What Would Defunding the Guelph Police Look Like?

The black lives matter protests have raised the idea that society should consider "abolishing" or "defunding" the police. I think readers might find it useful if I worked through some of the different issues involved in understanding this idea---both in general and with regard to the Guelph police department in particular. 

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The first thing to understand is that there are several different ways of doing political organizing.

1. creating political parties and working to win elections
2. lobbying existing governments to change laws
3. working through the courts to either overturn or support existing laws
4. creating social organizations to strengthen or create civil society
5. widening the "Overton window" in order to expand public debate

All of these are important and necessary parts of social transformation, but all require different organizational structures and campaign tactics. 

People rarely understand that there are different political goals that require different tactics, and this creates confusion among the public. For example, the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are often dismissed by people as being "meaningless" because they "didn't accomplish anything" and they "didn't leave behind any organization or leadership to rally around". 

This misses the point that the goal of these demonstrations was to expand the terms of debate allowed within mainstream society (that's the "Overton window"). Before the protests and when they first started you would never hear anyone on a mainstream news show or an elected member of Parliament or Congress talk about wealth stratification. Indeed, at the beginning of the protests I heard many pundits and politicians say that they "couldn't understand what the protesters want" but over the span of one week I noticed that "establishment types" started understanding and talking about "the 1%". That's the exact moment in time when the Overton window expanded. As such, the demonstrations weren't a failure---they were a massive success in terms of the fifth type of political organizing from my list above.

The current Black Lives Matter protests are in the same vein. They have managed to pile-drive into mainstream discourse an idea that was "beyond the pale" and unintelligible to mainstream media and politicians. That's the idea of "defunding" or "abolishing the police". 

Part of the problem with issues that are outside of the Overton window is that there is generally a language problem. That is, society doesn't have a word or phrase that will immediately point towards the issue in a way that everyone immediately understands. Another way of understanding the Overton window is to see everything within it as being "common sense" and everything outside of it as being "hard to understand what you are talking about". 

The phrase that made wealth stratification intelligible to ordinary citizens is "the 1%". But in actual fact, it's just as literally inaccurate as saying that people want to  "defund" or "abolish" the police. That's because the real problem isn't the top 1% of the population having so much more money than everyone else---it's more like the top 20%. To understand this point, consider the fact that if wealth stratification was just about the top 1%, we wouldn't be having a housing crisis in Guelph, because the 1% only needs a few places to live and they generally have mansions in the countryside anyway. The problem with affordability comes from the fact that the 20% number means that developers can make lots of money catering to their needs alone. If 99% of the population were all in the same boat, home builders would be forced to build smaller homes in more dense developments if they expected to make any money. 

But "the 1%" makes for an easily reproduced slogan that most people can understand even if it really doesn't mean just the top 1% and no one else. In the same way, saying "defund" or "abolish" the police doesn't actually mean that people don't want any police or anyone doing the core job of that the police are supposed to do. Instead, they want to get people rethinking policing from the ground up in and asking if the job can be done better and cheaper. 

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This raises a second point. It isn't just people of colour, the mentally ill, etc, who are having a problem with the police. Municipal governments all over North America have seen policing costs skyrocket because they increasingly have very little control over that part of the municipal budget. In 2013 the Public Safety Canada and the Canadian Police Knowledge Network co-hosted the Economics of Policing: Police Education and Learning Summit. One of the presenters, Mark Potter, Director General Policing Policy Directorate for Public Safety Canada, said the following: 

 

---one of the greatest challenges facing policing today is that both the cost and the number of police officers continue to increase while, at the same time, the reported crime rate and the crime severity index continue to decline. In 2012, Canada employed just under 70,000 sworn police officers and just over 28,000 civilian staff. In 2011, Statistics Canada reported that the total cost of policing in Canada was $12.9 billion or $375 per Canadian.

 

Since 1997, the cost of policing in Canada has more than doubled, outpacing the increase in spending by all levels of government. The average salary for police personnel alone has increased by an average of 40% since 2000 while the salary for all employed Canadians has increased on average by 11% in the same time period. In the face of such increases in police expenditures, the reported crime rate continues its downward trend, dropping 3% between 2011 and 2012, reaching its lowest level since 1972. The crime severity index also dropped in 2012 for the ninth consecutive year. In addition, recent polling indicates the majority of Canadians feel satisfied with their personal safety. 

