Why are police budgets increasing across Canada?

Clip You’re listening to a frequency podcast network production in association with City News.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings You are listening to a Frequency Podcast network production in association with city. I am sure that you remember the anger and you remember the protests, and I’m also sure you remember the slogan, be defund and abolish policing here in Canada. You’re here to ask for the defunding of the police. We are here to ask for the disarming of the police. No justice, no peace. No justice, no peace. But more than two years after protests swept the world in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and a majority of the people said that they agreed with the idea of defunding the police. That slogan has become a bit of a muddled battleground. Meanwhile, in Canada, police budgets have risen in some places, maybe only by a little, but in other places they’ve risen dramatically. Nobody’s getting defunded, that’s for sure. So why not? As I mentioned, there has been a clear majority opinion expressed in countless polls. That some of the money given to police would be better spent on options that reduce harm more effectively than hiring more armed cops. Why do so many people in bad faith or otherwise take defund the police to mean? Eliminate the police? Who actually controls how much money police forces in Canada get and how much say do those people have in what the police spend that money on? Have we missed the chance to better use that money and better serve and protect vulnerable people? Or is this just the beginning of a long time. I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the Big Story. Ted Rutland is an associate professor of geography, planning and environment at Concordia University in Montreal. That includes urban planning, which includes a focus on police funding. Hello, Ted.

Ted Rutland Hello.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Thanks for joining us today.

Ted Rutland Thanks very much for having me.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Of course. I want to, uh, start by going back to the summer of 2020. Immediately during and following the George Floyd protests at the time. Defund the police was a term you saw everywhere. But what I wanna ask you is back then, what did that actually mean and what do we know about where public opinion was on that?

Ted Rutland One thing to, to recognize with the huge protests of the summer of 2020 is that there had been a, you know, many decades of organizing, in Canadian cities and US cities around the world that sought to restrict and reduce the power of the police prisons and surveillance. Critical resistance, a US-based organization was formed in 1997 with Angela Davis, Ruth, Ruth Wilson Gold, and others at the head really popularized a different way of thinking about how to keep each other safe. And all that background meant that, you know, during the first Black Lives Matter uprising in 2013, 2014. There were discussions about reducing police power and resources, though the phrase defunded police didn’t exist.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm. And when?

Ted Rutland Six years later, the same problems with police, racism and violence. Were very much apparent. It was clear that the demands had to be clearer. Those, those easy reforms like doing police training or hiring more diverse cops weren’t gonna do it. And so the, public sort of consciousness or the among activist communities was really there to say, we wanna defund the police and we wanna reinvest in communities. And what did that mean, it absolutely meant taking resources away from the police. And so it didn’t mean saving money by, you know, reducing gas usage in patrol cars or saving on electricity. It meant having fewer police. Right. And it meant reinvesting that money in a series of services that that could, make cities and communities safer. And so the specific kinds of demands, the specific ways that people wanted to defund the police and reinvest in communities might have differed from city to city. But there’s a sort of a general argument that we’ve overinvested in the police. We require, we call on the police to respond to whole series of security issues in cities and issues that don’t even involve security. We need a lot of that money to be cut back, and we want that money spent in ways that actually keep us safer.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings And where was the public during those protests or immediately afterwards?

Ted Rutland In terms of support for that movement, it was really huge. I mean, there have only been two public opinion polls, uh, on this issue in Canada. The most credible one was in August, 2020, and it found that the majority of Canadians were supporting, defunding the police, you know, a higher percentage in Quebec and Ontario and British Columbia than other provinces. But majority of support, which is, huge given that the, the idea of defunding the police, was familiar to a lot of people prior to some to 2020, but it would be very new for a lot of people. And so it’s pretty impressive that people sort of jumped on board. They were willing to support that idea even though it’s, it’s not the, it’s not the simplest idea, and it would’ve been new to many people. And naturally, because municipal politicians in Canada always listen to the will of their electorate.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Since then, we’ve defunded the police and, and moved this money to communities. Right? Police budgets are lower now, right?

Ted Rutland Yeah. Yeah. It’s great. It’s great. I mean, we’ve solved all those problems. Glad glad we protested.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Uh, good. Nice to have you on the show, Ted.

Ted Rutland Yeah, we can cut, we can end the interview now, I suppose.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings No, seriously. Where are police budgets now?

Ted Rutland Well, they’ve increased. There’s not a single city in Canada that has, decreased the police, budget. Overall they’ve increased.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Yeah.

