Demands for reform bring scrutiny of police budget
Calls to ‘defund’ grow louder amid protests over anti-Black racism
The city of Toronto is facing two crises: a massive financial shortfall because of the pandemic and a renewed storm of outrage over police-involved deaths and anti-Black racism, with calls to “defund” the police.
These crises have renewed questions about the city’s priorities when it comes to spending.
For the past decade the Toronto police budget has topped the list of city operating expenses — $1.08 billion in 2020 — as a result of what some have criticized as bending to fears about law and order over addressing the roots of violence and social inequities.
Others say reforms pushed by Mayor John Tory, Chief Mark Saunders and the civilian police board have largely failed and don’t go far enough to modernize a force that is resistant to change, with a union that wields enormous power.
Amid this criticism there have been fresh calls to “defund” the police after police-involved deaths at home and in the U.S. Police spending in Toronto is “a prioritization of a very small but powerful minority of people’s perceptions of safety,” said Robyn Maynard, a PhD student and Vanier scholar at the University of Toronto who is the author of “Policing Black Lives.”
At the same time, the city is facing a $1.5-billion shortfall by the end of the year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Can the city spend less on the Toronto police? And should it?
The average homeowner, through property taxes, will contribute $738 towards the cost of policing this year — the single largest item and 23 per cent of the total $3,141 bill.
In fact, the entire police budget — part of the city’s $13.53-billion operating budget — is nearly as much as the budgets for the city’s parks and recreation division, children’s services and the Toronto Public Library combined.
Salaries and benefits account for nearly 90 per cent of total police spending. Those wages are locked in to multi-year contracts approved by the Toronto Police Services Board. The current contract, which secured an11.1per cent wage increase over five years — more than the increase for any other city employee — expires in 2023.
The policing budget has roughly doubled in the past two decades from the $550 million approved by council in 2000.
In 1999, the Star reported that 46 Toronto police employees (uniformed and civilian) made more than $100,000 — or just over $147,000 in 2019 dollars. Last year, more than 800 members earned that much.
In his first term, Tory pushed for a “transformational” task force to modernize the police. At the time, Tory said they were “committed to making the changes that are necessary to stop the growth in police budgets and to more effectively and efficiently deploy highly trained police officers to fight crime.”
In 2016, the task force recommended, among other major changes, something radical for the time: a three-year hiring and promotions freeze that would stop the upwards trend of a budget that had ballooned over $1 billion.
While that moratorium temporarily halted further increases, the budget has since climbed, beyond the level that it was when Tory took office in 2014.
Because of financial difficulties caused by the pandemic, Tory has warned that without intervention from other governments there will need to be significant cuts — including some 500 Toronto police officers.
But when asked this week about police funding, Tory said the only consideration “is that we have to continue to fund them.” He said calls to defund the police were not credible.
“People want, as much as anything else … a safe city,” Tory said.
Saunders, asked Thursday about criticism that the modernization of the force had been too slow, said the transformational task force was a “huge success.” The current police budget reiterated the need to address societal issues he said police are not responsible for.
“We are not responsible for the disease, but we deal with the symptom day after day after day,” he said.
When asked whether he’d be willing to reduce police funding in order to pay for programs to address the roots of violence, Saunders suggested the force was having trouble keeping up with the volume of calls as it is.
“We’ve got a role, and that role is to keep the community safe. Now we need other agencies to help offload those responsibilities,” he said. “Then we can start talking about the reduction.”
Toronto police board chair Jim Hart said Thursday that he doesn’t think the police budget is too high.
Changes made as part of the police modernization plan have resulted in cost savings, including a reduction of 600 positions — saving $100 million — the civilianization of some roles, and changes to the service’s shift schedule, Hart said.
But he welcomes public input on the budget, saying it’s “healthy for people to question where their money is spent.”
David Soknacki, a former Scarborough councillor and budget chief under David Miller, sat on Tory’s transformational task force. He said he believes its recommendations have not been fully implemented.
“There is a sense that a lot of changes that could have been made more quickly and deeper have not been made,” he said.
