Tories jump onto police bandwagon after years of digging potholes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/07/2023 (877 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba Premier Heather Stefanson had a conversion on the road to Damascus this week.

After six years of funding cuts to the Winnipeg Police Service by the Progressive Conservative government, the premier says it’s now time — three months before a provincial election — to put more cops on the street to fight violent crime.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: enough is enough, let’s defend our police officers, not defund them,” Stefanson said Thursday during an election-style news conference in downtown Winnipeg.

Actually, Stefanson only started saying that very recently. Prior to that, the Tories spent six years defunding police by freezing Winnipeg’s public safety grants.

The province provides the City of Winnipeg with a general operating grant for services such as transit, snow clearing and firefighting. That grant was frozen for six years under the Tories until this year. In real dollars — adjusted for inflation — it’s a funding cut.

The province also provides the city with separate funding for policing through a public safety grant. That funding was frozen from 2017 to 2022 at $23.96 million. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a 14 per cent cut, or a reduction of $3.26 million in real dollars.

The funding cut forced the city, among other things, to reduce the size of the WPS complement. There are now fewer cops on the street than when the Tories took office in 2016. The number of police officers in Winnipeg fell to 173.2 per 100,000 people in 2022, from 196.7 per 100,000 in 2016 — a 12 per cent reduction.

If the premier now believes the police force should be expanded, she should first explain to voters why her government cut police funding in the first place. Police would have had more boots on the ground today if the Tories had provided the city with stable funding over the previous six years.

It’s not as if the province didn’t have the money. It cut taxes by well over $2 billion a year during that period. Cutting the public safety budget (and funding for many other front-line services) in favor of tax cuts was a policy decision.

So when Stefanson now says “enough is enough,” what she’s really doing is criticizing her own government’s record on police funding.

Maybe the cop budget did need to be trimmed. There are sound arguments in favour of redirecting a portion of police funding to front-line services that will help reduce crime in the long run.

More money for addictions treatment, mental health services, income redistribution, better education and improved recreational amenities would do a lot more to reduce crime than hiring more police officers.

But since Stefanson is now firmly on the pro-police bandwagon, she should at least come clean on why her government spent six years cutting sector spending.

The story behind the story is the Tories are trying to manufacture a wedge issue with the NDP in the lead-up to the provincial election, slated for Oct. 3.

They’re claiming, falsely, the latter is in favour of “defunding” police. However, at no time has the NDP or its leader called for, or even hinted at, defunding police.

It’s something the Tories made up — and are hoping will stick, if they repeat it often enough.

The term “defund” is now part of the premier’s talking points.

What Manitobans could use is an intelligent debate about what steps should be taken to help reduce the causes of crime. There are no easy solutions, no silver bullets, to steer people away from a life of crime. But investments in education, community services and front-line programs would be a good starting point.

Cutting funding to public schools and municipalities, as the Tories have done in recent years, has exacerbated the problem. The less resources schools and cities have for education programs, extracurricular activities and recreational services, the fewer options marginalized youth have to resist the allure of criminal activity.

It doesn’t help that the Tories have also dismissed outright harm-reduction strategies for drug addiction, such as supervised injection sites, which have a proven track record around the world to reduce overdose deaths and connect addicts with treatment options.

Putting more cops downtown, or anywhere else, isn’t going to reduce violent crime. That’s an outdated, failed policy that died in the 1990s. There is no evidence that bulking up police forces reduces crime rates.

Surely to goodness we can do better than this?

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca