Front Burner - A path for Halifax to defund the police

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

A Halifax committee tasked with defining what it means to defund the police has released its final report: a 219-page document that recommends numerous reforms and reimagines our communities' relationship with law enforcement. Last week, committee chairperson El Jones presented the report to Halifax's Board of Police Commissioners. While the document doesn't recommend a specific amount of money to be cut, it takes an in-depth look at shifting some responsibilities away from police — namely sexual assault reporting and responses to mental health crises. Today, Jones walks us through the report's rethink of how to keep our communities safe and examines the common ground between supporters and opponents of defunding.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. We have to be prepared to do things that maybe yesterday seemed unreasonable. And to me, this is one of those occasions a lot of people... Halifax Mayor Mike Savage is talking about cancelling an armored vehicle ordered for the city's police. Regional Council voted to buy it

in 2019 in the wake of shootings in Fredericton and Moncton. But he's speaking here in June of 2020, just weeks after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. And armored vehicles are being used at U.S. protests. So councillors are about to move the over $350,000 for the vehicle to safety, diversity and anti-Black racism efforts. So here's our chance to keep our public safe proactively rather than reactively. This is an opportunity to do things differently, to do things better. It is our prerogative as elected officials to change our minds. One way to look at this event is that it was just moving money around a balance sheet.

But there's another much more controversial way of understanding what happened. Defunding the police. The next month, Halifax's Board of Police Commissioners created a committee to define what defunding the police could actually mean. And just last week, Chairperson Elle Jones delivered the report. This report is the result of community labor, and it's shaped by many hours of consultation, research, and engagement, and I believe you will see that reflected in the report.

And these principles of community are the foundations of the report. Defunding as a concept and practice is... The report is also written by lead authors Taria Jati, Harry Critchley, and Julia Rogers. And its 219 pages challenge the role of police punishment and care in our society, but also explain how defundings, champions, and opponents may have more in common than we think. Elle Jones is here with me now. Hi, Elle. Thank you so much for making the time to come on to the podcast today.

Thank you for having me. So the issue of defunding the police is a divisive one. Some people think the police are this militant, oppressive force that should be abolished. Others think they're already under-resourced and further cuts could throw society into chaos. But what did you find people on either side of this argument actually agree on? That's a great question to start with. So first of all, as we were doing the report, we did extensive public engagement, and that involved nearly 2,500 survey responses, as well as a public engagement session where people had the chance to present to the board. We also reached out to service organizations. And one thing we did find is that while obviously many people were opposed, we had about 56% that were for defunding and then the rest that were opposed.

Many people, for example, that would say that they were opposed to defunding the police would nonetheless say things that I would say are part of defunding. So, for example, virtually everybody agreed that there's a problem in the way we police mental health, even people that very strongly support the police and the role of police in society agree that what we're doing with mental health doesn't work. The police themselves, while of course, they very strongly oppose defunding, we spoke to the National Police Federation, which represent the RCMP. And they certainly don't agree with defunding at all. But they themselves also agree that the police are being tasked with many things

that they are not equipped to do. And they themselves feel that that places a lot of pressure and scrutiny on police. So often people think that defunding sounds very negative, and they take a stance against it, because they think, okay, that means you're getting rid of the police, you're going to leave us in crime, you know. We're going to be overcome by anarchy. What will we do? But one of the things we talk about in the report is that what we're really talking about is refunding society, refunding social service organizations, refunding what we have been stripping for generations, for decades in our societies, and how we can also shift our society away from ideas of punishment and towards more collective ways of keeping each other safe.

You know, why do you think it is that the police have taken on so many different roles in Canadian society, like responding to people with mental health issues? Like, how did we get here? Yeah, we see this, I mean, we're living this out during this pandemic, of course, right, where COVID very much showed people very starkly something that has been happening for decades, which, as I said, is the defunding of social institutions. And that is an extremely radical shift that has been treated as normal in our society. During the pandemic, we've seen how we literally do not have the capacity in our emergency rooms to handle both people who are sick from COVID and other medical issues because we have been defunding healthcare for so long. So we have spent decades engaged in austerity politics, meaning saying there's only so much to go around and in response, stripping public services, stripping our healthcare system, defunding education. And what we've done instead is download that money and responsibilities onto police.

