Police Funding Industrial Complex
The Edmonton Police Service budget continues to be increased, for the second time in a row since the killing of George Floyd and supposed calls for police accountability. We break down the recent history of police funding in Edmonton and the complicity of media and politicians in this cycle of growing police power. We also had a great discussion with Rob Houle about the harmful roots of policing in the west and the ultimate impact of the Community Safety and Well-Being Task Force, of which he was a part of.
Edmonton Police Funding: $100M–400M Increase in 20 Years
🎵 Intro Music – “Not Alone” by Melafrique
Oumar Salifou (Host)
We’re going back to our roots for today’s episode to talk about policing again. And I’m sure you all heard about the $1 million dollar increase that the Edmonton police got to their budget recently. So it’s a really good opportunity for us to talk about why police keep getting money, but also why this is tied to, I think, a general lack of accountability when it comes to police in Edmonton and Alberta largely.
We’ll be interviewing Rob Houle today, who is a community member who has been a part of various police advisory committees and councils. He’s been a part of Indigenous councils and advisory committees with police, as well as the recent Community Safety and Well-Being Task Force that was put together by the city of Edmonton.
Rob is really critical of policing and how it’s been conducted in Edmonton, and I think raises a lot of very important points — mainly a point around the fact that despite their performance, whether they perform very well, whether they perform very poorly, the arguments around police funding stay the same. It’s always more money every year.
In 2000, at the start of the last two decades, we saw the budget sitting at $106 million. And City Council had the Edmonton police come back to council every year to essentially ask for whatever money they needed. It was relatively routine for council to deny requests by the Edmonton police for things like extra money to operate their helicopter that they received, or to hire extra officers. For example, even before 2000, in 1991 Police Chief Doug McNally fought to add 11 officers, but was left with a budget of $76 million and the ability to add just one officer.
Now we see a conversation that’s relatively polarized where, I think, people rightfully think that police have always gotten what they wanted. But I think there have still been limits that were placed, and even going back more recently to 2014, council identified pretty clearly that giving police everything that they asked for was a problem.
Former Mayor Don Iveson pointed out, in budget talks in 2014 when City Council was debating, that the police budget has gone up by 112% in the last 12 years. And the approach for decreasing police funding was to essentially ask for other levels of government to pitch in — federal and provincial money to come in — and also to create the funding formula that we currently see today. That will provide predictable funding, and I think back then, they thought it would eventually lead to a decrease in funding to police.
That didn’t necessarily happen, but I also think it’s really interesting to see how none of the arguments that were made were confronted by the fact the police continue to get increased funding, none of the arguments included to just not increase the funding. I think a lot of the arguments are that we have to keep giving them more money, we just have to change how we keep giving them more money.
So budget levels continue to increase, except for in 2015. So in 2016, we saw $306 million. In 2017, we saw $322 million. When the funding formula was implemented in 2018, it was $335 million. Before I go any further, I think it’s important to point out that these numbers include a margin of error of around 3-4 armoured trucks (or $3-4 million) because it depends on what source you go to for police budget numbers, whether it’s the PDF from the police or media sources. But we continue to see increases until “George Floyd happened” — as people like to say — in 2020, when money was diverted from the budget, but increases still kept happening.
And I think it’s also important to point out in 2014-15 when budget conversations were happening, there were even talks about moving money towards what was called back then “preventative crime initiatives.” So community organizations like REACH Edmonton thought that their Crisis Line program fit the bill, and they were asking the city for $500,000. And I think it’s interesting to look at that ask versus what we’re seeing now, which is $11 million being divided into different streams and then $1 million this year.
A pretty dramatic increase over five years, I think. But also, I think it shows this low ball, almost of the amount that should have been in place years ago, now actually seeing an acceleration in that number given the fact that we’re seeing a lot more public pressure and even basic acknowledgments that the current system we have now is clearly not working.
At the same time, police are changing their strategy and becoming really clever in their ability to adapt to the social conversation around policing, by creating more social services and trying to adapt and act as social workers in order to hold on to funding or create a situation where social work is done under their umbrella. So like I said before, funding can be continued instead of going to actual social agencies and actual social workers.
