Close Encounters

Written By Oumar Salifou
 

It’s plainly obvious that the most vulnerable people are the most heavily policed. Along with a lack of mental health and addiction supports, this creates a cycle where vulnerable populations remain in poverty or enter our punitive justice system.

Hannan and Oumar talk to Shima Robinson, an organizer at the recently-closed Pekiwewin camp, about police targeting of houseless populations, the importance of de-escalation training, and the need for transit accessibility. We also speak to Mark Cherrington at the Coalition for Justice and Human Rights about the fear of police, lack of police accountability, and what a world without police might look like.

Hannan Mohamud (Co-Host)
Mental health services are connected with transit services, are connected with housing... it’s such a layered situation where one cannot be talked about without the other.

🎵 (Theme Music)

Hannan
So you have situations where transit officers are going on busses. And if you forget your bus pass... There is less of a chance of someone who literally came from work and has a work badge to get ticketed, because you can literally just say “I left it at home, I forgot, let me go off easy, I’ll just get off at the next stop,” versus someone who is homeless, has a mental health struggle, anyone who is literally going through withdrawal that is trying to get to a rehab centre. Anyone who is coming on the bus that makes you feel like they’re troubled. 

Our interviewees go very in depth with how the system was set up to remove people that are like that, from situations where we’re trying to access service, so the wider population doesn’t have to deal with it or see it. 

Oumar Salifou (Co-Host)
In the last episode of the podcast, we talked about the media. And that was a very personal episode for me, mostly because of things that have happened in my past. But also because I think of the general frustration that a lot of people share when it comes to the media’s inability to tell stories about anti-Black racism, police brutality, and anti-Indigenous racism.

We want to thank people who have decided to support us on Patreon. Without your support, we wouldn't be able to actually interview the people that you’re about to listen to in a way that is reflective of the truth, and that’s fair for Black people and Indigenous people and for everyone.

Hannan
Shima, tell me a little bit about yourself. Like, who are you?

Shima Aisha Robinson (Community Organizer)
I’m a community artist in Edmonton. I’m a spoken word poet, or performance poet. So that’s my main driving thing outside of work. My work is that I work for the Alberta Public Interest Research Group. We do social justice work with undergraduate students.

I am an activist, so I’m in Black Lives Matter YEG and I’m involved in the Pekiwewin camp in the Rossdale flats right now as the media liaison.

Hannan
The camp really is historical, in my opinion, I think it’s a very historical thing that’s happening right now when it comes to talking about affordable housing. The name ‘Pekiwewin’ – where did it originate from?  What does it mean, and what does it mean to you? 

Shima
So Pekiwewin is a Nêhiyawêwin word. Nêhiyawêwin is the Cree language, that’s the word for the Cree language in the Cree language. And then the word for ‘Cree people’ is Nehiyaw. Pekiwewin means ‘coming home,’ and it can also be translated to mean ‘inbound.’ So ‘inbound’ is like returning home.

Shima
Though the camp itself also means a lot about it… it just makes very clear a lot of the challenges and struggles that people have even outside of the issues of housing and mental health supports. Everybody is having a close encounter with their vulnerability on the site pretty much on any given day, so it’s about what it takes to make people feel safe.

When one is homeless — or houseless, I should say — in Edmonton, there’s a lot of laws and bylaws that prevent that person from, say, sleeping in the same spot every day. Or from pitching a tent somewhere. Those tents get slashed up, sometimes pepper sprayed, sometimes just things are stolen by Edmonton area law enforcement specifically. 

And then there’s also the fact that, in a lot of our public parks, you’re not allowed to sleep there. You're allowed to be there, but you can’t just be sleeping. It’s against a bylaw. And so people will be moved along when they're trying to get rest a lot.

So depending on where people are, they’re not always located in the inner city, they’re not always able to stay with people who are in the inner city, if they're relying on other people. And when they get housed, they might not be housed in the inner city. So how do they get around? They have to use transit. Transit should be free. If they take the chance on, not getting caught on the LRT, the attendant stress is not good for them. If they get caught, they're charged with trespassing because they haven’t paid their fare.

