As part of worldwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism, Canadians from coast to coast to coast are calling on governments of all levels to defund the police. 

Syrus Marcus Ware, a community activist and core member of Black Lives Matter Toronto, says defunding the police is necessary, given the problematic origins and systemic racism in policing, and that Black and Indigenous people are overrepresented in use of force cases. According to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, interactions with the Toronto Police Service resulted in Black people having “fear, trauma, humiliation, mistrust, and expectations of negative treatment by police.” 

For decades, Indigenous activists have spoken against systemic racism within police forces in Canada, and the RCMP, which originated to enforce colonialism, keeping First Nations people on reserves and later forcibly taking children from their parents to put them in residential schools. Over the years, Indigenous leaders have called out systemic racism, which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recently said exists within all police forces, including RCMP. 

The Way Forward for Social Impact Organizations 

Calls to defund police often recommend investing in social services instead. Ware says it’s necessary to better fund the agencies, non-profits, and other community groups who “have been at the forefront of providing harm reduction in the city for the last several decades.” 

He references, for instance, the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society, which began as a crowd-funded, volunteer-led initiative in Toronto’s Moss Park to supervise injections and intervene in overdoses. Also in Toronto, the Gerstein Crisis Centre provides 24/7 services to respond to mental health and substance use crises. When requested, the centre dispatches a mobile crisis team to meet someone in crisis at an agreed-upon location. It’s this type of intervention that should be better funded across Canada, rather than police services, Ware maintains. 

”We would basically be living in the kind of world that our ancestors were dreaming of when they were trying to get free.” 

Karen Joseph, the co-founder and CEO of Reconciliation Canada, which engages diverse communities in reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, recognizes that non-profits can play a larger role in shaping public safety, but says they must have conversations on how they won’t perpetuate injustice against marginalized people.

To that end, Reconciliation Canada will be co-hosting with the Vancouver Police Department discussions among a diverse group of non-profits and community organizations on how to improve policing. She says nothing is off the table in their conversations, including defunding police. While this has been part of Reconciliation Canada’s ultimate goal to create systems change, the current climate has sped up this initiative with Vancouver police.

She believes working with city police to determine whether their presence can be replaced by or supplemented by community groups is a good start to eventually working with the RCMP, “which is a much larger bureaucracy with much deeper roots,” according to Joseph. 

Ware believes that defunding would lead to a more just society. “Imagine if we had billions of dollars to put back into our communities,” he says, explaining the funds could be invested in parks, community centres, health, adequate child care, housing, and more. 

”We would basically be living in the kind of world that our ancestors were dreaming of when they were trying to get free.” 

Alternatives to policing

Nationally, over $15 billion is spent on policing, including the RCMP. Across Canada, policing makes up significant portions of municipal budgets. The Vancouver Police Department — which represents one fifth of the city’s $1.6 billion budget — has increased by $100 million over the last decade. In Winnipeg, the police service accounts for 30 percent of the city’s budget, which is almost double what it was twenty years ago.

Instead of this money being spent on police, Sandy Hudson, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto recommends a reliance on “well-trained social workers, sociologists, forensic scientists, doctors, researchers and other well-trained individuals to fulfill our needs when violent crimes take place.” 

Ware, with Black Lives Matter Toronto, says police budgets should be redirected toward creating conflict-resolution intervention teams that can respond and negotiate during conflict. “People don’t really realize the work that [police] actually do — they spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations.”

Police also respond to mental health crisis calls, and this year, these calls have resulted in death for Black individuals including D’Andre Campbell and Regis Korchinski-Paquet. In situations of psychiatric distress, Ware recommends creating community-led mental health teams, such as those led by the Gerstein Crisis Centre, who are unarmed and can respond appropriately. While similar initiatives are in place in cities in the US and the UK and have been found to be effective, police forces in Canada have yet to develop a response of this kind.

“When a person is in mental distress or crisis, it’s important that they receive specialist help and support from mental health professionals, not police officers,” states the North Yorkshire Police service, which works with mental health street triage teams to respond to distress calls, accounting for 40 percent of all calls to police in the UK county. 

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health released a statement calling for people experiencing crises to be met by mental health responders. “Police should not be the first responders when people are in crisis in the community,” the statement reads. 

Beyond that, nearly 400 healthcare and social service professionals signed an open letter to Toronto Mayor John Tory and city councillors, calling to defund the Toronto Police Service by at least 50 percent, citing police violence against Black and Indigenous communities, and proposed funding cuts to community and social services including subsidized housing, emergency shelters, community centres, and public transit.

The Toronto Drop-In Network represents 51 drop-ins, which are a welcoming space for people who are homeless or precariously housed and provide services such as harm reduction and food security. Diana Chan McNally, a frontline drop-in worker and the Training and Engagement Coordinator for the organization says their position is “absolutely in favour of defunding the police.” Throughout the network, McNally says police officers are seen as a threat. “Some drop ins have a policy of no police. When we say it’s a safe space, we mean there’s no police presence.”

McNally says the network, which receives under $8 million in funding — which hasn’t increased over the last eight years, despite increasing homelenessness — would welcome reallocating police budgets to support their work. “We’re helping a wide variety of people who are marginalized and yet we have a fraction of the budget of the Toronto Police Service,” McNally says, adding that the network could step in to substitute policing in matters that concern people experiencing homelessness.

But not everyone believes defunding police forces is the right path forward. Gregory Brown, a law and criminal justice instructor at Carleton University who is a retired officer with the Ottawa Police Service, says it would be “ill-advised” to have unarmed social workers perform wellness checks. “You can have mental health social workers show up and be stabbed to death,” Brown says. “I think the police model still has to be there.” Similar sentiments appear common amongst police services, with RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki stating that while social services should be better funded, this should not involve defunding the RCMP.  

