Reduce police funding / bodycameras do not work
Dear City of Ottawa analytical team,
This is a human rights issue.
Seeking help in a mental health crisis should never be a death sentance.
One death is too many and reason enough to put in the work to reimagine and rebuild the entire system.
If you are serious about your intersectional lens, you need rethink how we care for people in mental distress!
Stop sending people with guns and insufficient de-escalation training into these situations in order to better serve our community.
You can't fix this by training the officers you have - if training was enough it would have worked already.
Most of the rebuttals I've seen from the City and mayor amount to "but you wanted higher police budgets last year!" This is, frankly, a terrible argument: we want to see City Hall also changing its mind and actions when presented with new information - and all the information you need is a short google search away.
In case you need the research on this forum to consider it:
"Here’s a list of BIPOC people who have died during mental health-related interactions with Canadian police in the last three months:
On June 20, Ejaz Ahmed Choudry, who was 62, was shot and killed by police in his apartment in Mississauga, Ont., after police were called to “check on [his] well-being.” On June 12, Rodney Levi, a Metepenagiag Mi’kmaq man, was shot to death by RCMP in Sunny Corner, N.B., in the backyard of a church minister, where he had gone to ask for mental health help and guidance. On June 4, Chantal Moore, a 26-year-old woman from the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation in B.C., was also shot dead by police in New Brunswick, by an officer who came to conduct a wellness check at her Edmunston home. On May 27, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old Indigenous and Black woman, fell from the balcony of a Toronto apartment after her mother and brother called the police for help as Korchinski-Paquet was experiencing severe mental distress. On May 5, Caleb Tubila Njoko, who was also Black, fell from a balcony in London, Ont.—after his mother called the police because she was concerned about Njoko’s mental health. And On April 6, D’Andre Campbell, a 26-year-old Black man living in Brampton, Ont., was shot in his home after he called 911 for assistance during a mental health crisis." Source: https://www.chatelaine.com/health/what-is-a-wellness-check/
"Interactions between police and people in mental distress have been problematic for a long time. According to a 2018 CBC report, more than 460 people in Canada died during police interventions between 2000 and 2016. Of those killed, 42 percent of them were mentally distressed. " (same article)
"That’s particularly troubling because police-involved deaths of Black and Indigenous people are disproportionate to their numbers in the population. According to the Globe and Mail, more than a third of the 61 people fatally shot by the RCMP between 2007 to 2017were Indigenous. In 2016, they made up only 4.9 percent of people in Canada. A CBC report showed that of the 461 victims of fatal police interactions between 2000 to 2017, 43 were Black. Black people accounted for about 9.2 percent of cases, while they make up just 3.5 percentof the Canadian population." (same article)
Did you know that there is lots of research showing police body cameras don't work?
"Police-worn body cameras do not reduce the instances of police use of force. Nor do they reduce citizen complaints about excessive force. These are the unexpected findings from the largest study to date on the subject, which casts doubt on the generally accepted wisdom regarding body camera effectiveness. “We found essentially that we could not detect any statistically significant effect of the body-worn cameras,” said Anita Ravishankar, one of the researchers behind the study."
For any of you still holding on to the fantasy that Canada is not as bad as the US, did you know that Canada is one of the worst sources of online hate?
link: https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/canadian-right-wing-extremism-online-1.5617710
"A report released Friday on Canadian involvement in right-wing extremism online should serve as a "wake-up call" about the widespread nature of the movement and highlights a growing shift toward the use of less regulated platforms, says an expert on the phenomenon.
The research, led by the U.K.-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) think-tank, identified more than 6,600 online channels — pages, accounts or groups — where Canadians were involved in spreading white supremacist, mysogynistic or other radical views.
On some forums, Canadians were found to be "highly active," even more, on average, than users in the U.S. and Britain."
If you want more, i recommend "Racism in Canada is ever present but we have a history of denial"
link: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/racism-canada-anti-black_ca_5ecd6c6cc5b670f88ad48d5c
as well as these articles about requests to defund the Ottawa Police specifically:
source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/defund-police-ottawa-1.5623168
"People calling to defund the Ottawa police brought their message directly to the group overseeing the force's budget Monday night.