And this creates what I’ve been calling the “bus to prison pipeline,” because the next time they call that a ticket, they can go to prison for trespassing violations. Instead of doing that, we could just give people the means to stay housed, find them housing, and then give them free transit so they can stay in their housing so that they don’t have to be a huge weight on the taxation system.

Hannan
Wow, I never thought of it that way. Like the bus to prison pipeline. If you’re taking a bus to go see your family member or take care of someone, and next thing you know you’re getting arrested because you couldn’t afford it? It’s atrocious, like exactly what you said. 

And I mean, Edmonton winters are atrocious. Minus 40 weather — are they expecting people to just walk if they can't afford the ticket?

Shima
The highest demographic of ticketed individuals on ETS (Edmonton Transit System) last year was the houseless community. Highest demographic of ticketed people. 

And so when we think about that as being the enforcement of poverty, and we think about what people have to do, let's say when they get out of prison for the two weeks that were in remand, to be able to say their ticket is null. They get back into the city and then people have ‘trouble’ with them right. They end up in a neighborhood, or let's say they came back to Pekiwewen camp even, and somebody encounters them on the way to wherever it is they’re going, and they have ‘trouble’ with them. 

Now I think that this ‘trouble’ is more reflective of the deep, deep deficiencies in our systems.

Hannan
If, per se, someone — and I’ll give you what I would define as trouble in this situation — but someone was going through a mental health crisis. How would people at the camp respond to this? 

Shima
Basically that happens on the site every day, because there are some people who live at Pekiwewin camp who have very serious and cognizant around addictions and mental health, which is very common when people have any serious trouble with either one of those.

We offer as much compassion as we can. It's about empathy. It’s about also setting healthy boundaries. It’s about getting people on their medications. These are the things that are done on the site every day. Every day there’s some kind of meltdown, or somebody will be having a hard time in a specific kind of way that takes a lot of knowing them to understand.

There’s backstory, there’s developed relationships, there’s relational significance between organizers, volunteers, and people who reside on the camp. 

I think it’s really just about understanding that people are people, no matter what. No matter how distraught or angry somebody might be, they’re still a person. And to treat them like that usually helps them to heal with immediacy. 

It usually helps them to calm down immediately, usually has a really positive effect. And so it is just about extending that care.

Hannan
It’s just mind boggling to know that the calls that the police are getting are mental health related. So they would be dealing with situations that you deal with everyday. But in reality… there was an article that came out talking about disturbing numbers, an 11.9% increase from the last six months of 2020. 

Any type of mental health call was met with use of force, and an 11.9% increase in use of force was delivered, or control tactics, which we know are tasers or subduing a person physically.

I want to know just from you, even outside of the camp itself. As a person, what would you recommend as a type of training or as a type of service that you, like just as a citizen in Edmonton, that you’ve noticed that is severely lacking when it comes to mental health?

Shima
De-escalation. De-escalation training is the one thing that is severely lacking in my opinion.

Everything else is pretty much like your first aid, like mental health first aid and regular old first aid. Maybe like Naloxone training and then just like a knack for it. If you have a knack for it, you can do those things and implement those things when you need to do them.

But de-escalation training is a key feature, is a key aspect of the training package that is needed to do these things effectively without coercing people into complying to the requirements of receiving that kind of service. I think de-escalation as a core skill has to be emphasized for anybody who’s going to be working with vulnerable people. 

That includes everybody in a uniform, which includes EMS, fire department. All of these uniform service people should be exemplary at delivering a de-escalated, solution-based engagement with anybody.

Unfortunately that is not the case. Unfortunately it might not be able to be the case, given the culture of of law enforcement and the culture of first response.

Hannan
And so, Shima I want to know. Tell the viewers, I guess, like how they can support the camp, what they can do to get awareness of what you guys are doing, and how they can push city councillors to act.