So all of this is happening under the context of what I believe is a clear lack of accountability when it comes to not only how much power we’ve given to police, and how much authority, but also a blank check and a continuation of the status quo by media and by the government as well.
So need for police is going down. The Crime Severity Index has been trending downwards for decades. Despite occasional increases, we’re seeing a downward trend. And I think we’re also seeing incredible harm being done to communities by policing. Indigenous communities, and Black communities in Edmonton have seen decades, basically a century if not more, of police violence and police harassment. So that should be enough to justify not only larger accountability, but seriously questioning the system that we currently have in place.
A case that I want to talk about, that I think exemplifies a lot of the issues that we’re talking about, is a story that was reported a few weeks ago about a victim of sexual assault in Edmonton, who reported her crime to the Edmonton police and was met with a lot of myths around rape, such as the police telling her that the experience that she had was consensual when it wasn’t and that she regretted that, and also diminishing and dismissing what happened to her.
The victim complained about the way she was treated, and Chief Dale McFee dismissed the complaint against the officer and claimed that there was no wrongdoing in this situation because the officer deemed that they were in the right in that situation. The victim went on to appeal this case to the Alberta Law Enforcement Review Board, and that appeal was further dismissed. After that, the victim of this crime also went on to apply for this potential money that’s given out to victims in Alberta called “victims of crime benefit,” and was also denied for that.
And this is kind of a repeated pattern that essentially ended with an appeal by the victim’s lawyer of that previous decision, only to end up with $10,000 which only covered the victim’s legal fees. So didn’t even go into any other damages or any other expenses that this person had to endure, essentially just to have a basic amount of justice after having such a traumatic thing happen to them.
And this entire mechanism to actually give victims money, called the Alberta Victims of Crime Financial Benefit Program and the Criminal Injuries Review Board, were actually disbanded recently too. So it doesn’t even exist anymore. But I think this case is a really good example of a lot of the issues that we’re talking about today and the things that show that not only police are unaccountable, but that they get to decide the rules that govern themselves.
These are things that we’re going to talk about today, and this case is a really good example of these issues.
Rob Houle: Police Get More Money Whether They Fail or Succeed
Rob Houle is a community member here in Edmonton who has been part of the policing conversation for a long time, as someone who served on various Indigenous advisory councils and committees with the Edmonton police, as well as the Community Safety and Well-Being Task Force these past couple of years.
I really enjoyed this interview with Rob. I think that Rob is someone who’s really well informed about various perspectives when it comes to policing, and also has lived experience as someone who went through an incident of police brutality in 2005 that influenced a lot of his perspective on policing.
In our conversation, me and Rob go into a little bit of the cycle of police asking for additional money from politicians, and how there are a lot of contradictions and a lot of missteps when it comes to the pass that we give police. And this idea that whether or not things are going well or badly, whether or not we actually have metrics to actually track performance, funding keeps going up. And this is not necessarily a rule that’s applied to almost any other organization or institution.
Another thing that Rob does a really good job of in this interview is tracing the roots of policing as a colonial practice against Indigenous people, as something that’s always been inherently violent and inherently built to displace people and protect property, and acquire property for the ruling class which, in Canada historically, has been white settlers and especially in Edmonton, too.
Rob also points to the fact that we essentially have services right now, such as the Bent Arrow Society, such as the Bear Clan Patrol, REACH Edmonton — services that are operating, that need funding, that need support, and that play a crucial part in community safety, but aren’t necessarily put on the same level or at least given the same respect as the Edmonton police for the serious work that they do in the community.
I want to give you a heads up before you listen to this interview that it was conducted over the phone because that’s what Rob is most comfortable with, and the audio quality might not be the best or what you may be expected to be. But I can assure you that all of Rob’s answers to my questions are fantastic. Very, very good, very insightful. So I hope you enjoyed the interview and everything Rob has to say.
Oumar
Do you want to tell listeners a bit about your origins in the conversations around policing, around justice, and this new umbrella term of “community safety?”
