Thoughts on the police
This post does not
claim to have all the answers, or any answers, nor to be a
comprehensive, or any kind of analysis, but is simply some thoughts
on a subject that our society has finally been forced to deal with.
One's attitude to the
police is clearly shaped by the reality one lives in. Unfortunately
for too many people that reality is that the police are people who at
worst kill them or their family members and at best treat them
unfairly and discriminate against them. To others the police are
people they depend on to protect them and in some cases to protect
their privileged status in society.
Some will say this is
an issue that we have imported from a racist United States. We know
that to be untrue. Even those that say that know it to be untrue and
the best they can argue is that it is relatively worse in the United
States. Not being as bad as America is hardly a standard we should
want to be judged by in Canada, particularly when strong arguments
can be made that this is not true anyway, we just all wish it was.
Many will argue that
abolishing or defunding the police are simply ideas that are too
radical.
Indeed for untold
decades suggestions for community building and crime prevention as an
alternative to policing and incarceration have been met with support
in principle without funding being provided, while police budgets
have increased exponentially with little restraint. Indeed there
seemed to have be an unspoken argument that we will find money for
crime prevention when we no longer need it for the police because
crime has disappeared.
We could of course
reduce the need for the police by orders of magnitude if we stopped
criminalizing what is a public health issue – drug use and abuse.
We have done that for years with alcohol and tobacco use and
cannabis just recently. There is no rational reason why all
non-medical use of drugs should not been treated in the same way as a
public health issue.
The funds are available
to provide proper drug rehabilitation programs, sitting there in
police budgets being wasted on treating a health matter as a criminal
one. We could also use that money to provide mental health workers to
deal with mental health crisis so the individuals receive treatment
rather than being killed by police.
I dare say we have a
huge amount of room to defund the police and put that money to better
use.
We could put traffic
enforcement in a separate organization with a greater emphasis on
road safety rather than collecting fines,
What we have left
within the police for traditional policing, crime investigation and
law enforcement would still require major reforms. Reforms of the
extent that could justifiably be argued would be best done by
abolishing the police as they now exist and starting all over.