Four of the five members of the public who addressed the Ottawa Police Services Board asked it to redirect money from police to social servicessuch as mental health and housing.
They said officers too often resort to the use of force, especially against people from racialized communities, and are ill-equipped to respond to calls involving people with mental health issues.
"We need to reimagine what law enforcement looks like in Ottawa," said Robin Browne, a member of 613/819 Black Hub, an advocacy organization.
"We're not calling for the abolition of policing … Rather a proper, reallocation of funding that could begin the process of ending the culture of police brutality."
Nearly 10 per cent of city budget is police
Calls to defund police services across North America have grown louder in recent weeks as protests spread in response to police killings of civilians, notably Black or Indigenous people.
Ottawans held a march against racism and police brutality earlier this month, then a protest over the weekendmarked the death of Abdirahman Abdi, a 37-year-old man who died following a violent altercation with Ottawa police in July 2016.
Ottawa police Const. Daniel Montsion has pleaded not guilty to manslaughter, aggravated assault and assault with a weapon.
Farhia Ahmed, a co-founder of the Justice for Abdirahman Coalition, told the members of the police board it has pushed for reform for years, but the calls have fallen on deaf ears.
"Demands for justice have reached a boiling point and we cannot ignore them," said Ahmed.
Farhia Ahmed is one of the co-founders of the Justice for Abdirahman coalition. She says it's time for the police board to undertake serious reforms that prevent police violence against racialized people. (Idil Mussa/CBC News)Funding police is almost 10 per cent of Ottawa's 2020 budget. At just over $357 million, it's one of the budget's largest line items, with the majority going toward paying officers.
Browne called attention to the increase in funding to Ottawa police in previous years, saying it has grown at a higher rate than other city-funded services.
"We propose the Ottawa Police Service immediately launch a co-development process with the community to identify which social services it will be most effective to shift police funding [to] and create a plan to do so," said Browne.
"Particular focus should be on immediately establishing non-lethal, compassionate responders in the case of people experiencing mental health crises."
- Calls to defund the police gain traction with some Canadian policymakers. But what does it mean?
- March for racial justice fills downtown Ottawa"
"Minister says reckoning on police violence against Indigenous people needed
"Frankly along with many Canadians, Indigenous Peoples living in Canada, politicians in Canada, I'm pissed, I'm outraged. There needs to be a full accounting of what has gone on. This is a pattern that keeps repeating itself," says Minister Marc Miller."
"In the first, a graphic video shows an RCMP officer in Nunavut ramming the door of his car into the man walking along the road in Kinngait Monday evening. In the second, police went to check on the well-being of 26-year-old Chantel Moore in Edmundston, N.B., Thursday evening, and ended up shooting and killing her.
"A car door is not a proper police tactic, it's a disgraceful, dehumanizing and violent act," Miller said, at a news conference on Parliament Hill Friday morning. "I don't understand how someone dies during a wellness check. When I first saw the report I thought it was some morbid joke."
Miller was there to provide an update on the status of COVID-19 cases in Indigenous communities, but spent most of the nearly hour-long event answering questions about police violence and racism in Canada.
"Frankly along with many Canadians, Indigenous Peoples living in Canada, politicians in Canada, I'm pissed, I'm outraged. There needs to be a full accounting of what has gone on. This is a pattern that keeps repeating itself."
The man who was struck by the officer's car in Nunavut was arrested and later beaten by another man also in the holding cell he was placed in, requiring him to be airlifted to Iqaluit for treatment. The 22-year-old, whose identity has not been made public, told CBC News in Nunavut that he wants the police officers involved in his arrest to be charged.
The Ottawa Police Service, which does independent investigations of police in Nunavut, has sent a team there but the officer who arrested the man has not been charged or suspended. He was flown out of the community and is on administrative leave."
We are at a crisis point - the status quo is not good enough - everyone in Ottawa deserves better. Being open to reallocating funds from police to other social services is a critical step you can take today to better serve your community - especially those most at risk in all police interactions, including BIPOC and people with disabilities or in a mental health crisis.