But he’s hopeful changes to training and culture will usher in transformation from the next generation of officers once they reach management levels.
“Right now what you’re seeing is the service members who have been trained in the ways that existed before transformation … and the pressure was not and is not ongoing to force the change.”
Coun. Michael Thompson (Ward 21, Scarborough Centre), who has been a vocal critic of police spending on council, said it’s not apparent any modernization has actually been achieved.
“This police organization — it’s like climbing a mountain and then having to take another mountain on your back to make the climb,” said Thompson, who is the only Black member of council and one of only four visible minority members. “It just appears that every effort is made to obfuscate and every effort seems to be well intended, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.” During the 2016 budget debate, Thompson — who is now one of the mayor’s deputies — moved a series of motions to remove between $12 million and $24 million from the police budget and spend it instead on community programs like student nutrition, youth spaces and child-care subsidies.
Each motion lost in a 12-28 vote. Tory and all of the other members of the mayor’s inner circle voted against them. Those attempted reductions represented just one to two per cent of the police spending approved that year, far less than the 10 per cent reduction some are calling for now.
“There were forces within city hall that worked against me to make sure the police got their budget, make sure none of my motions were successful,” Thompson said, noting Saunders himself came to lobby councillors.
In 2018, Coun. Josh Matlow (Ward 12, Toronto—St. Paul’s) tried to remove just $2.61million in new spending being considered for police surveillance technology and instead spend it on community programs for at-risk youth.
That motion lost 12 to 33 with all but one member of the mayor’s executive supporting him.
If making even more significant changes requires looking at officer compensation and hiring, the police union could be a difficult hurdle to overcome.
Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack — a well-liked and outspoken character — has publicly criticized the mayor, Saunders and members of the board.
In 2018, the association placed ads accusing Tory and others of putting “your safety on hold” over staffing levels, with Tory’s laughing face superimposed over a splashy red “911.”
Thompson said the police association is a powerful force and that “fear is a factor in the increase of the police budget.” He praised McCormack as a skilled communicator.
“When there are shootings and so on the police association, the president goes on TV and says, ‘We need more cops because that will solve the problem’ and everybody starts believing that.”
Over the long term, the data on crime rates shows little direct link between the number of officers and the frequency and severity of serious crimes occurring.
McCormack, in an interview with the Star, said he understands the public wants to discuss the budget, but said calls to defund the police are “based on emotion.”
McCormack said it isn’t fair to suggest the police association “is out there saying the sky is falling, give us more cops.”
“We’ve always said, pay them what they deserve, pay them what’s fair, hire what you need to do the job, but based on evidence and fact. Let’s get away from a subjective narrative.”
Anthony Morgan, a racial justice lawyer and manager of the city’s Confronting Anti-Black Racism unit, said he supports the sentiment of defunding police and thinks what many people mean is reinvesting in communities.
The reality is, there is a finite pool of money from the city’s tax base and there is “alarming disparity” between funding of social well-being services and policing, he said.
“For a long time now — more than a decade — police services have dramatically, and I really want to emphasize, dramatically, outstripped the rate at which we fund parks and recreation, social support and housing, shelters, employee benefits, arts and culture.
“So what we’re really talking about is the reinvestment of neglected people, neglected communities,” Morgan said.
While the mayor touted $18.6 million in investments to tackle the roots of youth violence in the 2020 budget, about half that total was for a $9-million seniors dental care program entirely funded by the provincial government. In all, it was a fraction of the police spending budgeted.
Maynard, the academic and author, added that with a majority of Toronto residents being not white, making police the priority also comes “at the expense of most actual Torontonians in the present moment.”
“It really shows a priority of how the city is intending to manage the vast economic inequality in the city. It’s just by policing those people that are being left out and pushed out of more and more access to social services,” she said.
Maynard also pointed to a 2018 report from the Ontario Human Rights Commission that found over the previous five years, a Black person in Toronto was 20 times more likely to be fatally shot by the Toronto police than a white person.
“We have to ask,” Maynard said, “safety for who?”