Rob Houle
Yeah, sure. I am originally from northern Alberta. I grew up in the Slave Lake area, and I am from Swan River First Nation, which is a community just north of Slake Lake on the shores of Lesser Slave Lake. I grew up there on and off reserves. I grew up in the town, came to the city after graduating high school, and then after high school went into post-secondary.
And the reason that I became involved in social justice and policing is because in 2005, myself and my brother were the victims of a starlight tour at the hands of the Edmonton Police Service. And I guess these were prominent and commonplace activities at that time that I didn’t learn about until much later in life.
I’ve also been involved in Indigenous relations and working with the Indigenous community, increasing their advocacy and voice. And that naturally led me into looking at justice and policing, because Indigenous people are overrepresented in all of those systems.
And then I was happy to be part of the Community Safety Well-Being Task Force that was created by the city in 2020. And from there, I just continue to be an advocate and continue to challenge these systems that are abusing BIPOC individuals and Indigenous people and still seeking justice for my complaint against the police service for my treatment in 2005.
Oumar
When it comes to your own personal case stemming all the way back to 2005, do you feel like justice has been delivered for your case? You mentioned that you’re still seeking it. So what is the situation with that?
Rob
Well, the whole process has been a long-standing and ongoing process. And it helped to highlight the flaws in the system and the problems with police investigating police and not taking claims very seriously, and whatever else. So my understanding, my latest update is that it might be on the police chief’s desk. It might be on Dale McFee’s desk right now. He may have to review it, but I provided all the information that I can provide. We have witnesses, we have corroborating statements, we have all the information that we could provide to the best of our ability.
So it’s all sitting with the EPS. Again, the problem with police investigating police is that my complaint originally fell off the table a number of years ago. I had to hire a lawyer to get it, revitalize and get it taken more seriously. And then we’ve been through that process ever since. But through the work of the task force, it helped me to better understand how flawed the system is and how lacking in accountability the Edmonton Police Service and other institutions are in regards to their conduct with people.
Oumar
You mentioned when you answered my first question that you grew into challenging the flaws that we see in the system. Do you want to share with listeners a few of the challenges that you think are pretty obvious when it comes to policing, and the larger justice system legislates and authorizes these kinds of actions by armed officers, especially against Indigenous people who, in this country, have faced unique challenges when it comes to police brutality and an oppression against police?
Rob
Yeah, I think it starts at the very beginning of Canada, Canadian history, the march westward of the RCMP or the North-West Mounted Police. And they’re the establishment that created them to not protect the West, but corral and contain indigenous people in the west. That’s what the North-West Mounted Police were created for. Sam Steele and all that mythos, all that nonsense. It wasn’t to free anybody, it was actually to restrict and contain the flourishing Indigenous people that were in the west.
And then from there, that model of policing became kind of the model that all of these other institutions now follow. So again, if the root of policing in Canada was to suppress indigenous people, then it would make sense that the ongoing creation of these other institutions and organizations would continue that suppression because that’s what they were designed to do. And the evidence is in the courts, it’s in the justice system, it’s in the staggering statistics that continue to come out — how 50% of women in the justice system are Indigenous in the jails and we only represent a small margin of the overall population in the country.
So that tells you that there’s serious flaws leading to incarceration rates and over criminalization of Indigenous people and that the systems don’t progress, they don’t change and they don’t shift. They just continue doing the same kind of practice that’s been in place since 1885, 1884, around the early days of this country. And again, it goes back to the root of the issue. And then it just continues to extrapolate from there.
And then you see it in the way that these institutions and these organizations deal with Indigenous people on the daily, and then how people that are intending to go into those systems treat people on the daily. And and you see story after story of Indigenous people being brutalized, being victimized, being kicked out of the City Centre mall by people who are given even an ounce of authority, then abusing that authority to chastise Indigenous people on our own territories. I think that is what the overarching system was designed to do and continues to do and continues to perpetuate, and you you don’t have to look any further than news headlines of the day to see another body, another policing force, doing something to BIPOC and Indigenous people, volatile and vile violation kind of process that that this country and Canada is kind of founded upon.