So we have effectively defunded most sectors of our society and then said the police come in to deal with the gap and what happens when we see the effects of that defunding. So then when we see somebody who is unhoused, we say we need to call the police to give them a ticket. If somebody is in a mental health crisis, we say we need to call the police to give them a ticket. If somebody is in a mental health crisis, we say we have to call the police. And we have, in some sense, left ourselves no other options, both through literally materially what we fund, and also through, I would say, an ideology of punishment that has grown alongside that. And what I mean by that, that sounds fancy, but all I mean is that we are taught and trained through media, you know, cop shows, through seeing crime on the media,

through a general social narrative that the police keep us safe in particular ways and other people make us unsafe. So one of the things we think about in this report is how can we shift that idea? How can we start thinking differently about safety? How can we start thinking differently about each other? And are there other ways to deal with these problems rather than the police being our first call when they should usually be our last call, I would think. So let's get deeper into what diverting some of these responsibilities elsewhere would actually look like. So, for example, responding to people who are having a mental health crisis, what should happen instead? So what we're talking about here comes under what we call detasking. All that detasking really means is removing tasks that the police are not equipped

to do effectively and placing them with the appropriate provider who is able to do that. So rather than having the police respond, so for example, in Halifax, as in many places, we have a mobile mental health crisis unit, but when you call, the police come. So there is no model to call for a mental health crisis response that does not involve the police. As a result, many people will not call, especially if you are a drug user or you don't have status or there's some other reason you're from a racialized community and you're scared of the police, you're indigenous. Many people will therefore not make the call. So if we remove the police from the first response model, all it means is we have civilian

led models instead that can include peer workers, people trained in mental health crisis and de-escalation. It could include social workers. It can include medical staff. It can include whoever is trained and capable and resourced to come into that situation. be a danger and the person has a weapon or there's a fear that they may be a threat, that does not mean that that response could not also ask for the police's backup. So they can assess the situation and then decide if they think they need the police involved. But rather than it being automatic to involve the police, it would be a case-by-case basis. What we do know as well is that CAHOOTS, which has worked in Oregon for about two decades, has never had anybody die in this response. One alternative model that is now getting new attention is based in Eugene, Oregon. The city has a different way to handle non-criminal calls with an organization known as CAHOOTS, which stands for Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets. It dispatches

teams that are specially trained and specialize in mental health as first responders. So there is not actually this high amount of violent response by people experiencing crisis that needs, you know, a huge police armed response as well. So I think it's also important to say that people experiencing a mental health crisis are more likely to be the ones harmed in an encounter with police rather than the people that harm police themselves. What other rounds do you think that other groups could step into and take over jobs that the police are primarily doing right now? So mental health is very familiar to people. People may have less perhaps thought about traffic, although on our surveys, traffic was a huge issue for people. In Halifax, we have a number of deaths at crosswalks, for example. And traffic can be very easily civilianized, whether through red light cameras and other technology. And it's interesting, of course, that we're often willing to invest in body cameras for police, but not in that kind of technology like red light cameras that they remove, of course, bias from policing.

Right. So traffic stops are very heavily influenced by race and we can automate that and remove police from that. heavily influenced by race, and we can automate that and remove police from that. But it's not only that, it's things like a huge amount of overtime for police goes into things like street closures during special events, and that can be easily civilianized. So traffic is a good example. Another example that many people may be familiar with, but just not know the terms for is what we call third party sexual assault reporting. And so many people as they've been following reporting on sexual assault, know that very few people report sexual assault and the rates of conviction are extremely low. And people do not feel safe in many cases reporting sexual assault. Many people say that

they are re-traumatized by that, that going through the system is worse or just compounds the trauma of the original assault. So what third-party sexual assault reporting does is provide organizations that are equipped to deal with trauma that can be reported to trauma of the original assault. So what third-party sexual assault reporting does is provide organizations that are equipped to deal with trauma that can be reported to. And if people wish, there is still an option to go on and report to the police later. So the report is preserved. And if the person says, no, I actually do want to report it, then it can be reported to police. But if they don't, the person can still be connected to treatment. We still are able to keep track of how assaults are happening and get the data and make sure that the person is supported.

