The mass movement to defund the police in Toronto is growing rapidly | How are the city's institutions responding?
Photo Credit: (Global News / Google Images)
Written by: Adam Riggio
The ongoing global protest movement against institutional, communal, and individual anti-Black racism has had immediate effects in several governments already. Toronto is one of those; just barely anyway. As a Canadian publication whose home base is in Toronto, I am going to focus on a particular move by the city’s council to make the Toronto Police Department more publicly transparent.
This is not a motion to begin reducing the TPD’s operating budget or reallocating its funding and resources, but it is at least a first step. Black Lives Matter Toronto recently called for a reduction of the Toronto Police budget by fully half. That is not what Toronto City Council is anywhere near doing or considering.
How Are Toronto Police Responding to History in Action?
City Council in Toronto is currently in a back-and-forth with the city’s Police Services Board over whether and how to restructure the TPD, and how fast to do so.
In a 17 June memo, the Toronto Police Services Board made, among others, the following recommendation for the next step in police reform or restructuring. The full document, uploaded 19 June, is very long, so go to page 12. I quote the suggestion in full to show you how the civilian representatives of the police force in Canada’s largest city understand their relationship with the democratic government.
“[That] The Board direct the Chief to annually provide a line-by-line breakdown of the Toronto Police Service’s existing budget at the outset of the Board’s annual budget process, and this breakdown should be made publicly available. This line-by-line breakdown should be organized by the Toronto Police Service’s individual program areas, functions, or services delivered so as to provide maximum transparency to the public as to how public dollars are allocated currently (while not revealing investigative techniques or operations). The Board should also direct the Chief to provide and make publicly available the same line-by-line breakdown of any new budget requests that are recommended to the Board during the Board’s annual budget process.”
Essentially, their response to public accusations of systematic mistreatment of non-white citizens and a culture that encourages a violence-first response to incidents, is the following: ‘We won’t change anything about what we do or how we’re organized, but we promise to show you how we spend the money.’
Pay careful attention to the Police Services Board’s offered promise to provide detailed breakdowns of each of their programs and services. That promise takes for granted that all those operations will continue as they usually have, and we in the general public will see only what precisely those operations are.
What Will City Council Ask from Toronto’s Police?
Relative progressives on Toronto’s City Council are asking for more than this mere promise to let citizens finally see the operations and budget breakdown of all their oppressive and violent activity.
Councillors Josh Matlow and Krysten Wong-Tam co-sponsored a motion that would actually begin a process to defund and radically reorganize the Toronto Police Department, along with expanding other city services to replace the improper application of policing against vulnerable and endangered people. They lay out the creative path forward from police reform as follows.
“[That] City Council direct the City Manager to work with Black, Indigenous and People of Colour community-led organizations, mental health, restorative justice and legal experts to identify alternative 911 and other emergency responses to replace armed police officers with mobile, community-based crisis programs as first responders to de-escalate and triage non-criminal incidents of crisis involving mental health and addictions, the homeless, school discipline and neighbour disputes and to report back to the September 2020 meeting of the Executive Committee with the findings and recommendations, along with costing, source of funding and all other pertinent information.”
This is the most important part of the new policing policies that Toronto’s City Council is considering. Their main proposal is to let the defunding and reallocation from police services be guided by members of the affected communities. The reform, defunding, and abolition of policing activities requires the knowledge of those who are the objects, and sometimes the targets, of policing. Otherwise, changes will be done in the dark, or worse, with the primary input of the officials and officers whose actions and systems embody racism, oppression, and violence already.
Interrogating the Police, Questioning Policing
The motto, slogan, and meme that has put this discussion in public consciousness is “Defund the Police.” The term has been fascinating and confusing. It provokes liberal sensibilities because such comfortable people still think police are necessary to enforce the law and protect communities. But it also intrigues liberal sensibilities because the term defund sounds neutral and technocratic. That makes it perfectly attuned to provoke the rational, detailed discussions of alternatives to policing among the comfortable classes of society: the secure but aware, kind but blinded, concerned for others, but also for themselves.
When Stephen Colbert joked that the slogan began as the radio edit of N.W.A.’s “Fuck the Police,” the Late Show wisecrack carried many layers of meaning.
The movement to defund police organizations, to reduce their budgets and responsibilities, includes a philosophical act that many people among our more comfortable classes have never really considered. It provokes us to separate our patriotic imagery of the police from policing itself, and consider whether the best response to some problem or crisis is to police it.
