Thank you for having me.
I have published extensively in peer-reviewed literature on racial and gendered harms of policing in Canada's past and present, most notably Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. I am also a Ph.D. student and a Vanier scholar at the University of Toronto.
I will be forwarding today an evidence-supported argument that sheds light on the increasingly popular and publicly supported calls across Canada to defund the police and highlight the potential, should this be taken up, to meaningfully address the systemic racism that is embedded into policing in Canada.
The first point I want to lay forward is that rather than upholding them, for many communities policing is more accurately understood as a form of harm, particularly for Black communities, indigenous communities, racialized communities and people living with mental health or substance use issues. For example, an American Public Health Association 2018 policy statement affirms that law enforcement violence is a public health issue, addressing that police violence is itself a form of harm in our society.
My work documents rampant racial profiling since the creation of police forces across Canada, documenting, since the 19th century, the heightened policing of indigenous men and women, Black men and women and other racialized communities. Studies conducted in Toronto, Edmonton, Montreal, Halifax and Vancouver demonstrate that Black people are stopped by police at a rate anywhere from two to six times more frequently than white residents.
Reports that came out by CBC/Radio-Canada about dozens of indigenous women being sexually or physically subjected to violence by the police, as well as the police assaults of Majiza Philip and Santina Rao and other Black women, addressed that there is also a gendered element at stake in this systemic racism within the policing institution. We know that this also has resulted in death. Black people are 20 times more likely to be shot by police in Toronto, according to the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
Funding has continually increased for policing in Canada in a manner that is unparalleled in many other public services. For example, national spending on police operations has increased since the mid-nineties, reaching $15.1 billion in 2007 to 2018. A 2013 government report noted that the cost of policing nationally has more than doubled since 1997, outpacing the increase, they note, in spending by all levels of government. This includes police salaries, which have increased by 40% since 2000, whereas most Canadian salaries have increased by 11%, according to Public Safety Canada. In a context of a COVID-19 economic downturn, reprioritizing has never been more crucial.
We are also in a period in which we have seen the increasing militarization of policing, with particular harms for Black and indigenous communities. For example, a report by Kevin Walby and Roziere in 2018 noted that the use of SWAT teams or tactical squads had increased by 2,000% over the last four decades, increasingly being used for “routine activities such as executing warrants, traffic enforcement, community policing and responding to mental health crises....”
For Black communities in particular, this militarization has at times been fatal or violent. For example, Somali refugee communities experienced raids in which they were assaulted with battering rams and flash-bang devices—which an elderly Somali woman described as being physically brutalized—and, in one instance, told to die in the context of a tactical raid.
In tandem with rising militarization and budgets, there has been an expanded scope in terms of an ever-expanding role for police officers in response to mental health calls and presence in schools more broadly.
We've also seen a dramatic rise in police killings over the last 20 years. A CBC study called Deadly Force highlighted that the number of deaths at the hands of police have nearly doubled over the past 20 years, particularly impacting Black and indigenous communities.
It is important to look to several limited reforms that have not reduced the funding, power and scope for militarization of police and have also been ineffective in ending racial profiling and violence in policing. A 2018 Yale study, the most extensive to date, for example, found that body cams were not an effective way of addressing racism or violence in policing.
A recent study conducted by Concordia University's Dr. Ted Rutland addressed how community policing, frequently proffered as a reform, has been both ineffective in ending systemic racism and in helping to expand and retrench the harms of racialized policing even further in Montreal.
Decades of feminists' anecdotal evidence, as well as more documented evidence, has demonstrated the ineffectiveness of police training.
Of course, civilian oversights continue to be decried in the media and by access to information requests that show there is not only a lack of independence—being staffed largely by former police officers—but that few investigations lead to charges, and zero or less than 1% of criminal convictions.
This suggests that policing in Canada is not only flawed at a cosmetic level, but that the harms, racial and gendered, are structurally embedded into the institution itself.