A local academic says systemic racism in policing is a crisis and one way of addressing it could be reallocation of budget.
Judah Oudshoorn, professor at Conestoga College's Community and Criminal Justice program, also asked members of the Waterloo Regional Police Service (WRPS) board to ask tougher questions as an oversight body that should hold the police services accountable.
"The crisis that is systemic racism in policing," he said, during his presentation. "From the chief of police reports, we know we're not an anomaly. We contribute to this. We're participants in this systemic racism."
Oudshoorn said that research indicates that the criminal justice system has a criminogenic, or crime-causing, factor.
"Intervention by the criminal justice system creates worse outcomes," he said. "We know nearly one in 71 young white men between the ages of 18 and 34 will be incarcerated in their lives. Black folks are incarcerated at a rate of one in 15. This is why I'm calling it a crisis."
Compared to the U.S., Oudshoorn said, Ontario is incarcerating young Black men at almost twice the rate.
"We know that the criminal justice system causes trauma," he said. "We know we're adding further harm to people's lives. We're creating a society where young Black men are walking around traumatized, in fight, flight or freeze mode."
Oudshoorn also identified the root cause of systemic racism.
"It's because of white supremacy," he said. "I'm not calling anybody here a white supremacist. But the system itself is founded on white supremacy."
However, Oudshoorn said, the actions of one person aren't the entire picture.
"White supremacy is not the shark, it's the water," he said. "The London incident was a situation of the shark. But how does that happen? It's on all of us, especially white people, to figure out how someone like that grows up in our community."
One of Oudshoorn's suggestions to improve the system was reallocation.
"We need to think more clearly as a community how we're going to reallocate budget," he said, talking about the $31 million spent in January this year on on mental health calls, overdose calls, and welfare check calls that made up 17 per cent of all call of service for that month.
"One way for us to reallocate is to think about moving mental health calls, overdose calls, and welfare check calls out of policing. These are the things police officers tell us they're not trained to do. We know across North America there are ways we can do community safety calls in ways that are healthier."
Board members seemed unclear on how they could reallocate budget.
"You're talking about police services but you're also talking about social services," said Township of Woolwich Mayor Sandy Shantz. "Police services can't reallocate those funds to social services, the region can."
Oudshoorn agreed that it was up to the region to reallocate money.
"Maybe the way we need to think about that is to stop spending money on what's causing harm," he added. "You can say as a board that you're not going to spend money on mental health calls because it's causing harm."
Shantz dug deeper into the numbers the professor had presented.
"A lot of your statistics are not local statistics, you've got Canada and maybe U.S. statistics there, too," she said. "I'm wondering if you can clarify, you have 17 per cent of police call services are mental health, overdose and welfare checks. Do you have any perspective on what the total number of mental health, overdose, and welfare calls are outside of the police services? Can you put that into a community perspective as opposed to just a policing perspective?"
Oudshoorn said he was there to speak to the challenge the police has in responding to mental health calls, instead of looking at mental health calls in the wider community.
"We know that's often times where the disproportionate harm happens," he said. "It's partially because we've constructed people with mental health challenges as dangerous. And what I'm trying to indicate is that we've also constructed Black, Indigenous, and racialized folks as dangerous because of the long history of white supremacy in our communities."
These populations, Oudshoorn said, are most at risk of police violence when it's a mental health call.
"We need to remove police fully from that equation," he said, adding, he wants to come back to the board with a plan that shows a version of the 9-1-1 model that excludes phoning the police about mental health incidents.
"You really do not need an armed person attending these calls," Oudshoorn noted. "We're doing things in a very expensive and harmful way."
Shantz said she was only trying to put numbers in perspective.
"The other part you didn't speak to is when those calls have had very successful outcomes," she noted.
Board member Karin Schnarr said community representatives working within the mental health realm have come forward to the board to express their appreciation for being able to partner with the WRPS.
"They've come up with a model and would like to have additional resources to expand what they do," she said. "Your preference would be to go to a model where the mental health community, even if they would wish to have some involvement, have no interaction with the regional police, even if it's their preference."
Oudshoorn acknowledge that on a spectrum of mental health services, some would like to keep working with the police.
"At the same time, we need to listen and get some folks in that community to listen to the Black, Indigenous, and racialized experience," he said. "If we're listening to mental health workers in Black, Indigenous and racialized communities we know the outcomes are very different. We're more likely to have harmful outcomes when folks in those communities are involved."
A second board member, Ian McLean, pointed out that a number of other organizations and agencies aside from the police services are also involved in the process.
"Are you going to engage with the crown attorney's office in terms of incarceration rates?" he asked. "Children and family services might have some perspective on this? Who else is engaged in this? It's not just a police services board discussion but it's a much broader set of issue you've raised here."
Oudshoorn pushed back.
"I'm here speaking to police services board member about how policing is a gateway into the system," he said. "Police have a lot of power. They use their discretion all the time about who they charge and who they arrest. Part of your task as a board is to speak to how systemic racism shows up in policing. We have to not slide into this idea that this happens elsewhere.
"I want to stop paying for a harmful, broken system that doesn't work," Oudshoorn said. "If you want to think about the bigger stuff, do some research on the effectiveness of the outcomes of policing and what we accomplish by incarceration."
McLean then asked a question of the police chief Bryan Larkin.
"How exactly would we cut out mental health calls?" said McLean.
Larkin did not have a definitive answer.
"We'd need to look further into the information and data," he said. "We're very much interested in triaging mental health calls differently in our community. We're working with the government around triaging our communication centre for a non-police response for various calls, including mental health."
