It’s a troubling disconnect, one brought into sharp relief by the massive protests over police violence and racism that have swept both countries.
Critics of current models of policing have been pointing this out for years, but no one was listening. Or at least they weren’t acting. Politicians failed to challenge ever-increasing police budgets. Or worse, they deliberately fanned voters’ fears of rising crime — even as actual crime rates were going steadily down.
Suddenly, calls to defund, even dismantle, the police are being taken seriously. Exactly what that should mean is up for debate, and we will propose some directions tomorrow. But it’s worth pausing first to consider just how we got here.
Rates of violent crime soared in the late 1960s, ’70s and ’80s in Canada and especially in the U.S. They peaked around 1991 and have been falling ever since, reaching the lowest levels ever recorded in 2014-15.
There have been some increases since then — including a sharp uptick in gun violence in Toronto over the past three years. But overall, most big North American cities have never seen less violent crime, have never been safer.
But at what cost? When crime rates were soaring, fearful American voters supported a massive increase in spending on police and it didn’t stop when the trends went into reverse. Far from cutting back on police costs, they spent even more — tripling the cost in constant dollars over three decades to $115 billion (U.S.) by 2017.
Canada saw a similar story. From 2001 to 2014, according to one study, police budgets increased at twice the rate of the economy as a whole — just as violent crime was plunging. Even the conservative Fraser Institute, mindful of wasting tax dollars, pointed this out at the time in a study of runaway spending: “Canadian policing costs and staffing levels have grown over the past decade despite a dramatic fall in crime rates.”
Why? Fear, for sure. Voters naturally want safe streets, and after decades of rising crime it was easy for politicians of all stripes to win support by promising more police.
President Bill Clinton, a liberal Democrat, boasted of putting 100,000 more officers on American streets in the 1990s. And in Canada, the Harper government pushed an aggressive tough-on-crime agenda, resulting in longer sentences and more people in prison, just at the moment when crime rates were reaching their all-time low points. Many (including the Star) pointed that out repeatedly. But the Conservatives knew when they were on to a winner.
Powerful police unions played a role, too. Every time trims to budgets were suggested (as they were in Toronto in 2017) unions warned public safety was at risk. Invariably, it worked.
The nature of policing changed as well. Forces became militarized; suddenly even those in small cities decided they needed armoured cars, combat-level assault rifles, sound cannons and other expensive gear.
And as crime levels declined, police were handed a whole new range of tasks. They were expected to deal with homelessness, people in mental health crises, and run community outreach programs to attack the roots of crime. The New York Police Department, for one, had 5,000 officers assigned to schools.
Many of these were well-intentioned, but they too often go very wrong — most dramatically when people in mental distress end up dead after a confrontation with police. A para-military force like the police can’t easily adapt to the community-focused jobs the public wants done now that the threat of violent crime has receded. “Instead of trying to turn police into social workers,” observes Alex Vitale, criminologist at Brooklyn College and author of The End of Policing, “maybe we should just hire social workers.”
But of course it wasn’t all failed social work. Police also adopted aggressive policies in the name of crime-fighting that singled out minority (mainly Black) communities. In the United States, it was often known as “stop and frisk”; in Canada, carding.
By whatever name, it amounted to harassment and worse. And, not surprisingly, it poisoned relations between police and minority communities. Add to that mass incarceration in the United States that put millions of Black and Hispanic men behind bars, and an over-representation of Indigenous and Black people in Canadian prisons, and you have a formula for resentment and protest. George Floyd’s death was the spark, but the fire had been prepared for many years.
The bottom line is that we spent decades constructing police forces that are expensive, over-militarized and not best suited to the tasks they face in the third decade of the 21st century. In too many situations, they are making things worse, not better.
Reformers have been calling for change for a long time, and public pressure may now finally give the politicians the courage to start fixing the problem. We clearly need new models of policing, and we’ll suggest ideas for that tomorrow.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion.html
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