Defund the Police, Reallocate Funds to Competent Social Programs

Please do not ignore the plethora of complaints and calls for police defunding. The Ottawa police budget is bloated and must be severely reduced as an appropriate response of their incompetence. Many Ottawa officers have shown that there are far to many willing to abuse their power and do serious harm to the citizens they are obliged to protect. Within my 20 years of living in Ottawa, there have been physical assault, sexual assault and murder charges including Julie Cayer, Benoit Aube, Roxanne Carr, Stacey Bonds, Terry Delay, Hugh Styres and Abdirahman Abdi. While these officers are morally reprehensible and are individual cases, the department as a whole have shown they are incapable of holding their officers responsible. Constable Eric Post was charged with 32 criminal acts committed throughout his career, Constable Carl Keenan was held responsible by being suspended with pay after assaulting a woman while off-duty, as well as being accused by fellow officers of sexually assaulting them while training them. Sergeant Steve Desjourdy was docked 20 days pay by participating in the physical and sexual assault of Stacey Bonds.

The Ottawa police budget is excessive, 358 million and five times that of our public health system and more than our transportation, library and public health systems combined. I advise that the municipal government severely cuts the department, reducing it to a specialized violent crime unit, while also reallocating funds to our community, public health system, education or the creation of skilled specialized groups of social workers that can intervene in non/less-violent police calls, such as petty theft, domestic calls, mental health checks or public intoxication calls.

There are plenty of alternatives to a broken system of law enforcement that has been shown to be severely incapable of doing their jobs and holding people accountable. I hope that you can find a reasonable solution.