We spoke before about people without homes. We spoke before about people without homes. And I know in August, when police went to clear a series of 10 encampments in Halifax that led to protesters getting arrested and pepper sprayed, there have been similar encounters here in Toronto. What should we do, you think, for this group that has a disproportionate number of encounters with police, people without homes. Yeah, and that's a very good example because it, again, raises this ideology I talked about. So we can begin to think about why exactly do we call the police to issue somebody a ticket when they are living in a tent in public? And how is that a threat to the rest of us, right? Like, why is our response? What is it in us that says, I see a tent, somebody's living in it, I need to call the police. That is not solely on the police, right? That is also on us and our response and how we think about caring for people and who belongs in

our society. And I'll say very briefly, there was a decision in BC recently that said that actually people who are unhoused have more of a right to the park because it's life or death for them. So we actually shouldn't be balancing rights by saying, well, you know, this person needs to live in a tent because there's COVID in the shelters and they have nowhere else to go. And this person wants to take a walk. And, you know, they both have an equal right. And in fact, the tent's infringing on the person walking. We are now recognizing that the person living in a park does have a particular stake in living there because it matters. It is their life. So we know it's a huge amount of money. It was, I can't remember the money in Toronto to break up these encampments, essentially.

Numbers released by the City Tonight show it costs nearly $2 million to clear three homeless encampments this summer. Among those costs are things like policing, fencing and waste management. And to issue people tickets that they will never be able to pay, which often involve people in a cycle of criminalization. And there is, as I said, there's no real reason for that. What we should be doing

is investing that money. With the money that we spent on policing people who are unhoused, we could have built shelters. We could have funded more housing workers. We could have funded, even if it were

more temporary solutions that of course aren't the solutions we're looking for, like hotel rooms or in our city, we're still trying to build trailers, for example, which are not adequate solutions. And even those inadequate solutions, we are not funding adequately. So it makes far more sense to invest in affordable housing

rather than invest millions and millions of dollars in policing people simply for living somewhere. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for

Couples. So currently, what does the police budget look like right now? Currently, what is all the money for police actually going towards? So many people may believe that it goes to one-to-one policing, right? And this is what people say. People want policing. They say, we need more officers on the street. And what people want to see is officers walking the beat. When they think of policing, they think of, I want to see officers walking through my neighborhood.

But that's not what's really happening. In fact, over 90% of the money is going to salaries, in particular overtime. In my city, and it's similar in many cities, the sunshine list, which is public employees who make more than $100,000 a year, nearly half of that is members of the police. And so, for example, as I said, things like overtime for staffing parades or for doing traffic control on the weekends when there's a special event, the police are making an incredible amount of money to do that, which could be done much more cheaply by trained civilian workers. So one of the things we do look at in the report, which is very Halifax specific, but we actually do a snapshot of a random week to look at what it is that the police actually do. And I think that may surprise people who, again, think that most policing is policing murders or

violent crime or break-ins. In fact, it's a lot of bylaw policing, what they call citizen assists. In Halifax as well, we pay for a horse unit. We pay for lie detectors. And the budget for lie detectors is actually more than the budget we have for victim services currently. Oh, wow. So there are many superfluous items when you go. currently. So there are many superfluous items when you go. Yeah. Did the police agree with that? Because I asked because Halifax Police Chief Dan Kinsella is asking for two million more dollars in funding for the city's police. And he's saying that they have a desperate need to hire new officers, that staffing has been stagnated for a decade and quote, we are in a crisis,

we are in dire straits. We need to be able to make sure that we staff the front line. Yeah, so we're seeing that argument from police across the country. So one thing that I think was noticeable at the police board meeting that I attended is that the rhetoric had shifted into, so they said they wanted more people for policing sexual assault and hate crimes, So they said they wanted more people for policing sexual assault and hate crimes, as well as traffic police. So we do see a kind of interesting rhetoric where the police themselves start to position policing more and more as a sort of social justice enterprise rather than a criminal one. And as I said, for example, sexual assault, there are many more effective models that don't involve the police. But no, the police do not agree. They always say that they need a larger budget and more personnel. But one thing I did want to cite there is, for

