Our city is reeling from the havoc wrought by three years of pandemic chaos, and as we are struggling to recover, Mayor John Tory has inexplicably forged ahead with a proposal to increase the $1.1 billion Toronto Police Services (TPS) budget by nearly $50 million.
As physicians who see the devastating impact of chronic underfunding of social services, we cannot comprehend the logic in this proposal. As we have said before, we cannot police our way to well-being and still today, we cannot support the relentless hoarding of resources by the TPS.
The proposed police budget increase is $50 million siphoned away from families who are facing an uphill battle with rising costs of living. Families who are turning to food banks at record numbers as inflation drives grocery and gas prices to unreachable highs. Families who may lose their homes as rising interest rates have shocked our economy.
It’s $50 million that our children will not see invested in schools, education, libraries, and child care — an investment desperately needed as we try to recover from the trauma of years of pandemic disruptions. The “tripledemic” of RSV-flu-COVID-19 has now brought pediatric hospitals to the brink of collapse, with ICU beds at unprecedented over-occupancy and families panicked by Tylenol, Advil, and antibiotic shortages. Investments to make schools safer for our most cherished and most vulnerable should be among our highest priorities.
It’s $50 million Torontonians will not see dedicated to improving transportation in our city, and mitigating climate change and the health-related impacts of a city fraught with an underfunded public transportation system.
It’s $50 million that will not go toward housing, in a city where unhoused people have faced significant strife in the midst of hotel program closures, shelters operating beyond their capacity and too few warming centres open during a harsh cold winter. All the while, TPS has spent an astounding amount of public funds on armour, weapons, drones, and military equipment. This past year, on multiple occasions, they used this equipment to have dozens and dozens of heavily-armed police evict handfuls of unarmed unhoused people from public parks. And have in the past extinguished sacred fires lit in ceremony by Indigenous people on their own homelands.
The harm inflicted on Indigenous and Black communities by police continues to be very real, a fact clearly acknowledged by the TPS. Systemic racism in policing is well documented. Black and Indigenous people are more likely to be victims of violent crime and more likely to be harmed by the police. Indigenous women face astonishing rates of violence, making up four per cent of women in our population but more than 20 per cent of women murdered. In Toronto Black people are 20 times more likely to be fatally shot by police, according to the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Black and Indigenous people are significantly overrepresented in prisons, a trend Dr. Ivan Zinger, the Correctional Investigator of Canada, called a “disturbing and entrenched imbalance.”
In this discussion, we cannot forget the many police involved deaths of unarmed Black and Indigenous people in our city: people who have not been given a choice but to involve the police when they needed help, given all alternative mental health and socioeconomic resources have been devastatingly underfunded and under-resourced by decision makers. Increasing the police budget does not keep these vulnerable groups safe.
There is real harm in this proposal. Every dollar the TPS takes is a dollar drained from our communities, our social supports, and our families. The TPS is already one of the largest lines in our city’s budget — this money is hoarded at the expense of resources that actually keep communities safe. As community resources are drained, the police become the de facto institution appointed to address health and social issues that they are not trained or designed for, and thus the police mandate only grows — a black hole feeding itself.
We are left wondering, is the proposed police budget increase evidence-based?
Alok Mukherjee, a former chair of the Toronto Police Services Board expressed concern with this budget increase, citing a lack of evidence that increasing police budgets correlates to increased public safety, and noting that despite recent high profile and disturbing incidents of violence, crime indicators do not suggest increased police are needed.
We need to address root causes of these incidents. He reiterated what grassroots organizations, like No Pride in Policing, have been saying for years: to improve safety, we need a comprehensive response that stresses the importance of housing, poverty elimination, mental health and youth supports, and providing hope and opportunities to communities.
The safest communities are not the most policed communities. They are the communities that are empowered and well-resourced.
We have an opportunity to create solutions-based approaches to building real safety, these begin by defunding the police. This notion is neither novel nor radical. Defunding the police involves reallocating limited resources of our city’s budget in an intentional manner that begets solutions.
Instead of adding $50 million to our police budget, let’s instead invest in healing our communities. Let’s invest this money in education, recreation, child care, housing, health, climate change mitigation; measures that are proven to dramatically improve public health and safety. Defund the police, resource our communities.
Dr. Suzanne Shoush is a family physician and Indigenous Health Faculty Lead with the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto.Dr. Semir Bulle (@SemirBulle) is a psychiatry resident at the University of Toronto. Dr. Naheed Dosani (@NaheedD) is a palliative care physician and Assistant Professor in the Department of Family & Community Medicine at the University of Toronto.All writers are co-founders of Doctors for Defunding Police (@DrsDefundPolice).
