Why Increasing Toronto Police Service’s Funding is Counterproductive to Reimagining Policing

“The best study that I participated in recently was called an election; and I campaigned very openly on saying that I would not defund the police and that I would make sure the police—among other responses including the investments in families and changes to the law—I campaigned very openly on these things and said that l believed we needed to make some additional investments on safety in this area, and I got an overwhelming mandate. And that’s exactly what I’m doing.” – Mayor John Tory

A number of academics have suggested that one of the biggest flaws with the proposal is the lack of empirical evidence as to how increased funding will improve policing. In fact, the overarching findings from advocates of defunding the police is that increased budgets for police forces has little to no impact on police behaviour and discriminatory practices. With respect to discrimination in TPS, there are certainly numerous reports that support this finding. Consider the 2020 report from Wortley, Lanlyonu, and Laming which examined the use of force in TPS between 2000-2006 and 2013-2017. The report revealed that Black people were significantly over-represented in the Ontario government’s SIU cases involving TPS, finding that from 2000-2006 Black Torontonians made up 38.4% of use of force cases, and 28.8% from 2013-2017, despite representing just over 8% of the population. The report also revealed that between 2000 and 2006, Black Torontonians were involved in 54.2% of police shooting cases and 36% between 2013 and 2017. 

In another 2020 report from Wortley and Jung, the authors found patterns of over-policing Black Torontonians, where Black people represented 37.6% of all charges. Black Torontonians also made up 35.2% of out-of-sight driving offences (this being offences such as failing to update a driver’s license, or driving without insurance when no other offence was found). This means that there is at least a 17 year span where the data conveys TPS has continually engaged in discriminatory practices despite funding increases. We can also look to data from TPS’s race-based data collection. The data demonstrated that there were higher use of force rates for Black people involved in enforcement action. This was particularly in the regions policed by Divisions 13, 51, and 52. So will 2023 be any different? From this perspective the criticisms are certainly warranted. 

As mentioned earlier in this piece, the common approach to remedying the inadequacies and discrimination has been improving training, which is tantamount to more funding. However, when the Board conducted their report in 2020, they acknowledged that a different approach is needed, particularly because low-income communities couldn’t reliably depend on the police to guarantee their safety. As a result, the Board brought forth 81 recommendations to improve TPS. One of the more striking recommendations was to create a community response model that doesn’t include the police. This was recommended because police officers are often untrained or inadequately trained to address the specialized needs required in emergency responses. In other cases, it’s reported that they escalate the situation by their mere presence. As such, the perception became that removing police from these situations may improve outcomes, specifically in terms of mental health crises. And so, on March 31st, 2022, the city launched the Toronto Community Crisis Service (TCCS) which allowed for a mobile crisis assistance intervention service in multiple parts of Toronto working with multiple community partners, ultimately diverting 78% of calls from 911. During the six month trial period between March 31st, 2022, and September 30th, 2022, TCCS received 2,489 calls, including 1,530 from 911. Of these 1,198 mobile crisis team dispatches were completed successfully. 

In situations where mobile response teams were dispatched (84% of the calls), 57% of these were completed successfully. With this data my recommendation would be to slowly expand the work of TCCS, and build awareness campaigns to direct the public to call 211 instead of 911. What this means is that the funding provided to TPS could clearly be redirected to other areas of government to address community safety. This would allow TPS the opportunity to reassess its working model and police officer distribution across the city to reallocate the police from over-policed areas and low crime neighbourhoods, considering that the majority of their responses are not crime related. A study could also evaluate the effectiveness of TPS to assess whether the funding aided in their work. Yet, despite this success, there are no conversations about increasing the funding for this program (which doesn’t fall under TPS, but under the city’s Social Development, Finance & Administration division). If we are committed to reimagining policing and community safety, my question is, why aren’t more resources being put in towards this program? 