Shima
So there is a page on the City of Edmonton website that has all the phone numbers, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever they’ve got for every single city councillor, including the mayor.

Spam that, just go ham and let them know what you think about what they’re doing with Pekiwewin camp, what they're putting out there in the media, etc.

Oumar
I just want to jump here and mention that camp Pekiwewin has actually been closed recently. So last weekend, November 8, the camp was given a notice and most people were basically led out. I’ll play this clip from APTN reporter Chris Stewart to provide further context for what happened.

Chris Stewart (APTN)
Edmonton police are going through what remains of the camp. Lots of tents and belongings are still here. Christel Kjenner is the Director of Affordable Housing & Homelessness for the City of Edmonton. She says that the city has enough room in the several shelters to house everyone who needs it.

Raelene Carter is a long time resident of the camp. She says she is afraid to go to a shelter with the COVID pandemic.

Raelene Carter
If you’re going to put a whole bunch of people, anywhere from 10 to 300, what they do have at the Shaw Conference Centre, and expect them to stay there. And if one person gets sick, it’s like walking into a death trap. What I’m thinking is, we were right. I was right to stay outside here.

Chris Stewart
She says she will be staying at a friend’s place soon, but will be sleeping outside until then. And doesn’t understand why they were evicted.

Raelene Carter
To me, it’s just another form of sweeping it under the rug and saying that “we did the best we could with what we had.” But I think it’s a very unsophisticated fashion to handle people, especially when they’re dealing with our lives.

Chris Stewart
So now, the only people at camp Pekiwewin are the police.

🎵 (Theme Music)

Hannan
It really does sound like we’re paying for law enforcement to go ticket and surveil an impoverished population. Like Shima says in her interview, the most overpopulated ticketed population is homeless people in Edmonton. It’s ridiculous that we’re paying for a service that we know we’re not going to get our money back from. In my opinion, it’s directly done on purpose. What do you think, Oumar? 

Oumar
I definitely have a lot to say when it comes to transit in Edmonton. I think to begin with, Hannan you mentioned this before, transit in Edmonton ranks very low when it comes to national transit systems. Our LRT system only has 2 lines. One, which was added recently, is a great addition. It still has a lot of expansion to do.

But, for example, in the city of Calgary everyone gets to ride for free downtown. So it’s a good example of how you don’t necessarily have to have transit that’s inaccessible like Edmonton. 

The transit here also runs on a ticketing system, that was mentioned in the interview, that is completely based on the honour system. You don’t have anything preventing you from using transit if you’re using the LRT. You can just walk into the train, and essentially what the city does is like we were talking about, they enforce all these bylaws.

Bylaws like, you can’t put your feet up. Obviously if you enter without paying, that’s a bylaw violation. So it’s just the cycle of poverty. You don’t have money, so you’re punished for not having money, and then you have even less money after that.

How are we supposed to help people that are already disenfranchised because of racism? How are we supposed to help them actually get to a better place if everything in the system, all the policies that are in place, are just putting them back into the same cycle? 

I think a lot of people in the city definitely struggle with making ends meet. COVID has made things even worse. Now we’re seeing camps like this appear, and people don’t have many options. So I think it’s obviously time for policy to change.

Hannan, what do you think about policies that the city should change and how these things should be approached?

Hannan
I feel like their work is pretty much done for them. I think Shima mentions some very realistic solutions that are out there through research that volunteers have done.

I mean, think about it. How much money has gone into reports that the provincial government has put out getting experts from New York, from New Zealand to talk about oil prices or plunges in housing costs. It’s just unbelievable that you have this wealth of research out there that people have given up their time to do. Yet you’re neglecting to address it. Then furthermore, you choose to just pretend it’s not there and claim this isn’t a service we should fund because we think, or we don’t really know if people will access it.

I mean, 400 people going through this tiny park in Edmonton. 400 people. Think about it, Oumar. That’s 400 too many people trying to find a service during a pandemic. And hearing about those two shelters that were closed down, absolutely ridiculous.