So bringing that into perspective, we’re dealing with and criticizing the Edmonton Police Service and other institutions. Trying to hold them to a higher standard or a higher level of accountability has driven this advocacy search for justice overall for everyone that’s been involved in even minor interactions with the police services.
Oumar
And you’ve been involved in the public conversation around justice and policing for quite some time now, and I would say that it’s pretty widely known that there’s been a conversation shift since summer 2020. But from your perspective, from 2010 - 2020, how would you say that decade was characterized when it came to conversations around reform and policing and community relationships between groups like Indigenous people, Black people, and police departments, and the justice system largely?
Rob
Well, it’s definitely been a period of fluctuation. There’s been some positive actions. But again, when the new leadership comes into place, when new governments take power, we always see this same cyclical action of policing where there’s a call for increased accountability. The people that were calling for it then fall to the wayside, and then it goes back into the same old course of business that policing has always done.
And in the case of the Edmonton Police Service, we see that with the racism initiatives in the 2010s or even before that, there was a push for community safety. There was a lot of focus on marginalized communities. I remember in the early days there was this emphasis and focus on the Somali community, and there were all these task forces created and there was organizations like REACH Edmonton that were established that that had community based initiatives and youth based initiatives to get people to challenge this image of violence that was being perpetuated in the media and by the police service. Again, focusing and targeting those services on that one group of people then alienated them even further and continued to perpetuate this story and this misnomer of Somali violence when marginalized communities are no more violent than any other kind of organization and are much less involved in crime and blue collar crime and things like that. But again, we see this cycle of re-victimization, re-emphasis and then access to more resources.
So you see a huge influx of funding following those kinds of movements where there are very little checks and balances. You see more authority given to the Edmonton Police Commission, which again, as it came up through the conversations at city council, there’s a lack of accountability and real community representation there. So people have zero information on what is actually happening. And we saw the high profile things with Scott McKeen and others complaining about the new tank that the Edmonton Police Service bought that was kind of slipped under the rug.
So you see these cycles of community emphasis targeting specific communities, massive funding influxes. You have them freezing the funding formula, and then you have new leadership come in with fresh ideas that want to put things into check. They start to push the initiative and then you just see again — even today, with the response from the Edmonton Police Service, you see them fall into the same cycle “these bad guys downtown, these troublemakers, we don’t have enough resources, we don’t have enough accountability, we need more people on the ground.” And then it leads to more funding injections or arguments.
And I think it’s over the last 10 years that you’ve seen this unbridled support for policing, which I think is kind of interesting because when you look at the data, when you look at the statistics, policing and law enforcement is the only industry, the only service where your performance doesn’t have any merit on whether or not you get funded. You can do poorly, you can have crime rates skyrocket through the roof, and then you use that as a justification to get more funding because you don’t have enough to stop crime. If things are going well and crime rates are down, you see the same messaging from the police where “we’re doing such a great job, we need more money to keep doing such a good job.” And I think that’s something that is being lost on the general public that I hope is coming to the forefront with some of these budget conversations we’re having.
Oumar
Segueing off that end of your point there. So budget conversations are changing now at city council. And I would say that there are a few there… there is at least one — like Michael Janz is pretty outspoken when it comes to his intention to give the police less money. There are councilors who are seriously open about questioning the fact that, you know, we continually fund and increasingly fund our police department. And then you obviously have detractors. But even in the detractors, I guess now we also see an acknowledgment that it is incredibly unsustainable. And there are a lot of questions around, like you said, metrics, performance, the fact that it’s a pretty fractured system when it comes to community safety.
From what you saw in the last budget cycle, what gives you optimism? And do you envision or do you see anything substantially changing — talks around a potential forensic audit that Aaron Paquette brought up, and also talks of opening up the funding formula for Edmonton police?
Rob
Yeah, I think I think the fact that the funding formula was frozen first of all and kind of put aside was the first kind of real victory. Because for me, that was one of the greatest grifts that ever took place with the previous City Council was the sell job they did on that funding formula — that police, like any other kind of essential service, should have their funding escalated yearly and and to a greater rate than what even the City of Edmonton base funding was receiving was I think, just fantastic sell job on on what policing doesn’t really need to have in place. And so the fact that that funding formula was put aside was the first kind of real push forward for change.
