The Canadian Social Democratic Blind Spot on Police Brutality
Photo Credit: (To Do Canada / Google Images)
Written by: Daniel Xie
On August 26, 2020, just under three months following the murder of Indigenous-Ukrainian-Black Canadian woman Regis Korchinski-Paquet on May 27, 2020, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh responded to the recent verdict that no charges would be delivered against her killers and the Toronto police force, saying that Special Investigations Unit’s decision to file no charges against Regis’ killers brings no justice to her family, nor does it signify any sign that police brutality would not happen again, especially in light of the fact that the Toronto city council has rejected calls to defund the police funding by 10 per cent.
Rather than call for police defunding, Singh called for better police training and oversight, with training focused on de-escalation rather than the escalation of tensions. This earned him the ire of the left, with many left-wing activists and allies to Black Lives Matter calling out his opposition to defunding the police on Twitter as doing little to stop Police Brutality against racialized communities.
Singh’s advocating for reformism in response to police brutality constitutes a blind spot existing within social democratic leaders and movements. This blind spot manifests in their desire to reform institutions that exist to enforce capitalist oppression such as the police into something more humane, despite past efforts at reform failing, since it goes against the nature of the police to be anything but enforcers of capitalism and white supremacy directed against racialized and working-class communities.
Police Reform: A History of Failure
Proponents of the idea of police reform and oversight over police defunding have traditionally advocated for solutions such as body cameras or better training for police. These solutions have never worked. For instance, body cameras are now used by nearly every major police department in the US, but rather than reduce police brutality they’ve turned it into a spectacle where the gruesome crimes of the police are broadcast for all to see. The main reason for the failings of body cameras as a means to ensure police accountability is because body cameras do nothing in even changing the capitalist and white supremacist mentalities propelling police brutality against blacks in the first place. All they do is provide a televised view to mass murder.
With the murder of George Floyd in the United States just two days prior to the murder of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto, liberals have chosen to ignore the growing unrest in the US, with democratic politicians such as presidential nominee Joe Biden simply calling for police being less violent or shooting people non-lethally (despite the fact that the police officers would still be putting people at risk of death by the act of simply shooting people in the first place).
Social democratic reformists, on the other hand, have upped their efforts to put a human face onto police brutality, even if they recognize that police brutality is an important issue to deal with. Bernie Sanders responded to calls to abolish the police, by instead suggesting that the police should receive more funding, claiming that a key cause of police brutality is low wages and lack of education, and consequently police brutality emerges. The solution, as Sanders sees, is to make sure police are well paid and well-educated, which can be only accomplished through more police funding.
To be fair to Sanders, he has supported measures that would ideally facilitate the long term weakening of the police. He has brought forward a set of proposals that would make police officers be held civilly liable for abuses while providing funding to states and municipalities to create civilian corps of unarmed first responders to supplement law enforcement, such as social workers, EMTs, and trained mental health professionals. In addition, he is also calling funding to be provided for the establishment of independent police conduct review boards that are broadly representative of local communities.
However, what Sanders fails to recognize is that by defunding the police, the government will have plenty of money to fund the alternatives to policing Sanders is calling for such as a first response civilian corps that could reduce the power of police in society, along with community oversight towards policing.
By contrast, if money is funneled towards the police simply to make them more efficient and better trained, it would not solve the underlying problems existing within the police forces. Most police funding is carried out not by the federal government in the US, but rather by local governments. While a progressive may be open to funding alternatives to policing, a liberal democratic and conservative politician at the state and local level will be less inclined to use any funding for community oversight, instead opting to use these funds solely for the purpose of funding programs to train the police to be better educated and use supposedly less violent methods, while ignoring any means to fund social and community services that could reduce the influence of the police.
Simply slapping on gimmicks like body cameras, yoga courses, workshops that highlight previous incidents of brutality to new officers, or training police to be less aggressive has proven to be of little use with regards to reducing police violence. Consequently, it’s unlikely that Sanders’ assertions that we can both provide better training for the police and curb their influence in society would bear fruit. Especially since earlier precedents of police reform have produced dismal results.
Jagmeet Singh is treading the same erroneous ground as Bernie Sanders. While he acknowledges that the murder of black and indigenous lives by police in Canada is something that must be confronted, his solution falls short of the transformative processes needed to constitute a successful confrontation.
