The Main — April 12: Lawlessness in Police Town?
In Edmonton, competing versions of 'safety' in the ongoing debate about police budgets could become fodder for the election in October
“Am I hearing you correctly?” Coun. Mike Nickel asked. “Transit fares are racist?”
During last Tuesday’s Edmonton City Council meeting, Nickel questioned Robert Houle, an Indigenous member of a council task force on community safety. Houle and the task force had just delivered their report to council with 14 recommendations, one being to freeze the city’s police budget and redirect any potential increases into social services. During the discussion, Houle had explained that fines for transit-fare violations are much costlier than fines for parking tickets and that transit riders often hail from marginalized communities. As the city’s own work has shown, Houle continued, this disparity is a form of systemic racism that can make people feel unsafe.
Nickel wasn’t buying it. Aside from the question he asked Houle, Nickel told him that he needs “concrete, mechanical things” he can work on. Business owners tell him the city is in a state of “lawlessness,” he continued. All of these people suggest they don’t feel safe in Edmonton. “How am I to respond to them?” he asked.
Safe is a powerful word.
The discussion about policing and budgets in Edmonton has been predictably full of emotion and reaction. Suggestions of racism still spark automatic defensiveness in many government forums in Canada. Edmonton is no different. Are transit fares racist? Isn’t racism about intent? How can a system be racist? Any use of that word is demeaning to police. Many who answered these questions said they expected them.
But as the exchange between Houle and Nickel illustrated, at its roots the discussion is about that word — safety. There are several version of it. And these differing versions could inform the coming 2021 municipal election in this city.
What’s Safe?
Calls to freeze (as opposed to cut) Edmonton’s police budget and redirect any future increases into social services can spark fear. Won’t crime explode? We’re sure to be asked to consider that possibility. Nickel, who’s running for mayor, feeds the fear on the regular.
Fittingly, Nickel tweeted after the meeting that council had endorsed a “Defund Police” framework. “I voted no,” he said.
On the flip side, as members of the task force suggested in a video that played before their presentation to council, many others do not feel safe — and often feel this way because of police, not for a lack of them. These people deserve to feel safe and more policing won’t create it. “Imagine being in a dire situation and not feeling like the first people you can call is the police,” one person says, in the video.
As Tuesday’s council meeting closed, the two versions collided. Council voted unanimously to direct the Edmonton Police Service to work with the city to review the task force’s report. But a second motion, to consider the recommendation to freeze the police budget until it’s at a similar level to other cities of similar size, and to redirect money police would have gotten into social services, was far closer. Nickel and four other councillors — including two who sit on the police commission — voted against this motion, though it still passed, 8-5.
Not All Metrics
Unless crime is eliminated there will always be anecdotal evidence to suggest the need for more dollars to hire more cops. Didn’t your neighbour’s garage get broken into last week? Well, Edmonton’s lawless, don’t you know.
Indeed, though council is usually celebrated when it cuts a budget or trims believed red-tape, when it comes to police the inverse usually holds true. In a recent Facebook Live, for example, Coun. Andrew Knack talked of a 2014 debate about police helicopters, a multi-million-dollar expense for the city’s largest budget item. Some councillors, Knack included, had pushed back on the police service’s requested helicopter and had suggested a less-expensive version.
“I remember some of the mail and calls I got,” Knack said. “‘How dare you even question this ask. If that’s what they need, that’s what they need.’”
To borrow Nickel’s favourite term, the arguable direct result of this is a metric in itself: the Edmonton Police Service is the city’s largest budget item, at $471 million per year, and its budget continues to grow at a faster rate than on other municipal spending, like transit or social services. There are a few other metrics to consider, too. When adjusted for spending per person, Edmonton now invests the second-highest amount in policing in Canada, behind only Windsor, Ontario, according to a recent Globe and Mail analysis. And the police budget has grown by 23.4 per cent since 2016, while Edmonton’s population has grown at a much slower rate in the same period.
According to Statistics Canada data from 2018, Edmonton has the fourth-strongest police presence in Canada, with 187 police per 100,000 people. That means Edmonton has a higher ratio of police to citizens than Toronto, Surrey, or Ottawa.