And I think now, conversations happening around a new funding formula and establishing some new metrics show council and the community at large questioning the metrics that are being followed. Because when you look at the reporting of the Edmonton Police Service, they’re allowed to follow and measure their own metrics however they desire. So they have response times, they have recruitment, they have BIPOC officers, they have LGBTQ2S+ officers in their force. They have complaints against officers. These are the things that they themselves have elected to track.
And when you even examine their data on those metrics, they’re missing a lot of them to a large degree. They’re missing their targeted response times. They’re missing their records. Their recruitment stats have been stagnant. They are recruiting as many BIPOC individuals into the force that are leaving the force. And that tells me that there is a real issue with the system as a whole. If you can’t retain officers longer than you really should in a system that has unlimited funding and limited accountability, it should be easier to keep people on board. And so as long as we’re shifting the conversation and holding them to different accountability, I think we’re making good headway.
The fact that they still managed to get an increase based upon Truth and Reconciliation Day still leaves a bad taste in my mouth with this council. We were very close to having a conversation around just freezing it outright. But the fact that they were able to use the holiday — Chief McFee was able to use the holiday as a Métis person to justify a funding increase should hold a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths because a lot of other organizations, a lot of governments had to absorb those costs, shift things accordingly. And then to saddle council with having to increase the funding — even though it was “only” $1 million, it’s still an ongoing increase.
When the community was up in arms, we pushed for a wholesale funding freeze and really a chance to do better things with the money that is frozen. And the Safer For All report outlines how much money could be saved, how much money could be redistributed to the community. And then the problem is that, of course with COVID and everything else, the previous council wasn’t able to unleash a lot of that funding that was frozen, or they did for other kinds of community initiatives and organizations and grant programs I think is what happened to it. But now with this other freeze ongoing, it gives us a better opportunity to redistribute the funds to the community, to give people and organizations the funding that they need so that the police can do less.
And I think that’s something that has also come out over this whole course of funding and conversations, is that the police are doing a lot. They’re being asked to do a lot. And that is because the community as a whole has offloaded a lot of responsibility to them because they are a law enforcement agency. So once we start to take back some of that community ownership, maybe we can better align our priorities. And maybe the Edmonton Police Service can do what they’re intended to do, which is to keep people safe. And it’s hard to keep people safe when you’re dealing with all of these other things that police deal with. So with that comes the funding conversation, and hopefully a flow of more equitable funding to other organizations are really needed to do the good work that they’re doing.
Oumar
Let’s talk about some of those other organizations and I guess maybe the conversation around authority. That was something that Chief McFee brought up to city council in his argument for sustained funding was that police still have the authority because they receive a lot of the calls. When I say “calls” I mean emergency calls, whether they be medical or safety or whatever number of things they could be. Police receive those calls and they also have the legislative authority to act on those problems and be a part of the solution.
But we also have groups in Edmonton like Bear Clan Patrol, who you mentioned before, who are actively in the streets every single day helping the community when it comes to helping provide resources, providing food, guiding people towards shelters, doing things like that. So when it comes to the conversation around authority and alternatives, do you maybe want to speak to the kind of future that you want to see and where funding and authority should be directed to help people in a meaningful way?
Rob
Yeah, I think it’s a very similar conversation to the metrics and the measurements conversation where the Edmonton Police Service and the Edmonton Call Centre are under their authority and their control. So essentially the Edmonton Police Service and their officers and the call centre employees — who, to a large degree we heard through the task force work, are former Edmonton Police Service officers — determine which call goes where and how people respond. And through their own admissions to City Council and the community, 30% of the calls that come in aren’t even police work — they’re social agency work and they’re social services work. So again, when you have those many calls taking place that the police shouldn’t be involved in at all and aren’t within their authority, then maybe we can look to other organizations to do a lot of that work.