Rather than calling for defunding the police and looking into alternatives, Singh believes that one can both train the police to be better while reducing their role in society with regards to being first responders in emergencies and also with regards to providing better mental health services for racialized communities. This is despite the fact that efforts to reform the police to be less aggressive have all proven to be dismal failures, in part because of the fact that the police solely exists within bourgeois society as a tool for enforcing capitalism and colonialism; the RCMP for instance, was created for the sole purpose of enforcing settler colonialism on indigenous land, while historically police forces have been created not to punish criminals, but to patrol working-class communities and suppress social agitation.
The perhaps wilfull ignorance of social democrats towards the class and sociopolitical character of police forces also demonstrates that the solutions offered by social democrats are not the way forward out of the crises perpetuated by 21st century capitalism. Social democrats like Bernie Sanders and Jagmeet Singh believe that the structures enforcing capitalism such as the police could be reformed to be more humane, even as mounting evidence builds up showing that oppressive structures like the police cannot be reformed, but must be weakened and abolished.
An Unwillingness to Embrace the Left
In addition to failing to recognize that all attempts at police reform have thus far been a dismal failure, Singh’s support for police reform over police abolition also signifies a reluctance to move away from the rightward shift that has been happening for years within the NDP leadership.
Thomas Mulcair, the leader of the NDP who has moved the party to the right the most, has not only advocated for increased police funding, but defended that position during the 2015 elections. During the 2015 elections, Mulcair called for investing $250 million in recruiting front-line police officers followed by $100 million in ongoing funding annually. His justification is that while crime rates are going down, there are supposedly troublesome communities, such as Surrey, British Columbia, that require police funding to maintain order. Yet what had been ignored by Muclair is the toll a greater police presence takes on indigenous and racialized communities in Canada when they have to deal with police violence.
For instance, in 2017 two male Surrey police officers were reported for slamming a 16-year old black girl to the ground and handcuffing while she waited for the bus. The police officers assaulted her because they thought she was a criminal they were pursuing. In Toronto’s Jane and Finch, another community which had been associated with high crime rates, neighborhoods have been overpoliced and brutalized by cops, in particular by the army-like Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy police division and the 31st division. The latter division even faced a protest by residents of Jane and Finch on December 10, 2008, who claimed claimed that the youth living in the area were more scared of the police violence than they were of ‘street’ related issues.
There have also been various incidents of police related fatalities on Jane and Finch. On May 5, 2010—10 years before the murder of George Floyd in the US--Junior Alexander Manon, an 18-year-old African-Canadian resident of Jane-Finch, died while being forcefully choked by Constable Michael Adams and his partner. Judges, rather than bringing his killers to justice, simply ruled that his death was an accident.
These examples from supposedly high-crime communities show that Mulcair’s call for more police funding would cause more violence rather than less. Extra police funding would have further militarized the police and provided them with the tools to brutalize people of color in impoverished communities even further. Singh’s unwillingness to move away from Mulcair-era support for the police demonstrates once again a refusal to return to the NDP’s socialist roots.
Say No to Police Reform
Jagmeet Singh’s refusal to commit to police defunding, and by extension Bernie Sanders’ refusal to do so as well, demonstrates how social democratic reformism fails to properly confront police brutality. While social democrats like Sanders and Singh may recognize the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the issue of systemic racism in the US and Canada respectively, they prefer police reform over genuine sociopolitical transformation and revolution. Yet historically, efforts to reform the police, such as yoga training or body cameras, have all proven to be dismal failures. This is because of the fact that police were created to enforce a violent colonialist and capitalist sociopolitical order that social democrats have consistently sought to give a human face. Further reforms would not weaken the excess violence demonstrated by the police, they would, at most, only change the means in which police oppression is carried out.
Rather than support these milquetoast efforts to water down demands for transformative justice, leftists should support and advocate for not the reforming of police, but rather the weakening and defunding of the police, with the money being reallocated from the police going into improving mental health services and improving impoverished and racialized communities targeted by police violence. And rather than continue to uncritically support social democratic movements and leadership that call for these milquetoast reforms, we should support leaders and movements calling for systemic and transformational change through weakening, and eventually abolishing, the police.
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