I think the city really needs to start shaping up, minus 40 weather is going to be coming soon. During a pandemic, during the worst economic crisis, like our province is going to be hit the hardest in the country. We know this.

I just think if they don’t act now, will they ever? So I think it really is up to groups and people like Shima, supporting the work that they’re doing. She talks about Beaver Hills House. She talks about Pekiwewin. They’re feeding people, they’re giving people mental health services.

In the city of Toronto, there was a landmark decision where the homeless population actually won because the shelter was closed. It’s actually designated that housing is a right that people deserve. The UN has acknowledged that.

So it’s just preposterous that we are 20 years into a millennium, and the City of Edmonton is struggling to understand that housing is a right and not this privilege that we’ve elevated it to be. It’s very disappointing.

Oumar
I just want to talk a little bit about how some of these issues function in a cycle and how a lot of these things could be solved, but a choice is made by leaders and elected officials to push certain opinions to the side in favour of others. There are clear examples of how policies in the system and the process just always fails people.

One really good example that I want to start with is a story that Bashir shared with me during the summer. I remember when Bashir was called a racial slur when he was in a traffic situation, and when that incident happened he got a meeting with the mayor, Don Iveson, the mayor of Edmonton.

In that meeting, Don Iveson told Bashir that he “couldn’t just walk into the meeting and make demands.” When we’re talking about these demands in this meeting, we’re talking about things like seriously addressing racism in Edmonton. We’re talking about things like taking real action that includes funding, — or funding cuts when necessary — to address racism or address things that are related to racism like police brutality.

So to be told that you can’t make demands, and to also have a system where — in this interview Mark will explain that you get criminalized for not having money, which then means that you owe the government money. Which then means, if you can’t have any money to actually pay them, you are further criminalized.

So people kind of get brought down this rabbit hole, and there aren’t a lot of pathways in the system when it comes to actually funding solutions that aren’t more punitive action like ticketing, or nothing really. Just the streets. You’re just kind of on your own, no social housing, very few concrete social supports.

So when people struggle to afford transit, when people struggle to afford mental health and addiction services, we live in a city that it’s hard to live in if those things aren’t accessible. It’s hard to address these issues, it’s hard to make it known to the public that we need to start solving these things for people, if it’s always cloaked around confusion. Or if the blame is always placed on the individuals who are suffering through these broken policies and bad systems, and quite frankly, elected politicians who will probably smugly tell you that you have no place to make demands or to ask for things when you want them.

So, with that being said, here’s our interview with Mark.

Mark Cherrington (Social Justice Advocate)
So I’m a social justice advocate and I’ve been working in the Edmonton community for about 30 years. I’ve been helping people within the criminal justice system, the child welfare system, the health care system, the education system.

I think that the people that I work with... when you are struggling with mental health and then you’re entrenched in poverty and have little or no support, and then you have all this trauma in your life, that metastasizes itself into something that’s much more severe. And so a lot of the mental health work that I do is in the area of crisis intervention.

Like today, I took somebody to the hospital that was suicidal. You know, I’ve done that hundreds of times. And going upstream with this person, they had a mental health issue and it wasn’t addressed.  Then when they were faced with environmental issues, such as poverty, no food, no access to basic needs, that’s just adding fertilizer to it. It explodes and grows, and then your mental health becomes very unstable. And if you're lacking supports, then you’re at risk of that being like this girl’s case, wanting to kill or hurt yourself.

Hannan
And so I want to ask, what made you interested in this line of work? Because I know that you did train to be a lawyer, right? 

Mark
No no, I never trained to be a lawyer. I was actually trained to be a bartender (laughs).

Hannan
Okay, please share!

Mark
My dad had a restaurant, and I was working there. And it was downtown, so I was exposed to a lot of people that I’d never been exposed to. And I realized that what I really wanted to do was help all these people. 

So we’d get a lot of people with addictions issues in the bar, and I would encourage them to go away. And so I wasn’t very helpful for my dad’s business, but I certainly found my calling. 

