Winds of change are blowing through policing
Political change is like the wind.
Sometimes the wind blows, created by a distant drop or increase in pressure. Sometimes it doesn’t blow at all and, as any sailor knows, when caught in the doldrums nothing moves.
An astute politician is keenly aware of the wind. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, they don’t need a weatherman to know which way it blows. Political w inexplicable places, rebuild crumbling elevated expressways for inexplicable amounts of money and reform institutions that have resisted change for decades.
The winds of police reform are blowing hard right now and last week a contingent of Toronto city council, led by Mayor John Tory, chose to take down their main sail and avoid harnessing that wind. Instead of forcing Toronto Police Services to change, it’s asking them to reform themselves based on a report the police have already ignored.
A motion at this past week’s council meeting by Councillors Josh Matlow and Kristyn Wong-Tam that was explicit in the reforms needed but that also asked police to provide a 2021 budget with a 10 per cent reduction was, through mayoral procedural power, pushed
yor’s own successful police reform motion, minus the budget cut. In a particularly “Oh, Toronto” head-shaking moment, council actually increased the police budget to allow $5 million for body camera implementation.
Take that, winds of change.
ge, 2014 report by retired Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, one that came in the aftermath of the Sammy Yatim police shooting and other deaths of people suffering mental and emotional health events, laid out a roadmap of what has to be done, a phrase also used to describe the mayor’s motion.
In a damning analysis two weeks ago in Spacing magazine, journalist John Lorinc laid out how Toronto police leadership showed initial enthusiasm for the Iacobucci reforms, but didn’t ultimately follow or adopt them. What, then, is there to guarantee that police will give the mayor’s motion more attention than it did the Iacobucci report?
There isn’t any. Calls for police reform have been coming for decades, and beyond talk, little to nothing was done while the police budget continued to grow exponentially. In these political doldrums, the many alternative ways to respond to a mental health crisis that don’t involve lethal force remained largely elusive.
This is where the 10 per cent cut comes in. Critics said it was a limited amount of control council has over the police, and how shrouded in secrecy the police budget is, money is its power. There are two “arbitrary” things to note here.
The first is over the last decade, beginning with Rob Ford and continuing into Tory’s mayoralty, numerous city departments had their funding cut. Arbitrarily so, many might a the top” method of austerity budgeting, something that seems to apply across the board, just not to police.
The second, when asked by a councillor what a 10 per cent cut would do, Chief Mark Saunders said it was the equivalent of losing 1,000 officers. An a and assumes no cost savings could be found elsewhere or that some work could be done by services other than police.
Police chiefs, this one and others, are politicians and know what strings to pull to sway public opinion. Remember, this is a chief who said they were enforcing traffic rules but actually weren’t, and one who blamed the gay community for failing to help them find serial killer Bruce McArthur.
A smart person asked me this week, “can you get elected in Toronto on police reform?” It’s a good question, and the answer may or may not be the one people want. Recent polls show that while trust in police in Canada took a considerable drop of late, a majority of Canadians still indicate they trust the police to varying degrees. This still leaves considerable room, and appetite, for reform though.
Politics, leadership and doing the right thing don’t always connect to immediate electoral projections, and what’s happening in the streets sometimes takes a while to register more widely. It’s clear which way the wind is blowing on police reform now, and to not hoist the main sail to catch that wind is a deliberate act.
I’ve written before that there are few politicians in Canada with as much political capital as John Tory. Coasting into a second term, currently without a strong (or weak, for that matter) challenger on the horizon, and with a collection of “Team Tory” councillors inclined to vote his way, he’s got considerable freedom to govern.
Ensuring reform happens will be on him to make happen now. Despite the council vote, the winds of change aren’t going away, even if Toronto has done its best to stay in doldrums of its own making.