What should result from this is one of the safest-feeling cities in Canada. But the task force report suggests it isn’t — especially for Edmonton residents who are Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. Indeed, the task force’s most powerful metric is that, if you re-frame “safety” to consider these communities, you find a wild imbalance.
The task force report suggests, for example, that 32 per cent of Edmonton police calls are not connected to crime but instead responses to scenarios where a social worker, mental health professional or someone who works with those experiencing homelessness would be better equipped to help.
“It feels our city is stuck in a cycle that feels enforcement-focused and reactive,” reads the report.
How Did We Get Here?
Edmonton’s council created the community safety and well-being task force in July 2020, in the aftermath of the killing by police of George Floyd in Minnesota last May. In the weeks that followed, Edmonton saw a series of anti-racism protests and then several days of city council meetings where more than 140 citizens spoke about their experiences with police and, largely, called for change.
“We cannot afford to wait,” one said.
The task force’s 60-page report, Safer For All, calls for the operational increases over base funding that would have gone to police over the next five years to be “refunded back into the community” to support expansion of social services. The task force estimates this amount to be $260 million.
Police Union Reacts
Representatives of the Edmonton Police Service have not taken kindly to the task force report. Michael Elliot, president of the Edmonton Police Association, characterized it as “insulting and demeaning” to the EPS, in a letter sent to police union members (which was shared with Rage Against the Municipal).
The letter accuses the task force participants of being biased and borrowing from U.S. stereotypes about policing. “The task force alleges that racism is ‘baked in’ to the EPS … and that Edmonton's police officers are largely a group of ‘unwitting racists who should be fired in the name of diversity.’”
Marni Panas, a member of the taskforce, spoke out on Twitter, about being contacted directly by members of the police to express their displeasure with the report.
“It doesn’t help me feel any safer.”
Money Formula
Since 2018, the EPS has enjoyed a funding guarantee that many other departments in the city don’t. That year, council passed a formula for the police that locks in a base funding amount for operations and then uses a formula to calculate increases to it. This removes the yearly debates about the service’s operations budget, or in some councillors’ words, de-politicizes it.
“Prior to implementation of this formula, discussions of the police budget often included big increase requests with a rationalization that the public would not be safe if the big increase were not supported,” said Coun. Tim Cartmell, in an email.
What influences the increases within the formula? Several metrics are baked into the calculation used to decide the increases: economic growth (to account for increasing wage demands), population growth, inflation, and the amount the province takes from speeding fines police collect.
Coun. Knack, who voted to consider freezing the budget and considering a different formula, later spoke of his decision. “I don’t know if we have the formula down correct,” he said.
But while Coun. Cartmell roughly agrees that a discussion is needed, he voted against the motion.
“This motion to further examine the funding formula serves as a distraction from the work we really need to do,” he said. “The phrase ‘defund the police’ and suggestions to review police budgets are politically charged. They carry with them an undertone of presumption that the Edmonton Police Service actively intends to act with racism and discrimination. That was necessary a year ago, to bring attention to these very serious issues and to initiate the conversations we are now having.
“But the motion to further examine the funding formula is not viewed by our constituents as a call to perform a financial analysis as much as it is viewed as a call to perpetuate this undertone of presumption. We need to move away from the provocative statements and reactions towards mature, reasoned dialogue. Knowing that the financial analysis would happen anyway, I voted against this because I don't support this continuing narrative and the distraction it creates.”
What’s Next?
Houle, with the task force, is pragmatic about his work.
“I think overall it’s a positive step in the right direction,” he said, in an interview with Rage. “I take it as a win for having 13 of the 14 recommendations accepted.”
As Coun. Cartmell has underlined, the door remains open for a conversation about police funding in the future.
Houle also said he expects the competing versions of safety to be prominent in the upcoming mayoral and council elections in Edmonton, in October.
“I think it’s important that the candidates reframe and recategorize the conversation. Our recommendations are very reasonable. It’s not a cut to the existing budget. The EPS would still receive close to $400 million in funding. We’re just asking for the excess money that they would have been allocated go towards re-investing in the community. There will not be, as some councillors put it, ‘lawlessness.’ If there is, that just reinforces the findings of our report, in that the system is broken and policing needs an overhaul.”