“What I’ll say in the case of downtown is that I was asked by the business community and by people who live downtown to allocate more police resources, which I have done. We were asked by a commission, conducted by a respected judge in respect to the great concern that exists around missing persons, especially in the LGBTQ2S+ community, to allocate resources to do those major investigations. And we’re doing it. That’s what a lot of this is for. We’re having more neighbourhood police officers.” – Mayor John Tory

I believe the answer to the question posed above in part lies in Mayor John Tory’s response in a recent interview on CBC radio’s Metro Morning. But one of the most problematic things about this response is the prioritization of the downtown business community. Time and time again what we have seen is that low-income and racialized communities that require additional resources and support are relegated to the shadows as the City looks to prioritize the business community, which it sees as its largest financial contributors and investors in Toronto. On the one hand, I agree that the City has a responsibility to protect enterprises that function as economic drivers. On the other hand, these decisions present the picture that the City doesn’t perceive low-income communities as financial contributors or investors in Toronto, thus deserving of less attention. I find this interesting as low-income communities are often in need of safety, which the police fail to provide in some cases. Often, residents have experienced long wait times for the police; other times they have reported that they don’t show up at all. In some situations the lack of trust between the police and residents means that they won’t even bother to call them, as they believe that in many cases police act as aggressors to the victims who called them in the first place (which isn’t necessarily true). This lends to the question, who are the police protecting? If the prioritization is the downtown community, can we say that this is fair?

Personally, I believe that the decision to increase police funding presents as tone deaf—coming at a time where governments previously emphasized the need to reimagine policing through the use of alternative methods of community safety responses and investing in communities. My idea isn’t to significantly reduce the funding of the police, but merely reducing the funding increase for the necessary operational pressures would have been justifiable in my perspective. Theoretical ideas of defunding the police would suggest that this frees up financial capital to fund social and community programs and services. This is significant as researchers have suggested that the communities that are the safest aren’t the ones that have the most police, but are the ones that have access to the most resources. In this regard, an increase to TPS’s budget would suggest vital dollars are being drained from the community under the guise of improving safety, merely failing to address the social determinants of health and crime. This is particularly important as the increase in the cost of living has added inflationary pressures that the police cannot resolve. As opposed to being proactive in addressing the challenges that homeless and low-income people have in relation to transit, food, education, and health, the Toronto government has decided to be reactionary, likely responding to incidents that occur as a product of inflationary pressures. We can certainly say that there have been increases in randomized attacks on transit and around Toronto, but I would also argue that the media has played a role in picking and choosing incidents to display that largely occur in downtown core to evoke mass hysteria, serving as a justification for the City to respond to these pressures with an increase in the police budget. And I say this because Toronto’s major crime indicators have remained relatively stable over the last few years. Some may question the validity of this. They may argue that people don’t want to hear about statistics when they have to live in fear; but to me, these things have always happened, particularly in our low-come communities. And beyond the criminalities of these communities, there have also been suicides, drug overdoses, and severe mental health challenges, yet, in many cases these incidents weren’t media headlines. This isn’t to say that the concerns of the public are unwarranted; but I am saying that for years Toronto was been a two-tiered society that shields the business community and creates oblivion to inner-city struggles that have long been the norm. These communities have historically been neglected and cast aside until a serious issue arrives. Here, the difference is that these challenges that were once centralized in low-income communities, are now spilling into the downtown core, unveiling Toronto’s true identity. What I see here is sensationalism and the peddling questionable discourse ultimately at the expense of low-income communities.

Looking back to the question of whether criticism of TPS’s budget increase was warranted, I believe it is. However, I do acknowledge that as much as I feel like this, from the standpoint of safety, because all cases aren’t created equally, the reality is that the budget increase may or may not contribute to public safety. And unfortunately we won’t have much say in the process as to whether this is approved or not because the strong powers of the mayor increases the likelihood that the budget is accepted by Council on February 14th. Irrespective of the results and the unknown, the reality is that exploring alternative approaches to community safety such as the TCCS has the same unknown factors, but has proven to be effective in its pilot phase. Both have risks; but the government has chosen the risk that benefits its own agenda. So, our role now becomes holding the government accountable to transparently show the impact this funding has had on the community. I hope that our journey and dedication towards improved policing is a true commitment for the future.