CambridgeToday received the following open letter regarding the Waterloo police budget and their community responsibilities.
In 2020, in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, I joined my neighbours who marched in the streets and called for defunding the police. We asked local councils to reallocate the police budget towards Indigenous land sovereignty, equity for marginalized groups, and affordable housing. Investing in these “upstream” services, we argued, could prevent the pattern of “downstream” police violence.
Our elected leaders did commit some resources for those causes. But with tight budgets in recent years, we’ve also had to say goodbye to things like publicly-operated childcare centres.
Last year, we saw an across-the-board 10 per cent cut in community grants that funded grassroots initiatives.
Adding to the pressures on government services, non-profits are facing rising demand for programs and fewer donations and volunteers. But the police budget in Waterloo Region, proposed at over $252 million, keeps increasing. It's larger than transit, housing, infrastructure, or paramedic services.
I believe this situation actually presents the perfect opportunity: one could say this dark cloud has a thin blue lining.
Let me explain: many police officers, being well-paid with benefits, volunteer some of their free time with charities in their community. By hiring even more officers, we could create more volunteers for these organizations. With a big enough increase to the police budget, we could fill the volunteer needs of every non-profit in the region, while achieving complete synchronicity between law enforcement and social services.
We know that there is no correlation between rates of crime and police funding. But this narrow interpretation ignores all the wonderful things the police do that are unrelated to their core mandate. Imagine how much more they could do if we went all in.
The police have accumulated so much money and expertise that they are the natural solution for pretty much any problem. Instead of funding street outreach workers, let’s get the police to break up homeless encampments. Why bother with education support workers, when we could put a police officer in every classroom to deter bad behaviour?
Let’s convert underfunded emergency shelters into community prisons, where detainees can count on three meals a day. And instead of investing in better transit, we can just make it illegal to be late for work, with the threat of fines and jail time.
When police injure or kill a person, they have a special process where they are investigated by former cops. Since they know each other so well, an accused officer doesn’t have to testify, and there’s no jury. This makes it quick and easy to conclude that the officer was not at fault. We could reduce the backlog in our courts if we expanded this process to other alleged crimes, letting the police act as judge, jury, and executioner!
With every passing budget season, we’re getting closer to the police being the do-everything service, as enshrined in their motto, “People Helping People”. And you know what? Good for them. They’ve earned it. Who knows, if we commit ourselves fully to a police state, they could even make the trains run on time.
These ideas might seem radical, but when I look at the scale and severity of the issues facing our society, I believe the police have all the solutions.
In today’s polarized political climate, there often isn’t room for people to change their opinions. However, many people like me, who once advocated to defund the police, now see them as more vital than ever. All we are saying is, give police a chance.
Sam Nabi
Kitchener