Policing as an activity or process is the application of control and coercion to repair social ills. Those who take for granted the goodness of police organizations and policing have seen the danger of policing in the departments who riot against protestors in the United States. These officers beat, maim, and kill people, destroy stores and residences, all in the name of hammering and dominating a population into docility.
To question whether policing is the best response to protest movements opens the possibility that policing is not the best response to a lot of issues in society. The right-wing messaging of conservative political parties as well as corporate and segregationist activism has deeply influenced what the comfortable classes have come to believe about social services.
In short, North America’s comfortable mainstream believes that government money spent on social services like poverty alleviation, free therapy for addiction and mental health problems, and food security, among others of that kind are wastes. Thanks to decades of Reaganite and Bannonite marketing, too many of the comfortable still associate poverty with welfare queen fraudsters, drug addicts as violent cannibals, and children growing up in urban poverty and environmental disaster areas as ghetto urchins. You know what word you’re thinking of.
What Is It to Abolish Policing?
When you hear “Defund The Police!” you should hear it as a cry to re-evaluate the role of the police in society, and to call your attention to the real harm and injustice that comes from the activity of policing people. The police officers themselves who are genuinely admirable in their vocations are not actually those whose job is policing a population, keeping folks obedient and in line with authorities. Policing is an inherently anti-democratic activity because it bends a population into obedience and silence.
As Indigenous activist Pam Palmeter said in a recent Progress Toronto forum on police abolition, police organizations themselves will still have tasks for public service after we strip them of the power to police the population. “All you will have left is a tiny group of people who can focus all their efforts on protecting us, doing investigations, and making sure that we’re safe. That’s if you just defund racism.”
The benefits that police organizations bring to communities is the resources and knowledge to investigate actual crimes, accidents, and suspicious incidents. Infiltrating organized crime syndicates and terrorist groups, analyzing international financial crimes or money laundering, and investigating homicides, assaults, suspicious deaths, robberies, rapes. Instead of police departments, we will have criminal investigation departments.
Matlow and Wong-Tam’s motion at City Council also describes alternative ways to spend the money that would have gone to the TPD budget. Their ideas include investing in affordable childcare and housing, employment counselling offices, the Tenants’ Defence Fund and other legal aid offices, and improving food security for the city’s poor. This short list describes only some of the other investments that Toronto, and all our cities and municipalities, could make that would replace the violent control of policing.
In our current model of funding the police above all else, cops must intervene in mental health crises, spousal abuse, petty crime or guard duty, juvenile delinquency, sex work, drug use and addiction, homelessness, and a host of other social ills best addressed with healing. In a city government that has abolished the activity of policing, all these would be addressed with professionals in social work, psychology, therapy, refuge centres, mentorship, food distribution, and housing agencies.
Imagine What Seems Impossible to Make It Real
When you begin considering alternatives to policing, it is remarkable precisely what you can understand can be better handled differently. That’s why Toronto’s Black Lives Matter activists have been advocating starting police abolition with a cut of fully half the TPD’s budget, far more than the mere 10% cut before City Council now.
After all, the current police department budget in Toronto is $1.1-billion. A cut of 10% will reduce that to $1-billion. Certainly that $110-million will be better spent elsewhere. But there is no reason to stop at redistributing such a relatively small amount. Consider that this amount is the sale value of 884 detached family houses in Toronto. Consider that this amount is $34-million less than the production budget of 2016 action-comedy Ghostbusters: Answer the Call.
As BLMTO activist Rodney Diverlus told Spring Magazine;
“What’s the difference between a $1.1 billion police institution and a $1 billion institution? While the 10% cut is meant to placate the public, it’s frankly unacceptable. The fact that we’ve been talking about this issue way beyond my life time and this happened every decade. Every couple of years I’m here to talk about the same issue. Small concessions are unacceptable. People are dying, and as such, we’re asking for a minimum of 50% reduction towards the goal of zero. 10% does nothing.”
For too long, too many of us have thought little to nothing of whether the police and policing is the best way to handle some social ill or situation. This moment in history prompts us to think seriously about what policing as an activity actually does, and how effective policing is at what we actually want our society to achieve.
Let’s raise our thinking and our creativity to the powers that our moment demands, at long last.
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