 

Here are a few screen shots of graphs illustrating the same points from a Power Point presentation by Potter while addressing a conference on the costs of policing in Canada's territories. (Please note, these figures are for the entirety of Canada---not just the non-provinces.) 

It would appear from the final graph above that the major increase in policing hasn't come from a massive increase in the number of police officers or other civilian staff. One part of it has to be that 40% increase in police wages between 2000 and 2010 (please remember that this data is dated---that's an artifact of working from published figures.) 

This makes some sense in the Guelph context. If you can believe the website Glassdoor (which, among other things, allows people to anonymously publish their income from various companies to help people negotiate compensation) the average Guelph police constable currently makes $115,000/year. I don't know if this is a believable average, but there were 6 Guelph constables listed on last year's Sunshine List, and their income averaged at $117,500---and that's without adding in their taxable benefits. 

Here's a graph from an AMO (Association of Municipalities Ontario) report that shows the state of police salaries across Ontario between 2003 and 2012. If you extrapolate the salaries for another eight years, the slope of the graph would seem to place police salaries over $100,000/year in 2020.

Please note that what seems to have happened in the above graph was that a lot of people's wage increases had stagnated since the crash of 2008 and hadn't come back by 2012. This didn't happen with police and fire salaries, which makes perfect sense given that their increases were protected by the unique way that they are governed.

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The police in Ontario do not answer to City Council. Instead, they are theoretically governed by a local police board. The majority of the five members are appointed by the city, with two others by the province. Since the city pays for policing through their annual budget and three of the five members of the local board are appointed by Council, there is theoretical input by Council through the local police board. But in actual fact, any time a local police board has refused an increase in the Police budget demanded by the chief, it has been appealed to the Ontario Civilian Commission on Police Services where the chief won. The consensus among the politicians that I've talked to is that the Commission always supports the local police departments. One Guelph Councillor recently told me that "no attempt to limit the budget of a local police force has survived an appeal to the Commission in 20 years". After a while, Councils just give up trying---the same way they did with planning because of the Ontario Municipal Board's historical bias towards developers.

In addition, police departments are considered "essential services", which means that if labour contract negotiations stall they immediately go to binding arbitration instead of lock-out/strike. Again, the consensus is that binding arbitration tends to be much more generous than traditional bargaining, hence the above average pay increases.

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In the USA there are similar problems but for different reasons. Some police forces in America are relatively well-paid. But I think many constables there would be gob-smacked at the salaries of Guelph police. There is still a problem with the cost of policing even if too much money isn't spent on salaries. One part is that if a police department loses a law suit for excessive force, neither the individual police officer nor the department have to pay the damages. Instead, it has to come out of general revenue. For example, according to an article in ChicagoBusiness.com, between 2004 and 2016 the city of Chicago had to pay out a staggering $662 million in settlements and legal fees just to deal with excessive force lawsuits. 

It's important to put that number into a context, however. The Chicago consolidated budget in 2019 came to $10.67 billion. That means that spread over 12 years, these excessive force lawsuits came to $55.2 million/year, or, something like half of 1% of the 2019 budget. But still, it can certainly be said that this is money that can't been spent on other initiatives. Just to put it into context, the entire new library on Baker Street is projected to cost about $50 million in total. If that was averaged over 12 years, it would come to about $4.2 million. The total Guelph operating plus capital budget runs to about $331 million, which means that building a library over 12 years would come to about 1.3% of the budget. So scaling for the size of Guelph, if we had a comparable problem to Chicago's it would be safe to say that the legal costs of excessive use of force by the police would just about pay for the new library---.   

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Beyond the financial issue, there is also the general sense that municipal leaders simply don't have either the administrative authority or political power to "reign in" either policing costs or to control "rogue officers". Some of this has been caused by police unions that seem to exert far too much power, police administrators who have more loyalty to the "police culture" than to democratic governance, and, populist politicians who use "law and order" as a tool to win elections. 

I think that these are results rather than causes. It's important to understand the incredibly influential propaganda campaign that has existed all my life and promotes the idea that policing is a very dangerous job. Because it is so dangerous, the party line goes, we need to give police officers enormous leeway in the pursuit of their calling. 

