Making Demands

Written By Oumar Salifou
 

Our communities have been calling to defund the police for decades. But despite a wealth of research, lived experiences, and successful examples of divestment from police, our local government continues to increase the police budget while cutting community services.

Oumar talks to Batul Gulamhusein about the complicity of our municipal politicians in police violence and how we should approach next year’s election and the future beyond that. How can we elect leaders who we actually trust? How are we investing in the community mechanisms of care? And if we’re not calling the police, who are we calling?

Batul Gulamhusein (Guest)
If they wanted to, they could hold a meeting tomorrow and say “we’re cutting the budget.” Nothing stops them from doing that. They just don’t want to.

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Oumar Salifou (Host) 
In the last episode of the podcast, we talked about how municipal bylaws and policies related to policing, like transit bylaws, negatively impact already marginalized communities in Edmonton. I've been back to Camp Pekiwewin recently, and it’s completely fenced off and empty. 

Residents of the camp are now forced to contend with living in shelters while COVID-19 cases and deaths in Edmonton hit record numbers. The forced eviction of people and their belongings at the camp by police was supported by city officials and politicians. Since the last episode, Edmonton’s mayor Don Iveson has also resigned after 7 years in office. 

Today’s show will focus on the lack of accountability politicians have faced while maintaining support for militarized police and taking little action to support anti-racist policies and Edmonton. Language surrounding defunding the police and Black Lives Matter has also been co-opted by politicians and the police in what seems like an attempt to gain credit for action while maintaining the status quo. 

To talk about this topic, I’ll be joined by Batul Gulamhusein. I met Batul through work she's done with Black Lives Matter Edmonton during the summer while writing a response to changes in the School Resource Officer program. Batul has also worked in Edmonton with Climate Justice Edmonton and The Leap Org.

Oumar
What are some of the actions that you see in politicians take that have done both of these things? Like co-opt the language while also not actually doing anything?

Batul
I actually think the moment around Black Lives Matter in June is really depictive of that. We saw every single municipal politician come out and say “we stand in solidarity with Black communities in this province.” We saw folks come out and say and loudly proclaim that Black Lives Matter, as they should.

But then when it actually came down to the substance of that, when it actually came down to being like, you don’t just say a word, you actually have to stand with communities, they were unwilling to do that. 

Even thinking about my own conversations with my own councillor. In private conversations with me, Tim Cartmell fundamentally admitted that the police were a paramilitary force that have been basically allowed to run rampant in our city. And that we know that they’re not actually safe for racialized communities. He said that, like fundamentally in a conversation.

They know the realities of the problem, they actually just lack the political courage to do anything about it. They’re unwilling to defund the police, but they’re perfectly willing to defund community alternatives.

When you think about the fact that the city doesn’t actually have a plan to end homelessness. When you think about the subject of the city doesn’t have a free transit program. They’ve de-funded all of those other alternatives that actually keep us safe. So it’s not that they’re actually against defunding things. They’ve done it constantly. It’s about the fact that they’re actually unwilling to put the meat on the bones of policy that would be anti-racist. 

Oumar
With the current system in mind, with city council and the election coming forward, what is a tangible alternative to these committees and this idea that listening is somehow going to improve the situation more, or that bringing more people to the table is somehow going to improve the situation?

Batul
Committees and panels at this point in our lives are, quite frankly, just lazy. Because the policy alternatives have been researched, they’ve been presented, they’re possible, numerous folks have endorsed them, and they’re credible. And they’re out there. 

And so the question is, why are they not doing the thing? We can stop accepting that they need to follow these processes that they’ve built themselves that are fundamentally grounded in white supremacy — because they’re designed to delay and distract and basically cut the teeth out from under you — as an okay way that we’re going to continue to engage. 

The reality is, if they wanted to, they could hold a meeting tomorrow and say “we’re cutting the budget.” Nothing stops them from doing that. They just don’t want to.

And so the question to me is, why are we then wasting our energy and our time and our efforts on panels and committees that fundamentally serve to undercut all of our work, instead of building the alternatives ourselves, instead of engaging in direct action that makes them listen to us.

So the first thing is I think that we actually need to elect people who are accountable to us, or we need to move away from engaging municipal systems entirely. 

There’s two possible pathways that are able to be pursued in Edmonton. One is to say that we’re actually going to sit in front of candidates and we’re going to say, “if you don’t say defund the police, we’re not voting for you. This is the platform, this is the expectation. You’re going to come from us, you’re actually representing us. This is not, you’re going to come to us once every four years. You’re accountable to us.”

And the second is to say, “we don’t trust any of these people anyways. We know that this municipal government is a farce, because all governments on this land are a farce. We’re not engaging in this electoral process, because we’re going to disrupt every single thing that we can catch. We’re going to engage in nonviolent direct action. We’re going to be such a large nuisance that you’re going to have no choice but to listen to us.” 

I think to me, the second is how I think of my version of power is that we the people have inherent power. We give the power that allows governments and municipalities to continue running. The minute we take away that, the minute we say we’re no longer letting business as usual continue, we’re no longer letting capitalism continue at will — we’re going to block roads, we’re going to block meetings, we're going to make every single aspect of your lives hard in order to get what we want — we'll get what we want. 

And we've seen that time and time again. If you look at histories of movements, no one’s ever gotten anything by being nice. Every single centrist progressive will refer you to Gandhi to tell you how we can just hunger strike and it’ll be fine and fails to acknowledge that there was an equally violent pathway that supported Gandhi’s non violence. 

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Oumar
As you see the municipal election play out in 2021, what do you think should either be added to the original defunding proposal or changed when it comes to newly elected politicians who are coming into city council? What should they consider when it comes to policy around policing? And what do you think should be on the table? 

