Reinvesting in the police
Everyone will be made more safe if we stop listening to radical activists
By James Pew
The two sides of the police and public safety issue that I will be discussing below, and in an on-going series of essays on social unrest in Canada, are:
1) The inevitable failure of “Defund the Police,” and the corresponding shift in attitudes of public policy makers now supporting large reinvestments in police services. This is, of course, the opposite of defunding, "de-tasking," or dismantling the police and it comes about because it has been realized that police are greatly needed for society to function successfully, and regardless of the anti-police rhetoric still used by activists, and parroted by media, defunding or dismantling the police will make everyone less safe.
2) Criminal justice reform (including bail reform). Again, regardless of what activists mouth, the public is obviously less safe when violent criminals are let out on bail, enabling them to commit more violent offenses. What is the point of police arresting violent offenders, if a judge is just going to let them go?
Reinvesting in the police again
Public perception on race issues is often shaped when black activists morph into the “black community.” This occurs when journalists seek comment from radical activists, and then report on the views of “communities.” Black radicals speak for a tiny minority of black people, but the legacy media makes no distinction. Because of this, it is likely that the relentless anti-police rhetoric will continue regardless of the fact that ideas, like defund the police, have had disastrous results in jurisdictions all over North America.
Below is an example, a tweet from radical black activist Bree Newsome Bass, who writes articles like Black Cops Don’t Make Policing Any Less Anti-Black, which of course, is a complete mess of naive radical rhetoric and “reasoning” about “institutionalized racism,” and entirely misses the important point: cops being of any particular colour has nothing to do with the personal choices of individuals who commit crimes.
Woke activists do not represent the interests of any of the communities they claim to, in fact they militate against any member of the public who doesn’t fully embrace wokeism (or associated notions like “anti-black racism”). This was seen for example when a black trustee on a Waterloo school board was called a “white supremacist” on Twitter by community activists for disagreeing with the radicals (who were mostly white people) on that same board. I wrote about that fiasco in a piece called The Sinister Six Feel Entitled To Their Racism.
Illiberalism permeates a Toronto-based non-profit group that “combats individual and systemic anti-Black racism,” known as the Black Legal Action Center. It should go without saying, before we even dissect the highly illiberal components of both the notions of “systemic racism,” and of “anti-black racism,” the most obvious layer of illiberalism in this case is the outer one. That is, the fact that a non-profit of this nature exists exclusively for black people. Both the staff and board of directors are entirely black.
Are there any non-profit’s (that hire only white people) giving free legal advice only to white people? And why not? Especially when one considers the intense level of systemic anti-white racism that is overtly apparent in many dozens of domains across society, like job listings that deliberately exclude white candidates, or proposed antiracism legislation that deliberately excludes white people as a group that can even be subject to racism (which is entirely consistent with ideological “anti-racism”).
The Black Legal Action Center seems to have a dogmatic determination to pursue decarceration of black Canadians. This determination stems from their unsubstantiated analysis that black Canadians are disproportionately incarcerated because of the immorality of the system rather than the crime rate of Black Canadians.
Tomorrow’s essay will discuss the origin of the idea of “systemic racism”- so please come back for that. Today however, I will offer some analysis of “anti-black racism.” Isn’t it neat how the Black Legal Action Center combines the two - when they tell us they are combating “systemic anti-black racism.”
“Anti-black racism” is a term that originates from Toronto in the 1990s - as Akua Benjamin (a Marxist feminist sociologist) writes in her 2004 dissertation, the term was "Coined during the 1990's by grassroots and working class intellectuals in Toronto’s Black community, the concept of anti-Black racism emerged as an analytical weapon in the struggles against racism in policing by the Black community."
"Working class intellectuals" - read Marxist black activists. In fact, at this link it is specified that "anti black-racism" was coined specifically by the Black Action Defense Committee (BADC) in Toronto, which was the black activist outfit of the 1990s before BLM:
The Black Action Defense Committee was founded by Dudley Laws, a black nationalist and devotee of Marcus Garvey (black nationalist icon in the US), meaning Laws put black identity first and foremost, and believed in things like afro-centric schools.
The Black Action Defense Committee was covered in greater depth in the essay Importing the Perception of Systemic Racism into Canada, where Mr. M and I analyzed the “Yonge Street Uprising,” the infamous Canadian response to the Rodney King riots of the 1990s, which resulted in millions of dollars of property damage in downtown Toronto, as a result of the social agitation of the Black Action Defense Committee.
Isn’t it curious that there is such a similarity between the names of the radical black activists known as the Black Action Defense Committee, and the Black Legal Action Center? I mean, they both have the “black” and the “action.” One calls themselves a “center,” the other, apparently, was a “committee.” Just some food for thought.
I will return to the Black Legal Action Center below when discussing the latest developments related to police funding. But first, I agree with Jamil Javani who said, in his Jan. 11, 2023 National Post comment video:
“Unfortunately, the political left wasted a lot of the time and energy over the past few years on debates over ‘defunding.’ Now, we’re seeing cities that have starved their police forces of resources over the past couple years reinvest in those services, showing that bad things happen when cops can’t maintain law and order”.