The first police show I remember seeing on tv was Car 54 Where Are You?

People might find it hard to believe, but policing used to be considered just another job, one that didn't pay particular well but that was secure, had some benefits, and, most-importantly-of-all, had a pension. As such, it was totally fair game as a sitcom. 

Since then, over my lifetime the public view of what a police officer is has morphed into something that is a cross between a combat infantryman and a judge/jury/executioner. While there are a great many shows that promote this meme, probably the most influential is a show that the Fox Network (of course) first put on during a Hollywood writer's strike because it was cheap to do and used scab labour (again, of course). Of course, I'm talking about that bag of steaming crap known as Cops.

I use the phrase "bag of steaming crap" advisedly. I really didn't understand how awful this show was (thankfully, it was finally taken off the air during the recent protests) until I listened to a fascinating series of podcasts titled Running From Cops. 

Dan Taberski, cropped from a promotional photo from Mont Clair Film Festival. 

Image c/o Wiki Media Commons.

The fellow behind this show, Dan Taberski, put in an enormous amount of hard-core investigation to do find evidence to show:

• the insidious relationships that develop between police departments and tv producers to get the OK to ride around in police cars
• how the imperatives to present an exciting, dramatic program totally skew people's perceptions of how much crime, drug abuse, and, violence occur in the life of a police officer
• how the program shows police routinely violating people's rights, thereby "normalizing" this in the public's eyes
• how damaging it can be to appear on the show, and how it never goes back to explain that so-and-so was actually declared innocent during a trial
• how police officers themselves develop a warped view of what policing should be by watching and participating in the show 

Cops is probably the worst of the popular police shows. But it bears repeating that the average crime drama does the following:

• portrays policing as far more dangerous than it really is (it's only the 14th most dangerous job in the USA---after farming, garbage man, travelling salesman, etc)
• shows shoot-outs as being a common part of the job---even though three quarters of police officers (in the USA, mind you) are never called upon to fire their weapon during their entire career
• it shows the police solving almost all the serious crimes that they come across---even though the fact is that something like 40% of all murders in the US never result in an arrest

These very popular forms of entertainment are also very effective propaganda for the idea that policing is a very dangerous, very unique sort of job. And that translates into the idea that the average citizen has no idea of how difficult it is, and, how we should cut officers enormous discretion for the life-and-death situations that they routinely confront. 

Another form of propaganda that presents the idea that policing is especially dangerous are their huge, public funerals. I have raised this point in the past, and generally I get a lot of push back. But I think it really bears repeating even if I get hammered over it. Policing really isn't that dangerous a job. I've seen people get their legs crushed, a pelvis broken, and, a woman almost die from toxic mold---when I worked for 30 years in an academic library. All jobs involve an element of risk, but I don't see the downtown taken over whenever someone in construction falls off a roof, a farmer gets caught in an auger---or a healthcare worker dies of COVID-19 at a long-term care facility, for that matter. 

Constable Jennifer Kovach Funeral in Downtown Guelph.
Image from a CTV story, used under the "Fair Dealing" provision.

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So what exactly can cities do to lower the cost of and lessen the danger from their police departments? After all, they can't simply ban all the shows on tv that promote ridiculous notions about the job. But there are some "low hanging fruit" that can be picked when the public is up in arms over the drip, drip, drip of killings recorded on smart phones and security cams. 

First of all, I think it's important to remember that Guelph isn't Minneapolis, Saint Louis, New York, Atlanta---or even Toronto. We shouldn't tar our local people with the brush we could use for others. But having said that, I have heard people talk about problems they've had with the police, so we aren't immune to these sorts of things, either.   

Desmond Cole, picture from 
Ontario Federation of Labour.
Image c/o Wiki Media Commons.

I recently heard Desmond Cole being interviewed on the Toronto Star website. One of the things he mentioned was the experience of having a police officer show up at his door because of a noise complaint. He asked "why does someone with a badge and a gun have to deal with a noise complaint?" 

I immediately thought about the Guelph situation, where that particular bunch of low-hanging grapes was picked years ago. The law was changed in 2014 (I believe) to allow city bylaw officers to enforce noise complaints, and extend their hours of duty to all hours of the day seven days a week. This has the value of increasing responsiveness to noise complaints (I can testify that police didn't like enforcing the noise bylaws because they thought it was a waste of their time), cutting operating costs for the police department, and, reducing the (admittedly very small) possibility of a noise complaint escalating to something violent because a police officer reached for his gun too soon.  