And that’s not to say — and you always get caught into this — “what about the high risk, high volatile situations where there’s domestic violence and all these other things?” Well no, that is what the police should be doing. No one’s saying that the police shouldn’t be doing what the police should be doing. They have guns and things for a reason, and that’s to keep people safe in these highly volatile situations. But it’s the other things that they don’t require a gun to do that are taking up a lot of their time. So again, it’s a lot of the same conversation.
So when you have a call come in and an ex-police officer can determine whether or not who attends the call, that’s also akin to people choosing what kind of work they want to do for the day. And then again, that’s why we called for, as a task force, more transparency and independence from the police force, and a better coordinated system where, once you call 911, instead of fire-police-ambulance, maybe there’s a mental health option as well. If people are having a mental health crisis, rather than just rather than sending the cops, maybe you send a mental health worker and then another organization like crisis diversion or something like that.
The problem is that we’re not seeing those conversations happen at council. We’re still seeing kind of Chief McFee and the Edmonton Police Service manage what calls come in and trying to determine how the call centre is run and trying to determine who answers what call rather than the real, transparent, and accountable mechanisms that we need to see to have better organizations respond to some of these calls.
Also, the resources need to flow to these organizations so they can do their work appropriately. I read in the news the other day last week that there was a killing, a murder in one of the shelters downtown. That tells me that that particular shelter doesn’t have the resources required to properly search individuals for weapons or to do proper intake to ensure people are safe when they’re coming in. And that’s a failure in funding, that’s a failure in resourcing, and it’s a failure in the systems overall that we’re giving this organization that does all these other things that they’re not supposed to be doing a boatload of money. And then these other direct service providers are left fighting over the scraps that their government throws out for prevention and other things.
I hope that the conversation continues to progress a little bit more and that we start sending the right responders to the right calls and that we don’t get caught in the whole misnomer of “the police need to go to everything because you never know what’s going to happen.” I agree. Every situation is different, but there are for sure situations and calls that police have no business whatsoever walking into, and many of those are mental health calls and other things like that.
Oumar
That’s it for my questions, Rob. Is there anything else that you want to add or anything else that you think listeners should know relating to our conversation?
Rob
I think I just want to emphasize that policing is one of the few institutions where, regardless of how well or poorly you’re performing, there’s always money provided to you. And in Edmonton in particular, that’s come up directly through the budgeting process and that’s come up directly through the last decade of advocacy and desire to shift things. I think the community should continue to hold people to account and pay less attention to these negative stories that are coming out.
Again, if police are there to prevent crime, then a lot of these situations should be preventable with the amount of funding that they receive. Yet they come back with stories and media stories about all of this violence taking place. I thought the police were supposed to be there mitigating that violence. Our security officers are supposed to be there. And if they’re not, then maybe we should be doing something differently so that a lot of these occurrences can be avoided properly.
I think we’re heading in the right direction and that we just need to keep up the momentum and things will change for the better. That’s my hope.
How Canadian Media Enables Violent Police States
I want to talk a little bit about how media coverage of police and especially this funding increase that we’ve seen are examples of what we’ve been talking about. The Edmonton police recently got a $1 million budget increase. But when this happened, we saw that the media framed it as a decrease in funding because they didn’t get the promised $11 million that they were going to get according to the funding formula.
We saw headlines that essentially told the public that the police were going to struggle. So this is taken from the Edmonton Journal when the budget was being discussed: “We’ve taken too many hits. Edmonton police advocating against further budget cuts to maintain current service levels.” Keep in mind that they’re getting an increase in their budget of $1 million. But because the increase isn’t as much as they were expecting, this entire conversation has shifted into how the police are getting a “budget cut” and how they’re not receiving the funding that they need. And then the media definitely is playing up this narrative that I think is really good for the police because then a lot of other things can happen.
So essentially, when we talk about this I think it’s important to understand as well that this framing definitely benefits a few people. So when police get this increase, despite the fact that it’s reported as a cut, they can definitely campaign and continue to create narratives around police getting less money. Meaning that our city will have more crime, meaning that they should get more money.