Batul
I mean, we went back and forth on this, in the writing of that letter. I’m personally of the mind that the letter didn’t go far enough. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not enough to cut $80 million from their budget. We should be cutting the whole budget. And even if they can’t commit to cutting the whole budget in the next 2 years, there should be a plan to cut the whole budget in the next 5.

I think that when it comes to the next municipal election, the things that to me are priorities are taking money from that policing budget and investing in free transit. Investing in housing for every single member of our communities. I think it means investing in supporting Indigenous sovereignty. So what does that look like to actually build partnerships with Indigenous nations whose lands we live on that go beyond like tokenistic understandings? It looks like fundamentally funding and ensuring strong, essential public services. It means building a dense city that doesn’t expand into suburbs where no one can get anywhere and like where we are losing services in our inner city at the expense of middle-class families in the suburbs.

I think the question about what we’re looking for in this municipal election, to me, comes down to candidates. It comes down to saying, do we actually have people who come from our communities, who actually have strong legacies of community involvement, who we trust? And how are we building mechanisms to actually hold them accountable?

It’s not enough for me to say, “oh, you’re a member of my community. We’re going to elect you and hope that for 4 years, you’re going to actually listen to this community.” What mechanisms are we building, so that’s actually possible?

Batul
On the flip side, I think moving past the election, we need to have actual conversations amongst yourselves of, “if we’re not calling the police, who are we calling?” How are we building the alternative systems to policing right now, because as we’re dismantling the police, as we’re defunding them, we need to have systems that protect survivors. We need to have systems that keep ourselves safe, and we know that like our communities have already been doing that, but we need to formalize those processes. Make it so they have longevity beyond the like 4 aunties who currently do it right now. 

So how are we building community histories to make sure that these programs survive us, so that when these 4 aunties go away or they move out of the neighbourhood or something, the neighbourhood response team isn’t gone.

I also think that it looks like having genuine conversations amongst ourselves around how we treat folks with care and dignity? How are we in our communities supporting those who live with mental illness, supporting those who live with addiction? Knowing that those are folks who are more often in contact with the police because of the way that they’re criminalized. So how are we building harm reduction services in our communities? How are we supporting those programs? How are we ensuring that like affordable housing is being built in our communities? 

Fundamentally, the question of defunding the police goes beyond this idea of like, we want this paramilitary force to disappear. It comes back to a question of saying we want to respond to crisis with care, and so it means that we can’t just ask for municipal candidates who are running to say, defund the police and that’s it. To me, the question is what are you investing in? How are we investing in the community mechanisms of care that are fundamental in order to make that possible for us to survive? And that those have to happen simultaneously, and can happen. Because those systems and infrastructures are already in place, we just need to formalize them and fund them. 

I think that's the question that, to me, is going to consume this municipal election. It’s going to be an actual fight in the city. As we know, there’s going to be a slate of conservative candidates that are going to run for city council. It’s going to be a fight about, “what is it we actually care about?” And we need to build the vision and the political alternative that we haven’t seen for a long time.

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Oumar
While city councillors are complicit with the rise of militarized policing and a hyper inflated police budget, they’ve also opposed proposals by community members who’ve been given the opportunity to speak in the past.

Last summer in an interview, Bashir told me a story about a meeting he had with Don Iveson. The meeting was set after Bashir was called a racial slur while riding his bike in traffic. During the conversation about racism in Edmonton, Bashir was told by Don Iverson that he couldn’t “just walk into the meeting and make demands.”

The problem here isn’t just that politicians are often complicit with the police, but that when there is an opportunity to propose change, they aren’t able to accept or acknowledge the people asking for that change.

To end today’s show. I want to play a clip from an interview with Don Iveson on Ryan Jespersen’s show Real Talk, where he discussed his "legacy as mayor. This is just one clip from the show, so you can listen to the whole interview for more context, but I’ll let you decide what you think about this answer. 

Ryan Jespersen (Real Talk Host)
Mayor, I respect your time and your team’s time, I want to make this the last question. I’m grateful that you’ve allowed us to go into overtime here. You care about systemic racism so much so — in our institutions, community safety, police accountability — that you included it this morning in your bullet points, in your statement, about what your last year as mayor here in Edmonton is going to look like.

I’m curious for your take on what has to happen for us to tackle systemic racism in a way that actually has a tangible effect on our community. 

Don Iveson (Mayor)
I think Edmonton is now the kind of city that is ready to tackle questions like that and really honour their complexity. So that is one of the things that is different is that, you know, you can look at separate issues like the economy versus public health or the economy versus the environment. 

And it’s very easy for poor leaders to cast these things as at odds with each other, but why we need city hall and the convening power not of local politicians to figure this out for us, but to bring community together — industry experts, civil servants, and thoughtful elected officials from different perspectives, philosophically and ideologically, to come together — as the power of convening community to solve complex problems. To talk about what does reconciliation look like in a big Canadian city, from a housing point of view, from a mental health point of view, from an economic development point of view...

Oumar
When I listened to the answer, I don’t think the mayor has a desire to critically reflect on the impact of his lack of action on police reform and how the lack of anti-racist policy that has enabled the oppression of Black communities in Edmonton. 

He can still retire with legacy and a sense that something has been done when not much has changed. It’s disappointing that we don’t demand more of elected politicians, especially in a time when we know there are alternatives to the current state of policing.

Like Batul said, as the next municipal action approaches, we should be demanding more of politicians so that accountability goes beyond words and leads to actions to defund the police and invest in community.

That’s all for this episode of Is This For Real? This podcast wouldn’t be possible without the support we’ve received from you on Patreon, a special thank you goes out to everyone who’s contributed to the show so far.

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Oumar Salifou
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