Then I went to school and wanted to get a job within the correctional field, and I ended up working at the courthouse for 25 years with the Youth Criminal Defence Office. And now I’m with the Coalition for Justice and Human Rights.

We have an issue all across this country: on paper, we have a lot of protection. We have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, every province has legislation in the area of human rights, but for somebody that was evicted because of the colour of their skin from a housing project with no money, accessing a lawyer to uphold their rights isn’t practical and it’s not going to happen.

Filing a complaint with the human rights commission or any of these commissions across the country is going to take nine months to two years to resolve itself. 

So for that person, there is no human rights. There is no human rights. It’s on paper, but to their perspective, it’s meaningless. So our organization is able to pivot and work very quickly and very effectively in upholding those human rights.

So that landlord, we’d phone them and go, “hey, what the hell are you doing?” We would involve social media, we would involve the press, maybe the landlord and tenants advisory board, the political aspect of it. So that’s where we’re effective is that we’re dealing with human rights on the streets and in our communities. And we’re very quick and very fast and very effective. 

Hannan
I mean, you mentioned how your organization is key to filling those gaps that you’ve identified, you know, from when you were working at a bar. So I want to ask you, what are the services that you see are severely lacking in the city with regards to mental health.

Mark
Housing. I’m sure you’re hearing that a lot. Housing is a big issue.

And ongoing support. There’s all these subtleties that really affect our vulnerable population. And one of them is what’s lacking is, again on paper you have lots of support. We have more agencies than you can shake a stick out.

But you start looking at what these agencies can really do and you understand that their funding comes from the government. So they can’t be critical of government because you can’t bite the hand that feeds you.

And many of these resources are stuck in one silo. So you’ll have an agency that works with people involved in the criminal justice system, but the people involved that are helping you can’t pivot and move outside of that system to also help you in the child welfare system, or the education system, or the welfare system. And so they’re very limited.

We’re lacking real supports that are able to pivot and move and fight effectively within each system. So not only are we lacking the traditional things, we’re also lacking those dynamic resources, such as real agency support and people within the systems that are able to follow these people through their journey.

The turnover rate is so high. You look at a group home, or you look at a youth worker with a young person that has mental health issues. Well, that youth worker is getting $16 an hour, asked to work 45o or really 60 hours a week, has no benefits because it’s for a non-profit agency. And what happens is that they move on, they quit.

This young person is experiencing abandonment over and over and over again because there’s so much movement within the system. The young person doesn’t have any continuum of care, that young person has an emotional connection with that youth worker, that group home staff, that child welfare worker, but they burn out, they move on.

You have these issues of abandonment with our vulnerable sector, and it goes on, it moves on. People that are helping elderly, you know. “Where's George, who was your caregiver for the last six months, who you really like?”Oh, he quit and he moved on and then three months later. “Where’s Jill? She’s your care worker She was supposed to be help” Oh she quit, or she got laid off because of budget cuts.

So what’s really lacking is a continuum of support. We don’t have enough case workers. We don’t have enough support workers. And those that we do have, we’re underpaying them, they’re underfunded, and quite frankly we’re treating them like shit. 

Especially this government, this government’s cutting back on services and making work a lot more difficult and a lot less meaningful with our vulnerable population. 

Agencies are becoming risk averse too, that’s a big issue. A good example is Legal Aid. I worked 25 years with Legal Aid, and they became very uncomfortable with my advocacy and my support, and social justice on a whole. So eventually they became very risk averse and sort of like a cold bowl of pablum. They did no harm, but there was nothing to it. And they became inert, so they let me go. So that's another problem is that you’ve got all these agencies that are risk averse.

Hannan
So you rightfully label quite a few tangible resources and solutions. And Shima, the media liaison for camp Pekiwewin, labelled the exact same things that you’re saying right now. But I want to ask you Mark, because on this podcast, we try to talk a about policing and how that is directly involved in the mental health situation that’s going on. 