Ted Rutland Which is interesting. If you think about it for a moment, because there have been moments in the last 20 years where police budgets have decreased. In Montreal, there have been three years in the last, 20 years where budgets have been decreased slightly. The argument there though, was a neoliberal argument about, you know, keeping taxes low, keeping public expenditures low, and so it was possible to decrease the police budget a little bit for neoliberal reasons. But if you start to say, we want to defund the police to keep communities who are harmed by police safer, all of a sudden it’s impossible. And so, you know what? What we can see and what I try to show in the this conversation, is first of all, that no city has, has reduced police funding since 2020. But there are some things that we can look at within those trends that I think are kind of interesting. So we can see, for example, that some cities, notably Toronto, and Edmonton, did increase their budgets but increase them at a smaller amount post 2020 than before 2020. And, not something to celebrate, but it is something to notice. Whereas there are some cities like Montreal, they increase the police budget much more after 2020, than before 2020. And so there is a huge problem where, where we’re moving in exactly the wrong direction. Don’t fund the police quite as much year to year. Doesn’t have the same ring to it as the original slogan. No. No. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. I mean, and there’s been, you know, there’s been some pushback on, on the phrase defund the police. Often it’s, it’s journalists say, you know, that makes it sound like you’re going to just remove police from the streets and that’s it. And it’s like, well, the phrase was always defund the police reinvest in communities. It’s not activist’s fault that certain journalists and media personalities have just hitched on the first part and can’t seem to remember beyond three words. I think that when you explain to people like really concretely what that might mean, people get it very quickly and, and would be in support of it. We’re obviously not talking about like disbanding the homicide squad as like the first step in defining the police. We’re, we’re actually talking about looking at the many things that police do that have nothing to do with safety?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I mean, can you give us some examples?

Ted Rutland Yeah, sure. You know, so the, the, the exact figures might differ from city to city, but somewhere between 60 and 80% of 9 1 1 calls that police are called to respond, to have nothing to do with crime or law enforcement. The police are just our 24/7 all purpose response to people’s needs in the city. And so, a lot of cities are, are, are making small steps towards diverting some 9 1 1 calls to civilian emergency response teams. So you have like social workers or nurses or mental health professionals responding to certain kinds of calls. And if we want to talk about actual violence, people are rightly concerned about, there’s too much violence in, in our society, and there has been for, you know, a century, although it’s lower now than it was 20 years ago or 30 years ago. I mean, we can talk about, well, what actually works to reduce violence. And, you know, decades of research show that it’s particular kinds of community inter interventions can prevent violence from occurring in the first. And if you can prevent violence, then you don’t need as many police officers doing investigations of acts of violence, attempted murders or murders. There simply aren’t that many to do. So we’re not saying like that. People should, we should all just look the, look the other way. If someone, you know, shoots somebody we’re saying, we can prevent a lot of that violence from occurring in the first place. And if we can do that, then we simply don’t need as many police doing investigations and arresting people for, for, for violent acts.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings There was wide public support for decreasing the funding for police and investing that into community services. And yet, two years later, two and a half years later, police budgets are higher across the country. What do you think happened? Like, why didn’t that support translate into any meaningful change?

Ted Rutland I mean, I don’t have the whole answer to that, but I think it’s pretty clear what happened. I mean, The media was paying a lot of attention to this issue because of the protest, because of what was happening in Canada, the United States, around the world. And so there was a lot of attention given to defunding the police, and I think that that’s reflected in those. Opinion polls in 2020, but obviously there are groups that we’re gonna fight back against that. And the obvious ones are, you know, police departments, police brotherhoods, which are sometimes called police unions. And then, you know, some right wing politicians, some certain kinds of crime journalists especially, we’re gonna push back on that. And police brotherhoods came out very quickly and they established their message initially, their message. Yes, reinvest in communities. There are real social problems in cities that the police can’t solve. We need spending on certain kinds of social programs, mental healthcare, et cetera. But this money doesn’t need to come at the expense of the police. And that worked quite, quite well. Many politicians adopted that as their language. So when people are saying, defund the police, they’re like, no, no, no, no. We will reinvest in communities, but we won’t. Of course they didn’t reinvest in communities either. But then you have sort of a second strategy, which was just to stoke fear of crime and disorder. And that varied from city to city. In Montreal, they came out hard against gun violence, which they, they took a couple months before they started blaming on, on, on Black Street gangs. It was pretty obvious that when they were saying gun, They were gonna move towards just blaming this on black communities, but they, they, to give them credit, they took two months to actually make that move. And for two years, this has been nonstop fear mongering about Black Street gangs, even though they, they, they’re responsible for a tiny, tiny, tiny part, of violence in this city in Vancouver, they went hard against homeless people, homeless encampments, and drug users. Then Toronto has done a mix of both, a little bit of that sort of, anti-black fear of gun violence. Now they’re going full bore on fear of poor people on, on public transit. And so, What does that do when instead of, you know, during the summer 2020 having big important I questions about defunding the police being at the center of our discussion of public safety, you know, and very soon after you have police brotherhoods. Police, police, forces and journalists who are not organizing in their spare time. They have vast public relations departments, um, working full-time to change the message. I mean, I think, I think we, we, we could have easily expected that kind of backlash. It happened and, and sadly it’s been successful for now.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I’m speaking here from Toronto where, the police are getting 50 million more this year, which is obviously a source, of significant debate in this city given, what we’ve seen on the TTC and elsewhere, but, no matter how much extra money it is or, or less money it is. When council sets a police budget, how much control can they exercise over that money?

