Defunding The Police Will Save Black And Indigenous Lives In Canada
As I write, demonstrations are raging across North America in protest of continued police violence against Black people. The police killings of Black people have sparked resistance uprisings, from Whitehorse to Miami and seemingly everywhere in between.
Demonstrators are calling for justice for Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto, who fell to her death while police were in her apartment, D’Andre Campbell in Brampton, Ont., George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and countless others who have faced anti-Black police brutality.
If we truly want to effect change that could stop police killings of Black people, we must have a conversation about defunding the police.
Perhaps you are thinking to yourself, “What about violent crime?”
I hear you. And I want you to consider this simple fact: police do not prevent violence. What we need in the event of violent crime is a service that will effectively respond to it, stop it from happening if it is ongoing, and investigate the circumstances surrounding it.
This is a conversation about safety, and the mechanism through which we as a society will provide safety for one another.
Policing is ill-equipped to suit these needs.
When victims are not the right kinds of victims, police have utterly failed. When the queer community in Toronto told police there was a serial killer targeting racialized queer men in the Church Street village, the police openly denied there was a serial killer and did not take the threat seriously. This allowed serial killer Bruce MacArthur to get away with murdering at least eight men over at least seven years.
In British Columbia, police failed to apprehend serial killer Robert Pickton for over 20 years, and this failure meant that Pickton was able to murder 49 women. The majority of these women were Indigenous, and police routinely refuse to take the disappearance of Indigenous women seriously. When Toronto police attended to the suspicious death of Black transwoman Sumaya Dalmar...