A quick example is if I call 911 right now, not only am I part of other calls that are mental health related, but the police officer that’s coming — there’s a chance because of the increase of 11.9% of use of force in their report for the first six months (of 2020), that’s how they respond to mental health calls. 

So my question for you, Mark, is what are your thoughts when you hear numbers, astounding numbers like that, and you might even see them in your line of work? 

Mark
If you Google my name, Mark Cherrington, with Edmonton police, you’ll see a lot of conflict.

Hannan
That’s how we found you Mark. We were like who has their name with Edmonton city police? Who can we find out there?

Mark
I remain optimistic with the police because I demand that they are our police force. They are not the chief’s police force, they’re not their own police force, they’re not there to judge and jury. They’re there to assist their community, which is our community. We’re their employer, and as far as I’m concerned, we’re their boss. And I’m not happy with my employees right now, that being the Edmonton Police Service. And I can be quite frank. 

And again, this is my perspective, and this is the perspective of the thousands of people that I’ve tried to help. What we see, and what I see is the police force of white males on white horses. That's the perception. That they're in to ride in and save the world. That's their perception, and it's not like that. 

I want a police force. I don’t want an army in our city. And we’ve militarized our police to the point that I can’t distinguish the difference between the police and our armed forces. And there’s no excuses for that. 

I see needs for equipment, like I see the important need for a helicopter. It really does help reduce the risk of dangers, like high-speed chases, so I’m not against technology or equipment.

But when you start militarizing the police and changing uniforms from a light grey community police uniform that they had up until the early 90s, to these dark black blood red insignias. You know, these jack boots, black leather gloves,. ramming bars on their cars, they become very intimidating and they become very militaristic. So there’s the issue of militarization of our police force. We need to pull back on that and put the brakes on that immediately.

 We need to hire a diverse police force that’s reflective of our community, and there’s no excuse why this police force cannot work aggressively to achieve that goal. We have a police force, as far as I’m concerned, that’s being trained in the wrong direction and in the wrong manner. 

That at least from my experience, working with people that I try to help, their interactions with the police have always been that the police are aggressive and violent. 9 out of 10 interactions of people that I work with police, there’s always some sort of violence associated. 

I think that’s a way that they need to start tracking statistics. They need to track episodes of violence. It’s a push into the hood of a police car. It’s the twisting of an arm to get a handcuff on. It’s the elbow into the back of the head. Each of those actions are violent and each of those actions need to be documented. And we need to see a de-escalation of violence. 

How do we do that? We need to put more money away from the arming of police, into the training of police, and into the community aspect.

I question why our police budgets have increased so dramatically compared to other first responders, like our fire department or an ambulance, or EMTs. Even healthcare, I don’t think is at the same rate of increase as our police budget. I’m not saying we need to defund the police, but we need to audit the police and we need to divert some of that funding away from equipment and the militarization of policing into the community aspect.

The final stage of policing, I think, is accountability and transparency. And I think by and large with ASIRT (Alberta Serious Incident Response Team), with our professional standards branch and the law enforcement review board, we have okay oversight. But again, from the street level those are paper resources, and it doesn’t provide the transparency that somebody at 4 in the morning would like. 

So how do you solve that? Well, I know how you solve that: body cameras. Body cameras and cameras in police cars. I think that is as vital an aspect of equipment as I can see as being a helicopter or even a sidearm. I think that body cameras need to be standard issue.

I also believe that, as technology develops and grows, we need to understand the area of privacy and police privacy. I’m worried about what's called police drones. I think in the next 15 years, you’re gonna see drones with cameras floating around not only crime scenes, which are good, but also drifting into our backyards, hovering over our houses. 

So I think that oversight and transparency is going to be really critical to the next 20 years of policing. And I think that we need to really establish a way that we’re going to deal with that in a manner that’s going to reflect what’s acceptable to our community.

Hannan
So I also want to ask you, because I think you pretty much know that on this podcast we talk about abolishing the police, like the concept of policing not even being an option at this point and more of community involved resources.