Ted Rutland Can they say, you know, this is to beef up your 9 1 1 systems or to fix your old buildings that are falling down. And it’s definitely not for like machine guns and tanks, like how much control do they. Uh, well, the, the thing that, that we need to understand is that elected government is not supposed to have any role in ongoing police operations or investigations in cities. And that’s part of, you know, a, a essential structure of our, sort of our liberal democracy. Sure. And, and that is often extended by people who don’t want to take any responsibility for the police to say the government has no role to play in decid. How the police spend their money, distribute their money, et cetera, which is absolutely not true. And years of court cases have have demonstrated that, uh, municipal governments, provincial governments, federal governments can have as much influence as they want over, not investigations, but how that money is spent. and we do see that. I mean, in, in, in Vancouver, for example, mayor Kenzi, who wrote to Power on the endorsement and the financing of the police association has said, we’re gonna give the police more money to hire a hundred more cops, but we’re also gonna hire a hundred public health, uh, nurses to work with the police. I think they shouldn’t have hired a hundred extra cost, but it shows that absolutely you can tell, you know, the police how to spend the money in Toronto, uh, John Torres saying, you know, we’re giving them this money. And a lot of it will go towards so-called neighborhood police squads. So that’s another example where you can say, we want it spent on this. And then the capital budget is an, is another matter in some ways where, so we’re talking about how they’re spending money on like cars, guns, tanks, et cetera. Their cities have total control. Mm-hmm. . Um, because you can really just dictate, we’re talking about buying new things. You’re, you are a public institution, we can tell you whether we’re getting, give you the money you need that you want to buy more guns, to buy more, you know, armored.To update your telecommunication system. That’s straightforward that that governments can, can dictate that.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Why don’t we see that more? Or maybe we do and I’m just not paying attention and people aren’t paying attention. But it really seems like the fight that we are having doesn’t matter what side of it you’re on, is just about the money in general.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings And whether that’s the optics of it or you know, the statement that it makes. I don’t know. But I don’t see much of people getting in the weeds on, I guess to your point, what is something we could have a lot more control over and could direct in a more positive way if we wanted to?

Ted Rutland Yeah, I mean, I think that some of this discussion happens be behind closed doors. Like, I think that there are discussions between, you know, the mayors and the, the sort of elite at the municipal level, and the executives, uh, on directors of police departments. The police department will express what they need, uh, and then the elite of the municipal government will say, uh, that’s not gonna fly.

Ted Rutland People will respond badly to that. How about we like say a little bit of this is going to neighborhood policing, so I think this happens behind closed, but that sort of just reinforces your question, like, why are these not public debates? And I’m not really sure. I think one of the reasons that, more police and more police funding sells well is because it’s such a simple message. Yeah. Uh, you city residents, you’re concerned for your safety. I care about that. I’m going to increase police funding. I think fewer and fewer people actually buy that. The richness of our public debate isn’t there most of the time. And also I think that, you know, politicians are not brave.They don’t, they’re not willing to explain to the population why we’re gonna do something that, um, will actually work. But, but isn’t the kind of thing that we, that we’re used to telling you, you know, Um, instead you have people like John Tori saying over and over again that more police will make people safe. And occasionally he’s called on that, um, notably, you know, by CBC’s Metro Morning, and he’s not able to to respond. He ends up saying, well, the proof. That more police will make us safer is that people voted for me.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Hmm.

Ted Rutland Because there is no evidence to support it. Their drift isn’t.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings What about the money that isn’t targeted for specific things, be that, uh, guns or cars or new programs or buildings?

Ted Rutland What’s unbudgeted spending and what’s it usually covering? Well, in the, the conversation piece that I wrote, I talked about unbudgeted spending, um, just in terms of, um, police departments going over. I focused on that a bit because it’s such a flagrant problem in Montreal. The police goes over budget by 30 million every year.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings The city covers the bud, the, the, the overage, and then they increase the budget the next year. And that’s just, that’s just intolerable to me. I mean, through a democratic process, relatively democratic. Anyway, we decided on a police budget and then the police spend whatever they want and we just cover it.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Yeah. And so, you know what, what, what are police spending money on when they go over budget?