Another colonial system

Across Canada, Indigenous people have also raised concerns regarding dispatching social workers and child welfare workers to emergencies, but for a different reason. “It’s very much a colonial system as well,” explains Joseph. “The predominant feeling is that they’re actively involved in taking away children and breaking up families.”

In Canada, Indigenous children are overrepresented in the child welfare system. Joseph says this is not due to abuse, but rather neglect, which can often be a result of trauma among parents, stemming from colonization — and so the solutions to address this must be different. “Defunding one colonial institution [police] to find another colonial institution [social work] is certainly not the way we want to go,” she says.

Defunding one colonial institution [police] to find another colonial institution [social work] is certainly not the way we want to go.

Defunding police will require restructuring society, she says, and Ware agrees: “Abolition isn’t just about funding or getting rid of police — it’s about building alternatives.”

“We, as a collective, as a community, can say, how can we take care of each other? How can we respond to harm through community accountability circles, transformative justice processes, and other [ways]?”

Ware says Black Lives Matter looks to Indigenous tradition to shape what this could look like, referencing practices such as healing circles, which do not require the intervention of police or criminal justice systems. He also points to grassroots initiatives such as pod mapping — small support groups that provide tactical and emotional support. He says alongside practices like mutual aid and community accountability circles, these can play a role in ensuring community members, rather than police, respond to people’s needs. 

Indigenous policing

Some Indigenous communities in Canada are responsible for their own policing. In Whitehorse, the Kwanlin Dun community is supported by community safety officers who don’t carry guns or lay charges. During crises, residents can choose to contact the community safety officers or the RCMP, who still operate in the community.

In Akwesasne, a Mohawk Nation territory that straddles Ontario, Quebec, and the U.S border, the Akwesasne Mohawk Police Service has operated since 1970. While it has a mission to adhere to cultural values, the Akwesasne police perform duties akin to other police forces, such as patrolling and enforcing anti-drug laws. 

Brown says diversifying police forces and using Indigenous policing, like in Akwesasne, can help reduce racial bias — Brown surveyed more than 3,000 police officers across Canada, and found that 96 percent felt they were at an increased risk when interacting with certain demographics such as racialized people, queer people, and those with perceived mental health challenges. But Joseph doesn’t agree with this proposed solution. “That’s not a systemic change… when they have to follow the same exact laws and process.”

She looks instead to initiatives such as Skennen Kowa, a Mohawk mediation centre which is dedicated to peace in Akwesasne. The centre uses traditional teachings from elders along with customs such as the circle process which is meant to transform people in conflict. 

Joseph also explains that some Indigenous communities “use traditional forms of mediation and ceremony as part of their socialization.” For example, the Squamish Nation uses family meetings, and in the Ayas Men Men Child and Family Services which is in the Greater Vancouver area, teams provide case management for children in care, family therapy, and child and youth support. 

In Winnipeg, the Bear Clan Patrol provides security to Indigenous people in the inner city in a “non-threatening, non-violent and supportive way.” Relying on more than 1,500 volunteers, the group patrols the streets, distributes food, provides rides and escorts, and other community support through relationship building. The Bear Clan Patrol prioritizes caring for elders, women, children, and the vulnerable. According to Joseph, incorporating Indigenous traditional wisdom and practices in these ways helps create safer, peaceful communities.

An Ottawa program curbing arrests 

In Ottawa, public intoxication among people experiencing homelessness generates hundreds of calls to police and emergency medical services every year. As a retired officer, Brown recalls that some people were arrested nearly 300 times per year, spending the night in a prison cell, tying up police resources, and ultimately, not addressing the root cause of the issue. 

“I’ve arrested the same person three or four times in one week,” he says. “I think as a society we can do better. Is that really the way to respond to that social problem [of addiction]? To have police put someone in jail everyday until they sober up?”

Is that really the way to respond to that social problem [of addiction]? To have police put someone in jail everyday until they sober up?”

In 1998, Shepherds of Good Hope, an Ottawa non-profit, developed the Managed Alcohol Program, a harm-reduction service that provides both shelter and alcohol to participants through medically prescribed dosages of wine, every hour, for fifteen hours a day. 

“It was expected the program would be able to keep people safer indoors and reduce public intoxication and reduce the use of EMS and Ottawa Police Services,” explains Caroline Cox, a spokesperson for the organization. That’s precisely what happened. A Canadian study found that managed alcohol programs support participants by reducing their contact with police and time in custody (down 43 and 33 percent respectively). 

The program, which receives half of its funding from the municipal government and alleviates some responsibilities from Ottawa police officers and EMS, has not led to a reduction in the city’s police budget. Instead, over the last two decades, the Ottawa police budget, which now stands at nearly $358 million, has tripled — showing that non-profits stepping in with alternatives to policing may not necessarily result in defunding police.

The managed alcohol program, which currently supports around 80 people, often turns individuals away due to a lack of capacity. Cox says additional funding would enable them to support more people and eliminate police involvement with people experiencing addiction. 

Shepherds of Good Hope has advised other alcohol and drug harm-reduction programs in Montreal, Thunder Bay, and Sudbury, and Cox says the current conversation on reallocating police funding may potentially lead to more investments to help these programs scale, which is sorely needed, she says.

“There is only so much [police] can do. It’s been a revolving door when they pick someone up for public intoxication. What can they do with that person? It’s social services that really make the difference and we see that at work here” at Shepherds of Good Hope, Cox says. 

Tell us this made you smarter | Contact us | Report error