Indeed, Mark Baxter, president of the Police Association of Ontario, estimates a shortage of 2,000 to 2,500 officers in police organizations across the province.
“A big contributing factor to that is that as our communities have grown, we haven’t increased the complements of our police services at the same rate in which our population is growing.”
Baxter explained, in a Global News report, the issue of an aggravating factor: rates of post traumatic stress suffered by officers.
“Police officers are exposed to trauma at a much greater rate than that of the general public and as a result of that trauma, they often experience PTSD, other operational stress injuries,”
This problem is occurring at the same time as an already alarming officer shortage. By now it should be clear to anyone paying attention, that not only was defunding the police the wrong idea, but that reinvestment in police is the right idea.
Last week the Toronto Police Services Board voted unanimously to increase the budget by $48 million. “That is a significant turn,” said Jamil Javani, “because the last few years Toronto politicians have been busy trying to please defund the police activists.”
This is a reversal from Toronto Mayor John Tory’s position in 2020, when he was promising to reduce the police budget and reallocate funds to “community safety models.” As Javani said “there is no community safety model that doesn’t involve the police.”
The Black Legal Action Center was not happy about this. As reported by Global News:
In a written deputation to that meeting, the Black Legal Action Centre said it was “extremely concerned” by the proposal.
“The solution is not to provide the police with more money for new officers, body scanners or training. It is to de-task the police and to redirect funding into those services that will actually protect, serve and increase the public safety of Black people, and everyone,” the not-for-profit community legal clinic wrote.
First off, calling them a “not-for-profit community legal clinic” really doesn’t get across the whole exclusively black (and exclusively for blacks) thing. They should at least call them a “not-for-profit black community legal clinic,” so that any non-black readers of Global News won’t make the mistake of trying to seek out this community legal clinic for advice.
And secondly, yes the solution is to invest more money in the police, and the $48 million is a good start. I would support more. If we listen to the Black Legal Action Center, we will all be less safe.
And lastly, notice how radical black activists always say things like “increase public safety of black people, and everyone.” They do this over and over. It’s always about black people first, and everyone else next.
I’ll leave it at that for today. Come back tomorrow for an essay I wrote about “systemic racism,” which includes more commentary on “defund the police.”
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Thanks for reading, for more from this author read - The Unmarked Graves Boondoggle - by James Pew
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Having served as a street crime officer with the Metro Toronto Police from the 1960,s - late 70,s I can say that it was a challenging job but the tools we had in that day allowed us to serve the community well. A little known fact is that 10% of the force does 90% of the criminal work at the street level
Those like me spent their time following stopping and constantly keeping tabs on the criminal element in the city 24-7. The mayor & the Police Board as a result of pressure from BLM and others removed the right to do this tying the hands of those dedicated officers to work effectively.
My son continues to do the same job today as a Detective with another force in Ontario he keeps me updated as to the job those officers on the street face which is nearly impossible due to many factors that have changed the entire policing concept since my day.
There is far too much political interference with Police everywhere in Canada today when there should be none. The hiring practices are biased by color, sex, & other ridiculous ideas when only the best people should be hired based on merit and lets not forget promotion of officers also.
Self defense i.e. defendo & judo should be taught & relied on more than taser or guns. Stop immediately with SWAT & dressing police in camo they are not soldiers and should not be employed on the streets of cities that is the American way of dealing with people and it simply does not work.
New recruits should be mentored longer on the streets by older and experienced officers only my experience tells me that 6 months would be a bare minimum a full year would be much better.
We need better search & seizure rules and changes to the laws that govern this.
Back in the seventies, I was a member of the Communist Party.
We became expert at inventing Astro-Turf (fake grass roots) organizations that boasted promising sounding popular justice names that we would use when communicating particularly to the media people, who always needed to talk to someone with a title; you know, 'spokesperson' for People/Communities for/against so and so and such and such popular cause/resistance/justice coalition. 'Coalitions' were a favorite as that implied a much broader sweep of multifarious popular 'movement' concern.
It was all smoke and mirrors, but no one ever questioned this unrepresentative swill of self-appointed activists, who were 'leading' the working class/communities/environmentalists etc in 'the struggle' to 'empower' themselves to and defend themselves against, some perceived opportunity and/or threat to the self-evident public good for which these front organizations were the guiding stewards.
Not all popular movements are fakes. Some can start as fakes, but catch on if the conditions are right, which leaves the activists in charge of real political movements that have to be reckoned with. Unionization and civil rights campaigns have fallen into that category.
But on the whole, 'grass roots' activism is an opportunistic form of political parasitism that is much better at creating color and movement than delivering anything of substance to its supposed beneficiaries. It can so easily just leverage populist rabble rousers whose only real interest is to empower themselves, often at the expense of the people they are supposed to be advocating for, like the indigenous 'industry'.