Ted Rutland It’s hard to say because we often don’t ask, and they don’t, they’re not very transparent. I mean, they’re, they’re the least transparent public institution that we have. One, one thing we can say is, you know, 90% of of the operating budget of police departments in Canada is personnel. So if they’re going over budget, they’re basically spending more on cops being in the street and often that. That the, the police have been doing a lot of overtime, so getting paid time and a half and like, and like I say in the piece, you know, in the current order of things, some amount of overtime, it’s just a normal part of police operations. If a cop arrests someone at night and they’re, and the person is in court in the morning, , the cop might have to be there and they get overtime, right? So police departments budget for a certain amount of overtime. We could maybe address that if we wanted to, but it is budgeted. Um, and it is normal, uh, in the current order of things. But what we see a lot of time is, is that the overtime is outta control and certain experts on the police, former police officers themselves, Had pointed out the ways that police officers will coordinate with one another to be strategically out sick one day so that their colleague can get overtime and then they’ll, and then they’ll, they’ll do the opposite where the other officer will call in sick so that their friend can then call, do overtime. And so there’s a whole set of informal kinds of strategies that police use to do over time because it’s a way to make lots of. I mean, cities aren’t going to have a handle on how much a police department spends every day, but if they go over, if they go over budget, you can say, well, we’re gonna cut your budget next year. Like there are ways of disciplining public institutions, whether that be like public transit authority, the hospitals. Uh, uh, schools, et cetera, but we do it for all of those folks. So why is this problem so intractable? Is it just fear? Is it just a marketing campaign by the cops? Yeah, I think that’s it. I think, I think there’s a belief that if the police are going over budget, it’s, it’s to protect us. So I think, you know, they’ve managed to cement the idea that more police and more police funding equals more safety and. You know, it’s a little bit of a riskier move for, for a city council to say, we’re gonna force them to o obey their budget.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So what gets this moving back in the direction it was headed in after the protests in 2020? Part of me wants to look at it and say, if we’re still here two plus years later, and it’s still going in the wrong direction, I’m just not hopeful anything will. But from your perspective, what could, what could move the needle? So I think the foundation is there for change. So then what’s actually gonna bring about that change? What’s gonna translate this sort of public desire and understanding of this issue into policy changes?

Ted Rutland I mean, I think there’s two obvious things. One is that there have been small steps in the right direction, small steps, and I think, you know, Edmonton and Toronto have been on the forefront of, uh, of beginning to divert some 9 1 1. To a civilian emergency response team and this small, it’s not enough, but they’re doing that, and I think that their experience will show that that works quite well, and, and that we can continue to move in, in, in that direction and other cities are gonna follow suit. I think, you know, British Columbia just, uh, effectively, uh, decriminalize certain kinds of drug possession. I, my hope is that that will, that will be successful. It will be emulated elsewhere, and it’ll also. Um, expanded. So right now it’s annual. It’s not really the decriminalization of drug possession cuz it’s such a small amount of drugs, smaller than the amount lots of people hold for their own possession.

JORDAN But it’s a small step, I think, and, and we can build on that. And then the other thing obviously is, We’re gonna have a major moment of uprising again. I think a lot of people who are really invested in the status quo, including most of our political class, sort of think that they’ve weathered the storm of Black Lives Matter and defund the police.

JORDAN They’re like, it was a big deal in 2020, but now no one’s talking about it and we won’t have to do anything. But it’s like, There is no other solution to police racism and violence other than defunding the police. This is not a fad that people were into in 2020, and now, you know, we’ll go on to some other kind of fad.

JORDAN The next time there’s an uprising. It’s like the police continue to brutalize people.

Ted Rutland They continue to kill people, and they continue to harm people’s lives even when they’re doing things properly. Like every time we send someone to prison, it’s a policy failure that’s there’s something that we could have done to prevent that harmful act from happening in the first.

Ted Rutland And so even when the police are doing their job well, it’s not a job that we want them to be doing. Like we want them to have to do that as little as possible. So this idea is not going away. And the next time that there’s an uprising around police racism and violence, that demand is gonna come back again.

Ted Rutland And there’s gonna be a deeper understanding in the population about what this means and how to do it. And more attention to hold politicians accountable to it. So this, I mean, to me, I’m optimistic this things are gonna change. I can’t predict how, but there’s no way in which this movement is gonna die.

Ted Rutland I don’t see it possible to not make this change eventually. It’s just hard to know exactly how it’ll happen or when.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Ted, thank you so much for this, uh, really insightful.

Ted Rutland Thanks so much for having me.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Ted Rutland, associate professor at Concordia University. That was the big story. For more, you can head to the big story podcast.ca and of course, if you want to talk to us about anything about this episode, a past episode, suggest an episode, simply say thank you or I hate you. You can get us on Twitter at the Big story fpn. You can email us hello at the big story podcast.ca, and you can call us (416) 935-5935. The big story is available wherever you get your podcast. And on smart speakers if you ask it to play the Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.