We talk a bit about how a few of us even, like me and Oumar, growing up 911 wasn’t an option for us. Maybe for some of the people that you’ve even helped out, 911 wasn’t an option. They call people like you, they call people like Mark to show up and to help them navigate things. And for me, that was my auntie or uncle across the street.

So I want to get your thoughts on that type of community involved service rather than, you know, body cameras, or all these other things. And to just fund people like you that are actually doing the work that, in my opinion, that's more meaningful.

And I mean, do you have any numbers of harm or use of force that you’ve used, Mark, that we’re not aware of? 

Mark
No, no! And the issue of calling 911, I remember once I got a call from a girl who was scared to call the police. She had a warrant for her arrest, and also her interactions with the police had never been positive.

So she called me in a crisis, and when I pulled up she was holding the bulbs of her intestines in the palm of her hand, keeping her guts from rolling out onto the pavement. She’d been stabbed, and she wouldn't call 911. And I took her to the hospital. And that scenario shouldn’t happen.

I think as the crime rate continues to decline, and we get a more active community, your examples that you’re showing — Black Lives Matter, the Indigenous community is becoming much more vocal about policing. We're having all these other community grassroots organizations rising up and becoming the eyes and ears of the community.

I think there’s going to be a time, I won't say abolish, but I think policing will look dramatically different. We can do things like... I remember as a kid, we used to have what were called block parents. It was for lost kids, my mom was a block parent. It was somebody that you could go to in the neighbourhood, a specific person in your neighbourhood and your community to deal with situations that involved a fear of violence, disruption, disorder, without going to the police.

And I think we can work towards that. We need to do the preliminary steps to get to that point. And I think we need to look at what role firearms play in our community and our country. We need to look at support in the areas of mental health and poverty. If we’re addressing those issues, then I think the need for police would diminish dramatically. And the types of police involvement would be a lot less intrusive and look completely different than what we see. And we might not be calling them police, we might be calling them block parents.

🎵 (Theme Music)

Hannan
We can all kind of see how Mark is able to understand the complexities that surround homelessness, mental health addictions, but then also kind of see where the police are coming from. He provides this perspective we don’t show a lot on this podcast and he explains himself why, despite saying we need body cameras and better accountability measures and diversity in the police force, he actually goes into later on why Indigenous and Black folk don’t call the police.

I don't know about you, but like him explaining that stabbing situation and why he’s the one showing up to a young woman’s call, holding her guts from spilling out, rather than an ambulance. It’s purely based on fear. And I don’t think people will ever understand the fear of calling for a service when you need it the most, and knowing that that service is going to harm you.

And proposes his own alternatives! We literally see Mark go from, you know, police body cameras, diversity in the police force, and then start mentioning block parents on every block and envisioning a world without policing.

I think that's the perspective we’re trying to show more on this podcast. Rather than the media focusing on why we need policing and why crime is something we should be so afraid of, we need to start looking at what human rights is, what is our charter is supposed to protect us from, what freedoms we deserve and why those freedoms won’t be upheld by a system that is inherently racist, which we try to prove here. And a system that's just made to control and put people away.

I use this example a lot. Before prisons were created, it was the Indian Pass system. And when the Indian Pass system was gone, prisons... the money came in. The numbers went up. And now we have 70% of people sitting in the Edmonton Remand Centre without being sentenced or charged.

I don’t know about you, but that's not what the Charter that I believe in was created for. And that’s definitely not the freedom that we should strive for as Canadians. I think as Edmontonians, we should try to not only be aware of what’s going on by listening to Black and Indigenous folk, but by also holding the systems accountable.

Accountability shouldn’t just be this prospect that you believe the other person’s going to give you. It’s a two way street. And I hope with this episode, you’re able to sit and hear what we’re trying to say.

So if you have any tips or feedback, or any topics that we should explore more, please let us know how we can try to continue this discussion of multiple intersections of one issue. So it’s not just a mental health episode, but more of like, services that the city should try to provide. For Black and Indigenous folk, and not just the white people that live in this city.

🎵 (Theme Music)

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Oumar Salifou
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