When it’s also framed that way, I think that politicians can go to the public and say that they met the public’s demands and say that “we’ve responded to what you’ve wanted. And we’ve also reinvested in other things.” And again, it’s important to point out that they still got an increase.
So these narratives also benefit the media because crime and narratives around crime, and stories are easy to essentially parrot because the main sources are police. And you essentially get these communications releases or, you know, cut and dry stories about a criminal committing a crime, the police coming in and solving it. And it’s very easy to essentially run with these stories.
But also stories that play on people’s fear and that can often be sensationalized and run with to essentially take advantage of partisan views on police and who should solve the problems around crime when things are portrayed as “bad criminal, good police.” It plays into people’s fear and then further stirs engagement. And I think this article by Global is a really good example of that, with the headline being “Edmonton police budget at razor-thin tipping point after cuts,” and this was published in November of 2019.
And just from the beginning of the article, and this isn’t even a quote from the Edmonton police. This is from Global directly. It says here “Edmonton Police Commission members ran through the numbers Thursday ahead of city council’s budget talks in December. It doesn’t look good. Police are figuring out ways to cope with getting less money after the province decided to keep more of it for themselves.” And then it goes into quotes about the police and really putting them at the forefront of the story as victims of further cuts so that they can continue to do their jobs to prevent crime, and essentially continuing this narrative. But I think also perpetuating this idea of police being victims of less funding that prevents them from doing their jobs of essentially catching criminals.
And then there’s also, I think the media’s ability to create a real prevalence of crime. So if you look at the Edmonton Journal’s front page or any issue of the Edmonton Journal, crime is usually something that’s put at the very forefront, if not on the first page then definitely on the second. We’re getting the police narrative. The police come in as heroes, as saviours of the story. You also don’t necessarily get any of the context of the fact that the Crime Severity Index has been going down in Canada on a historical trend. Like I said, even if we have increases year over year, the trend has been going down historically over a decade. So this context isn’t usually seen or even remotely talked about when we look at stories about crime that are often put at the forefront of these media publications.
I think a good example of this that also ties in to some of the things we mentioned about police oversight, is another article by Global this time talking about a man that was shot and killed by police in central Edmonton, and about how a police watchdog will investigate. So the headline does say that a man was shot and killed by police. But then when you actually go into the article, we hear sentences about how the man entered into a “criminal flight” from police. And then you essentially see how this man collided with an unoccupied vehicle. And then the police subsequently “discharged their firearm” in response and “fatally wounded” this man.
So this kind of language, I think, is really perfect and very convenient to paper over the fact that police shot and killed someone. Someone who was clearly suspected of a crime, probably in the process of doing a crime. But when you say that “police said a man was fatally wounded,” and when you use language like that to essentially paint a picture of the police doing something righteous and courageous in almost any situation, especially in a situation where someone was killed by them, I think people don’t necessarily see things as they probably should.
And I think they see things the way that the police want them to see things. Unfortunately, I think the way the police want people to see things often lines up almost perfectly with the way that the media wants people to see things. So, yeah, I think the public’s perception of police violence is often shaped in distorted ways by the media. And we have a lot of examples from recent times in Edmonton of how this is perpetuated.
“Community Safety” and Controlled Opposition: Canadian Politicians Fake Support for Police Reform
One of the most important factors in the conversation around police is local politicians. And they don’t often talk about police, I’d say, in a context outside of mentioning that the conversation around policing is “contentious” and then when they’re required to during budget talks and other things around city council. And I just want to go into some of the reasons why I think this is the case, and I think a lot of it centres around the fact that we have inherent weakness in politicians that fundamentally don’t really care because it doesn’t really lie in their own interest to do so.
So their interest, I think we can see from previous years being rooted in reelection, being rooted in keeping the status quo, pleasing their peers, and usually appealing to constituents and voters — a small amount of voters, at least in Edmonton — with narrow concerns around property. So these are their own concerns, and I think talking about police and policing in the same way that the public is, doesn’t necessarily meet any of those self-interested concerns. And it doesn’t really lead to any reason to particularly care about this issue or to really place it at the forefront of any meaningful conversation.
