FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Who will protect me?

Who is protecting you now? Community, family, friends.

Funds will be reallocated towards community based emergency response systems. This will include unarmed individuals trained in crisis management. 

Don't police need more money because crime rates are increasing?

Police don’t ‘prevent’ crime. They respond once something has occurred. Contrary to what we see on tv, police don’t spend a lot of their time ‘fighting crime’; they mostly patrol, and certain neighbourhoods and populations are patrolled more than others. 

Defund the police also includes the second part, which is a reallocation of those funds towards community services. If we are looking to truly prevent crime and decrease occurrences of unlawful behaviour, defunding is the answer! 

I agree we should decriminalize drugs & police shouldn’t handle non-violent crime; but what about violent crime?

We need to understand and address the root causes of crime. Crime doesn’t just randomly happen.

Police don’t effectively ‘solve’ violent crime.

The current solution to violent crime is imprisonment. This is ineffective as it fails to address the root cause that pushed the offender to violence. We need to use community resources to help violent offenders rehabilitate and change, while ensuring their dignity. Our collective goal should be to reduce harm in the community, rather than to punish violent offenders

Not all police use excessive force, just a few ‘bad apples’. So why are you targeting all police?

It is interesting that the first part of the phrase- a few bad apples- is often used to dismiss the larger problem within policing. The whole saying is “a bad apple spoils the bunch”.

The notion that it’s just a few police officers who use excessive force is erroneous and denies the well-documented institutional and cultural racism that is endemic to policing across Canada. 

What about suggested reforms, such as providing police with more training, installing body cameras, or having more oversight?

Calls for more training and oversight are not new and often, police are already receiving the sorts of training being proposed. For example, Vancouver police receive ‘anti-racism training’. So calling for more training is calling for more of the same. These types of reforms have not substantially changed policing practices. The fact that so many acts of police violence are recorded (often on people’s phones) and they still keep happening, it is clear that the body cameras are an ineffective response. Instead of more training or half-measured ‘reforms’, we need to shift resources from police to community-led initiatives.

What about prisons?

Abolitionist perspective: Prisons aim to separate and punish those who have harmed others, however the underlying social issues that caused the crime are left unaddressed. Prison abolition would mean solutions that address inequality, racism and poverty. Further, Prions fail to rehabilitate incarcerated individuals, and once these individuals re-enter our communities, they are more likely to reoffend as the underlying issue of poverty and lack of access are still unaddressed. Prisons present a geographic, spatial solution to social issues. The separation of crime does not mean that it does not exist, and further incarceration. We propose that instead of putting more money into a system that aims to separate and punish wrong-doers, we must use our community funds and tax dollars to create systems that address inequality and that rehabilitate offenders so that they may safely rejoin our communities. Instead of assuming a moral point that all those who commit crimes are bad, and must be treated that way. We must address the large societal factors that influence unlawful behaviour. Some of these factors are a lack of mental health support, systemic racism that differentiates judicial outcomes based on identity, and economic class barriers that lead to housing and food insecurity.

Further reading, sources and supplementary media:

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis

Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault

The Skin We’re In: A Year In Black Resistance and Power  by Desmond Cole 

Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks in incarceration and prison abolition in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic - https://youtu.be/hf3f5i9vJNM 

Do you actually mean “Defund the Police?”

Yes, We Actually Mean It

What is systemic racism?

Systemic racism is policies and practices entrenched in institutions, which result in the exclusion or promotion of designated  groups. In Canada, Indigenouspersons, Black people, and other racialized individuals face systemic  barriers based on their identity. Police services in North America were established to aid colonizers in controlling the Indigenous populations and enslaved persons. The protection of settler property was valued above the safety of Indigenous and Black persons. These practices persist today through racial profiling, and increased violence towards Black people, and members of the First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities. When discussing systemic racism and the need to defund our police systems, we must be aware of the disproportionate harm that Indigenous and Black people face at the hands of our police system 

This is different from interactional racism such as discriminatory comments or stereotypes. Systemic racism is different in that “legitimate” power, that of the state and state institution, is used on a large scale in the differentiated and negative treatment of racialized individuals 

What would we spend the money on instead?

Defunding the police would allow communities to reallocate the funds towards public services. This includes community-based crisis intervention,  education and health care, affordable housing, mental health and addiction services, as well as the funding of public transit. The aim is to reduce the interaction of police with at-risk groups, such as Indigenous persons, Black people, those facing mental health or drug issues and the impoverished. Instead of an armed police officer responding to these calls, it would be a member of the community trained in nonviolent crisis de-escalation. The reallocation of funds to public services, such as housing, would decrease inequalities and address the root cause of crime. 

Source and further reading: 

Defund the Police: Moving Towards an Anti-Carceral Social Work by Leah A. Jacobs et al. https://doi.org/10.1080/10428232.2020.1852865