Another low-hanging fruit that Guelph has already picked is that of bringing in social workers to deal with mental health problems. During one of my last years at work we had city police call us to say that a student had phoned from the Library to a friend and said she was contemplating suicide. We found the girl and the police arrived with a psychiatric nurse in tow to talk to her and see that she got the help she needed. 

Yet another example is the safe-injection site we currently have downtown. That allows people to get do their fix while limiting the chance of catching Hepatitis or AIDS from a dirty needle, and, with a medical professional nearby who can administer Naloxone if they suffer an overdose.  

Finally, if memory serves the police department long ago decided to save some money by changing some administrative positions from being filled by uniformed officers to civilians at a lower pay grade. Also, if memory serves, there was some push-back at the time from officers who expected to get a cushy desk job---at a relatively high senior police salary---after years of service, but eventually people accepted the new normal. 

So I think it's only fair to say that the Guelph police are far from the worst service in North America. But I do think that some significant changes could be made that would redirect resources towards areas that need the money more than they do. Here are a few suggestions. 

First of all, what if you could call through 911 about a person who is in a mental

health crisis and specifically say that you don't need a police officer or paramedic? Instead, you'd just  get people with experience with psychiatric disorders and who are taught to de-escalate through talking instead of dominating and controlling through intimidation and force. Well, this has been going on in Eugene Oregon for over thirty years. It's called CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets). 

Another way that Guelph could cut policing costs would be to split the job of policing into several different streams. 

The first part would be to make a certain percentage of constables "peace officers", who's primary duty would be to deal with mundane issues like issuing traffic tickets, dealing with drunks downtown, etc. They would also be able to deal with a variety of paperwork---like recording thefts. This would be considered something of a municipal job just like any other---and paid accordingly. Would this person need a gun? Perhaps not, Great Britain calls these people "Bobbies" and they don't have guns. They could be issued batons, pepper spray, tasers, and, handcuffs, though.

One key part of these people's training, however, would be the use of "de-escalation" techniques and the essential need of police to gain and retain the support of the community. This last part is a key part of a British police officer's training, and is directly in opposition to what many Black Live's Matter activists call the "over-policing" methods that lead to communities feeling like the police are an occupying army. This is a key concept and is based on the idea that there are so many different regulations on the books that just about everyone is breaking one law or another at any given moment. If police are actively seeking minor violations at any given moment, they lose the support of the community. 

To cite a couple practical examples of "over policing" that I've heard about in the USA, consider the following. One community had a recycling contract with a business that complained that they'd based their numbers on a certain number of aluminum cans in the average blue bin. What was happening, however, was that desperately poor people were going through people's blue bins to pull out the aluminum cans so they could sell them to scrap metal dealers for cash. (This happens in Guelph and I often see people walking down my street rooting through the bins---although I suspect that they are looking for alcohol bottles and cans to return for the deposit.) The police were ordered to fine people for doing this. 

One of the problems that led to the explosive anger and demonstrations that put Black Lives Matter on the map was the fact that the Ferguson Missouri police department was tasked with raising so much money through fines that they were supposed to not only pay for themselves but also turn a profit and subsidize other parts of the city apparatus. (Can you imagine what the relationship between Guelph's citizens and it's police department would be like if it did this?) 

The Canadian practice of "carding" would probably be considered a classic example of "over policing" that creates the distance between police and the community and destroys the support they need to do their job well.

The second bit would be the specialist investigators. These would investigate major crimes, with the emphasis on "investigate". From what I understand, being good at investigating a crime is very similar to being a journalist or scientist. You don't have to be Dirty Harry, just curious, tenacious and creative. It might be significantly harder to find good investigators than peace officers, so you might have to pay them a bit more. But again, this wouldn't a dangerous job so they wouldn't need guns either.

The third class would be a small number of guys who really do run risks. They'd have to be very well trained with their weapons. They'd do the "high risk" arrests and be called to back up peace officers and investigators when necessary. This class of officers would be fairly small, however, which would allow the city to get some control over the wages that they are paying out.  