And when that’s combined with this idea that we usually have of politicians having this blank check once they get elected and not necessarily rocking the boat and creating these policies that might change things too much, because then when you go to get reelected, that might skew your chances... And all of this also, I think, makes it really easy for politicians to be pushed around by powerful institutions. So when you have an institution like the police that sees a situation like we have now, I think it is relatively easy for them to come in and have their way with funding increases.
There are also convenient ways to say what you’re trying to say without actually saying it. So everyone avoiding the actual sentence “policing” by, you know, putting in their platforms this sentence “community safety” or these words “community safety” as a kind of placeholder for police or policing. And while the umbrella term community safety is great, if we’re actually talking about including social agencies, including the public in a really meaningful conversation around what that means for everyone, then that would be a different story. But I think oftentimes it’s just a placeholder for, you know, talking about police without talking about police.
And another factor is governing by habit. So working with police in a very close way I think has been the default for municipal politicians. They obviously work as the enforcement arm of laws that are written by politicians on the provincial, federal and municipal level. So you just govern by habit, you just go with the status quo. You’ve been working with your colleagues for a long time. They’re integrated in a lot of things like city administration. So there’s no reason really to mention them and it’s very easy to ignore these facts when these are your colleagues. And again, it keeps that tacit support because they’re protecting the state, they’re protecting property, they’re protecting law and order that is enshrined by these politicians and that is upheld and really put on a pedestal by these politicians. So there is no real reason in a lot of cases to challenge or even mention these institutions like police.
And I feel like the idea of controlled opposition is often placed on activists or other people who are put into positions where they seem like they’re opposed to positions when in reality, they’re being controlled or being manipulated to fit within the status quo. But this term also, I think, works really well for politicians who themselves want to be seen as oppositional towards police or oppositional towards maybe more conservative councillors or politicians. But in reality, they are still controlled by the factors of the status quo of increasing funding, of continuing to place authority and power into the police’s hands. This idea of controlled opposition is another factor of why politicians don’t talk about police in these critical ways or even at all.
And I think another way that we can see this too is through issues management. So this idea that issues such as police or any other issue can exist within this political vacuum for politicians and their staffs to then, you know, descend on to and essentially manage. So come up with ideas for how stakeholders should be engaged. Then you see things like leadership style being brought in, ideas of bringing “everyone to the table.” And then, you know, policing becomes this thing where you don’t even have to mention it. You can if you want to, but it just becomes another issue that you know you manage. And managing can mean all sorts of things. And I think all those things often fall into the narrow category of what works best for their own interests. And that interest again falls into reelection, keeping the status quo, and I think ultimately seeing that politicians and their partners and colleagues ultimately end up on top. So I think those are definitely some concrete reasons and kind of paint a larger context around why politicians often dance around this idea of challenging police or even talking about police and in a meaningful way.
The current council that we have now has been engaged in the conversation around policing by essentially passing this funding increase that was then reported and talked about generally as a decrease because the police didn’t get as much as they wanted. And I think we saw mayor Amarjeet Sohi, along with other councillors, being really critical of the structure and the network that police work within. And I guess just asking and saying that they want the public to have a more integrated and connected network of community safety and well-being so that money can be placed in the right pockets for where it’s needed.
We saw talks about creating more transparency and more metrics around the way police operate so that council isn’t always in the dark for how to actually evaluate whether or not police are using the resources to the best of their ability and whether or not their funding is actually tied to performance. There’s certainly a lot of buzzwords in this conversation around policing now in 2022. And we’re seeing a lot of politicians, I guess, resorting to pretty empty, pretty shallow conversations when it comes to how we’re going to move forward with funding police in Edmonton.
So I guess I kind of hope that the conversation will evolve in the future, and this is certainly something that we’re going to keep our eye on given that there’s definitely a public push for further direct action to defund the police. And I think politicians are on notice when it comes to the fact that people are paying attention.
So as this conversation evolves, we’ll certainly be paying attention and trying to bring you information. And yeah, we hope that you come back to the show for this kind of information, but also keep yourself informed on what we think are very crucial and very city-defining topics as we move into the future of this year.