Canadian activists want to defund the police. Here’s what that means.

In the three weeks since Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality have emerged and continued around the world, from the US to Australia — including in cities and towns across Canada. 

Canadians aren’t just marching, writing to their representatives, and taking to social media in solidarity, though. Black and Indigenous people are disproportionately killed by police in Canada, according to a CBC analysis of fatalities during police encounters from 2000 to 2017. Incidences of deaths during encounters with police also steadily increased over the 17-year period, even when adjusted for population growth. Indigenous and Black people are also more likely to be surveilled by police, and are highly overrepresented in our prison population. The recent deaths of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Chantel Moore and Rodney Levi during interactions with police have reinforced Canadian protesters’ insistence that police brutality is an urgent problem here, too. 

These and other stories have led to a central demand among protesters, both around the world and here in Canada: defund the police. 

What does it mean?

Proponents are calling for governments, from municipal to federal, to gradually defund police services and reinvest in social services whose workers are trained to deescalate violent situations and provide social supports shown to prevent violence and crime in the first place, like youth services or subsidized housing. This kind of reinvestment could also include creating a new frontline service of unarmed social workers trained to respond to mental health crises, as many are killed by police during wellness checks. 

Considering that policing makes up the largest budget line item in many Canadian municipalities, this could mean a considerable amount of money invested in community and social services. And the #defundthepolice movement is gaining momentum — two Toronto city councillors recently proposed cutting the city’s police budget by 10 percent. In Vancouver, where policing represents 20 percent of the city’s budget and the police board rejected a one percent budget decrease just last month, City Councillor Christine Boyle recently told the CBC, “I’m very interested in how we better support communities and front-line efforts to develop community safety themselves. And for that to mean a decreased need for policing and being able to shift that policing funding.” 

Minneapolis’s city council unanimously voted last week to disband its police force and invest instead in community-led public safety programs. 

Black Lives Matter and anti-racism activists here in Canada believe this is the right path forward. In an interview with the CBC, author of The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power Desmond Cole said in response to a question about what defunding the police would mean, “Somebody who’s trained in deescalation, who doesn’t cost $120,000 a year, could have gone to Regis Korchinski-Paquet’s apartment building and tried to make a better outcome than what happened.” 

Defund or reform?

An important distinction proponents of defunding police forces are making is that they’re not calling for police reform, which many argue has been attempted to no avail for decades. They point out that body cameras are not shown conclusively to reduce police violence. Anti-racism training for officers is not the answer either, they say. “How can we expect an institution that has failed all attempts at reform to suddenly refrain from targeting, maiming and killing Black people because of a new police chief, mayor or policy?” Black Lives Matter Toronto co-founder Sandy Hudson wrote in an open letter to white Canadians for Macleans. “I am asking you to refuse an approach to safety that is simply good enough for you, and absolutely unjust to me.”

Cole echoed this in the CBC interview, and said the only meaningful solution to police brutality in Canada is to defund police weaponization, specifically. “The police can’t be trained out of their ways, because they live in a white supremacist society that teaches them that oppressing us is ok,” he said. “The white settler state says that policing has to be at the barrel of a gun and that the police have to have a license to kill. If you give someone a license to kill, it’s because you want them to use it sometimes… The sticks and the guns and the tasers need to be taken away, and that money needs to be transformed into supports for our communities.” 

Defund or demilitarize?

Cole’s points bring up another distinction among protesters — some are calling specifically for demilitarizing police forces. That would mean prohibiting the use of military weaponry, equipment and tactics in policing in order to reduce police violence against Black and Indigenous communities.

Robyn Maynard is the author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. In an interview with Toronto Life, she said demilitarization is an important first step toward true public safety. She pointed to a recent study that found that deployment of SWAT teams in Canada has risen by more than 2,000 percent in the last 37 years. “There is an increased reliance on using SWAT teams in Toronto, Winnipeg, Ottawa, for things like executing warrants, traffic enforcement, and responding to mental health crises,” she added. 

Defund or abolish?

While some proponents of defunding the police envision a future where much smaller police forces still exist with their mandates limited, others see it as a process leading eventually to the complete abolition of policing in society. 

“In Minneapolis and elsewhere, police abolitionists say their real goal isn’t just to wipe out police forces, but to reconstitute society in a way that makes them far less necessary, if at all,” wrote Ruairí Alfredo Arrieta-Kenn for Politico. “The movement has a wider program: decriminalization of many nonviolent offenses, such as drug use and sex work, and shifting resources and responsibilities from the police to social welfare services. The result, advocates envision, is a community that simply has less crime to deal with.”

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