example, in most cities, we had a discussion about what you call carding in Toronto, what we call street checks in Halifax, which is racial profiling. And universally, every single force, when they were compelled to stop, allegedly stop, I wouldn't necessarily contend they have stopped, but allegedly stop racial profiling, immediately said, well, then we need more money to train officers. We need more money to hire minority officers, as they would say. So every time there's a crisis in policing, we see the police respond by demanding more resources without thinking that perhaps the crisis in policing is partly because of the infusion of resources constantly into the police. So do we need more Black officers? Is that the solution? Or is the solution not surveying and criminalizing Black communities highly? But as I would say, through this pandemic, we have seen that it isn't working. We haven't seen our society function in a way that works. We saw our seniors dying in huge amounts in the first wave

because we weren't funding healthcare workers properly. We've struggled in our schools to get things like proper ventilation. So we have schools where we can fund a police officer to be in the school, but not ventilation for our children to breathe. This is an unbalanced society. And again, not all of it rests with the police.

The police are obviously the very visible symptom of that, but they're not necessarily the cause. The cause is a society that has disinvested from care, that has said only the strong survive, pull your socks up, you're on your own. And we've seen what that's led to, nearly 20,000 deaths of people in long-term care facilities because we're not adequately caring for people with disabilities. Inability of emergency rooms to cover health. All over society, the loss of jobs and housing and people in crisis and the huge spike in homelessness. Does this look like a society that is funding the right things? Is it the most valuable thing right now to place in my city, 2 million or more into policing in Toronto was 20 plus million more

when we're saying we can't even get you a bed in emergency room. I believe those priorities are skewed. And I think there are things that we can do to shift our thinking on that. And to many people, it may sound radical and that's being a lot of the response, right? People hear you say defund the police, and they think this is crazy. Like, what are you doing? You're destabilizing society. But I would suggest it's actually been radical to do what we have done now. It is actually radical to say, we don't care for our seniors. It is actually radical to say, when you're sick, there's no emergency room for you. Those are radical things. Saying maybe we should shift resources from people who are supposed to be there to keep us safe and police crime, but they're not supposed to be there to deal with somebody living in a tent

or somebody having a mental health crisis. I don't think that's radical. I actually think that's very practical. And I think it makes a lot of sense. I know that you've touched on this, but I actually would just like to ask you the question flat out. Why do you think it's necessary to take funds away from the police to accomplish this shift to better community support? Because I think some people might, might agree that, that you need better supports for all of these other issues, right? But, but maybe don't agree that, that the money should come from the police budget. That is a great question. That was actually the position of the National Police Federation. They said, we think we should fund both fund the police adequately and fund social services adequately. One answer to that, of course,

is a power imbalance. So for example, jails and prisons have healthcare staff, but we also see repeatedly that healthcare staff become involved in covering up violent incidents in the jails, not providing adequate care. Because when you're in a scenario where the default is the security and policing, it is very hard to then establish a different culture of care within that. So one concern is if we say, okay, we have a fully funded police force, and then, you know, we have these civilian workers within them. Are those civilian workers going to have the power to challenge the police? Are they going to have the power to challenge the police? Are they going to have the power to say, actually, no, you're not going to come on this call. I am.

There is a power imbalance. Another reason is why. Why would we maintain funding at a level that is unnecessary when we can place that funding elsewhere? So on a very practical level, this isn't about austerity for the austerity's sake. It's not about saying, where can we find budget cuts? It's about saying what actually works. And if we are needlessly putting resources, for example, into police-led mental health units, when we can actually have civilian-led ones, it doesn't make a lot of sense. So I think part of this is really looking at how we distribute our budget and where we distribute dollars. I would say that values follow. We fund what we believe in and we fund what we value. And so if we continue to fund punishment, we will have punishment. If we continue to fund the police, we will have the police. The very simple way of saying this is when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Right. If you fund the police to respond to everything, the police will respond to everything. If you fund other alternatives, they will be available to respond. Okay. L. Jones, thank you so much for this. It's always a pleasure to hear you. Thank you so much for having me. All right, that is all for today. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.