicked off with a Reimagine Public Safety presentation from Amy Siciliano, public safety adviser for Halifax Regional Municipality, and youth advocate program manager Derico Symonds that might have been labelled police defunding.
Symonds said the popular defunding police theme means reallocating money from police and reinvesting it into mental health supports, education, social services, housing, prevention programming, anti-racist education, food security and alternatives to policing.
During the presentation, a municipal staff motion was introduced that the commissioners adopt a definition of defunding the police that supports a role for policing in HRM that includes police performing policing functions, appropriate resources to perform non-police functions and investment in resources that have been proven to support community risks and promote crime prevention.
Board vice-chairwoman Carole Mcdougall put the motion on the floor, but it died when no one seconded it.
“I'm not sure where the origins of the motion came from,” Blackburn said after the meeting. “It was a staff motion but it was just sort of parachuted in at 3 o'clock (Wednesday) afternoon, so none of us really had a chance ... to do a little bit of digging and to try to get some background information so that we could properly debate it.”
The group Abolish the Police — Halifax, which has a strong Facebook and online presence, said in a news release that it's clear the board of commissioners is feeling the heat.
“They want to make it seem like they're listening to calls being made by community members to defund the police,” the group said in its release. “But, if they truly wanted to hear from us, why have they stalled on meeting until now and barred public input into the meeting?”
The group posted Thursday morning on Facebook that the staff motion was nonsense because it “makes no mention of reducing the police budget,” urging members to contact the mayor and councillors with their objections.
But Mcdougall introduced another motion that the board “appoint a community advisory committee to provide a definition of defunding the police that supports a role for policing.” That motion, too, was panned by the Abolish the Police group because it would
“come up with a definition on defunding the police which affirms an ongoing role for police in policing functions.”
The commissioners agreed that the motion should be debated at the July 20 meeting.
Blackburn said defunding police means different things to different people so it is important to settle upon a clear definition of what defunding the police looks like and how it plays out in the community.
The presentation from Siciliano and Symonds centred on the municipal public safety strategy adopted by council in 2017 that promotes "upstream" intervention and focuses on a proactive approach to addressing community safety and well-being that doesn't use instruments of criminal justice to address social problems.
Symonds described a number of youth programs that promote a safe space to hang out, receive mental health supports and access food and housing support.