Lest the above seem like crazy "pie-in-the-sky" dreaming, it is my understanding that this is how police are organized in Great Britain. That is to say, only something like 7% of the police are issued weapons and spend their time patrolling in "Armed Response Vehicles" (ARVs). This means that at any time when a Bobby or investigator believes that they need armed back up because their situation seems particularly dangerous, they can call them in with their radios.

It might take a lot of work to do, but I suspect that if the police department wanted to set things up according to the British model it might be theoretically able to do this. Unfortunately, I think that the police union would lose their marbles over this, as it would probably mean most officers would think that they are no longer "real police" anymore. But if we can get 5,000 people on the street in the middle of a pandemic to protest the existing police structure, at least someone should be "thinking big".

Unfortunately, I think that the next two ways in which Guelph could dramatically cut policing costs would be pretty hard to do without buy-in from the Feds and the Province.

The first one would be to end the homelessness problem. Ultimately, that's a political tar baby, IMHO, because the people who already own their homes don't want to make any concession that would be needed to increase the housing stock in the city to the point where rents and mortgages would start to go down to an affordable level. Councilors either genuinely believe that there is nothing that they can do to fix the problem (they want the feds to pay for huge increase in social housing) or they realize that it would be political suicide to actually support new, high-density housing in existing neighbourhoods outside of existing "sacrifice zones" (like the downtown)---so they keep coming up with excuses or blame the problem on the province or the feds. 

Unfortunately, however, until more housing stock gets built, the only option that homeless people have is to break the law through the necessary ways that they live without a legal home---primarily by begging, trespassing, and, petty theft. If we make poverty a crime, we are going to have to have police to continue to control and penalize people who are poor. This is a crappy thing to do to poor folk, and it's also a crappy thing to do to the police too. 

The second thing we could do would be to legalize and regulate addictive drugs like the opioids and crystal meth. The problems that people associate with drug addiction aren't really caused by the addiction itself, they are caused by the implications of making the drug they are addicted to illegal. That's because street drugs are orders of magnitude more expensive than legally-bought ones from a pharmacist. Moreover, the concentration levels of a street drug are totally unknown by users, which means that every time they take a hit they are playing Russian roulette with an overdose. In contrast, legal drugs have a scientifically-defined concentration of active ingredients, which means that there is no risk of accidental overdose. 

One final point to consider. If an addict has to get a doctor to write a script for her, she will have to register with the "system" and this will allow social services---if it wants to and has the funds---to get her into counselling and treatment. Since addicts move heaven-and-earth to get their fixes, tying it to being available for treatment for the underlying reason for their addiction would help. Moreover, if it was done right (which past experience would suggest will only happen after every other possible avenue has already been tried and discarded) the money saved by keeping people out of jails could be used to fund an expansion of the drug treatment system, which I understand is horribly under-funded. (I recently heard on an Ideas podcast that the average cost of keeping someone in a provincial prison is about $85,000/year---treatment has got to be cheaper!) 

If we stop bankrupting drug addicts by forcing them to spend every dime they have on wildly over-priced street drugs, they can keep their homes and life savings. If that happens, they will cease to engage in petty crime and prostitution in order to fund their habit. And if we provide them treatment to stabilize both their addictions and avoid the related lifestyle, they can either become or continue to be productive members of society who work at jobs and pay taxes. 

Moreover, the police could then spend their time dealing with the more core parts of their job instead of constantly dealing with complaints from citizens about petty thefts by addicts and responding to people overdosing on the drugs they bought with the proceeds.

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One last point. It's true that this is a unique moment where rapid change could possibly happen. That's because of the functional alliance between Black Lives Matter sympathizers and mainstream politicians who want to get police departments back under their control. But if we want to get something that actually makes the lives of people better, we are going to have fight tooth and nail to make sure that populist politicians don't hijack the movement and use reductions in police budgets to cut taxes. The money that the police now have control over is desperately needed to fund other social services that have been chronically under-funded since the 1970s. Every other time a social movement has gotten the government to take action to cut funding for some moribund government service---the closure of the provincial mental health hospitals comes to mind---money hasn't been redirected to more efficient alternatives, but was instead channeled towards tax cuts. We need to be ready to fight tooth and nail to see that this doesn't happen if there is some success in getting the police back under public control. 

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!