No Justice, No Peace: Bloated Canadian Police Budgets and #JusticeforRegis
Photo Credit: (Aesthetic Magazine / Google Images)
Written by: Morgana Adby
On Saturday, over 5000 people marched on Toronto Police Headquarters to demand an investigation into the suspicious death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet. The rally is organized by Not Another Black Life. She was a black community member and churchgoer, who fell off her balcony to her death on Wednesday during a police encounter.
The police had been called to help by the family, as they were dealing with a mental health emergency. Immediately after the tragedy, the family called for an investigation into police conduct, citing what they see as suspicious activity: in a live video online, a cousin asks for Korchinski-Paquet’s mother to explain what she observed.
The mother responds, “The police killed my daughter, came into my apartment and shoved her off the balcony,”
As the family’s legal counsel expressed to CP24, the events went as follows:
“Police arrived and spoke to the three of them [mother, Claudette Beals-Clayton; brother, Reece Korchinski-Beals; deceased].
Singh then said Korchinski-Paquet asked to go to the washroom inside her apartment and went inside. Several officers followed her in while another blocked her mother and brother from entering.
After a minute or two, Singh said the mother and brother heard Regis call out ‘mom help, mom help, mom help’.
An officer then came out into the hallway and said that Korchinski-Paquet was either on the neighbouring unit’s balcony or on the balcony below her unit.
Then another officer told Korchinski-Paquet’s mother that her daughter had fallen to the ground.”
This case touches on the primary concerns regarding policing in this country. Many are asking how it can be that the police were called to help and a beloved community member ends up dead?
CBC found that most Canadians killed in police encounters had a direct connection to mental health and substance abuse issues, and many academic works on the same topic align with that finding.
Likewise, the unprecedented months of COVID-19 measures have seen an increase in domestic and mental health-related calls to police.
The second major nerve this tragedy strikes is police accountability in general. Many are also demanding answers regarding the substantive facts of the case. They want to know who caused Korchinski-Paquet to end up 24 stories below. People want to know that if they end up dead in police presence that the full story will emerge.
It is a tangible pain in Toronto. The demands for answers in this specific case is reflective of the deep fear that many have - that if they or someone they love die during a police encounter, nobody will ever know exactly what happened.
The Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, an independent watchdog that looks into alleged police misconduct, is on the case. This means that at the very least the grievances will be looked into in a public way. That said, there are many activists that do not trust state organizations that investigate police, and specifically question the impartiality of the Ontario Special Investigations Unit. This is because the SIU is staffed by ex-cops from Ontario, and regularly rules in favour of cops over citizens.
For these reasons, transparency will be key in the investigation into this tragic death. The intense public engagement should pressure the unit to investigate the incident fully. If there is not a full and transparent investigation, one should expect to continue seeing citizens in the streets.
The final reason that this event is so impactful, is that it contributes to the narrative being told by the state to racialized communities: that it is ok when they die. Even if it is proven that this case was just a tragedy, and the police officers did their job to the best of their ability, the event still reaffirms the narrative that deaths during police encounters are business as usual.
After all, it happens all the time. You know Ahmaud Arbury. You know George Floyd. You should know a racialized CNN reporter and his team were arrested, live on air while reporting on the demonstrations in Minnesota.
But if you think this message is only sent in America, you just have not been paying attention to the lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, Arab, and other racialized groups in this country.
But in case this is new, here are a handful of Canadian’s killed in police encounters in recent memory. This list is non-exhaustive and does not include encounters where death did not result.
2014, John Caleb Ross, 21, white.
2014, Unknown Bicycler in his fifties.
2014, Jermaine Carby, black, 33.
2014, Peter de Groot, white.
2015, Unknown Suicidal Man, 41.
2018, Quinn MacDougall, 19, Indigenous.
2019, Chad Williams, 26; 2019.
2019, Machuar Mawien Madut, 43, black.
2019, Sean Thompson, 30, Indigenous.
2019, Randy Cochrane, 30, Indigenous.
2019, Jason Collins, 36, Indigenous.
2019, Unknown Teen, 16.
2020, Stewart Kevin Andrews, 22, Indigenous.
The Big Picture: Race and Police Violence in Canada
Visual owned by PIVOT, Equality Lifts Everyone, designed by Peter Kim.
According to a PIVOT deep dive into CBC’s data of fatal police encounters, Black and Indigenous people are impacted disproportionately. For many on the ground, this just confirms what people have seen with their own eyes.
Tensions are especially high right now because of the pandemic. As one lawmaker commented on the LNG TransMountain Pipeline, it is a “great time” to do unpopular things, like build a pipeline, because people cannot gather to protest. The power relations between the state and its citizens currently favours the state.
What is missing from this analysis is that people are taking to the streets anyway, here and in the United States. Regardless of the consequence, when people feel they are being executed at random, they have nothing left to lose. The people are trying to take back some of the power of police in this country, and not just through these demonstrations.
Calls To Reevaluate Police Budgets
Many have called to reevaluate the police budgets of major cities, such as Toronto. It is essential to have an appropriately funded police department to do their jobs, and many rural areas suffer for this reason. However, once a budget is sufficient to fund basic police work excess relates directly to power.
An increased budget is more cops on the streets, more weaponry, and otherwise gives them more power. It can also go towards training, but the type of training can either increase or decrease the power disparity: if it is community or mental health support training, this will create different outcomes than training that frames citizens as enemy combatants.
And the Toronto police budget sure has increased. In 10 years, the budget has expanded by over $200 million.
An average property tax breakdown by CBC’s Lauren Pelly indicates that $700 of a $3020 bill goes towards police- that is the largest percentage to go to an individual service.
It is absolutely fair to question if that $700 is going towards protecting the community or hurting it. About 90% of the budget goes towards the wages of personnel; Toronto was able to add 341 new officers for 2020. Wages may seem like a great place for the money to go, but many are deeply concerned with the excess of officers. There are two main issues, one is the fiscal aspect, as people do not want their tax dollars wasted. The second issue is that people do not want to contribute to police expansion when it has underlying issues of violence against Indigenous, black and brown communities.
Suggestions have been made at length for how Toronto could decrease its police budget. As Phillip Preville with Toronto Life suggests, they could:
“Do away with the two-cops-per-cruiser rule that’s in effect from 7 p.m. until 3 a.m.”
Give civilians the jobs that do not require a badge (this acts as a power equalizer by integrating civilians)
“Create an open database of all the incoming calls and analyze it to better deploy resources.” As he notes, these ensured responses were more timely and less expensive for the system overall in New Zealand.
The above suggestions are some of the least controversial in a long line of proposed improvements to the Toronto police department..
Many internal changes could further protect Indigenous, black and brown people in our communities, but at the very least, shouldn’t the budget reflect those priorities? If cities truly want to build trust between citizens and police, they should use the power they hold over police budgets to protect our communities from the police. Meanwhile, the movement for abolishing the police entirely is gaining strength.
The message that some lives do not matter is greater than the sum of its parts. It cannot be torn down with one service of justice because it bleeds into every facet of our legal system. However, the budget of the Toronto police is a great way to start re-balancing the power in our cities.
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