Police games send the wrong message

Opinion

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This article was published 26/07/2023 (801 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SINCE the powerful summer of 2020, Winnipeg has seen an increasing public scrutiny and critique of police power, violence, and budgets.

Unlike crude right-wing caricatures of the defund the police movement, the “defund” demand is not merely to take money away from police — although that is undoubtedly required, with the Winnipeg Police now spending $327 million a year — but to reinvest such resources into public services that actually keep people safe and prevent harm from occurring in the first place.

Rather than merely reacting to violence with criminalization and incarceration, the aim is to build genuine community safety through housing, harm reduction, food distribution, Indigenous-led street patrols, income supports, mental healthcare, and more.

This basic and evidence-based vision for the city has been advocated for by many organizations in countless venues: council and committee meetings, rallies and protests, media interviews and outreach campaigns. By now, all levels of government are deeply familiar with the call.

Yet rather than acknowledge the obvious reality that more policing does not lead to more safety — especially for people who are Indigenous or Black, unhoused, or dealing with mental health issues — governments have continued to dump ever-more funding into police.

Most recently, as the latest salvo in their so-called “tough on crime” campaigning, Premier Heather Stefanson and the Manitoba PCs announced yet another $10 million to hire even more cops for the city’s downtown; this move was explicitly justified with the pledge that “our government will always defend — not defund — the police.”

All of these constant funding announcements are bad enough. But starting on July 28, the hostility to demands for actual community safety will become even more visceral when the World Police and Fire Games kick off in downtown Winnipeg.

For the following 10 days, during the height of summer, the city and its few quasi-public facilities — parks, pools, the Forks — will be overrun by upwards of 8,500 competitors from around the world, largely from law enforcement agencies including police, correctional officers, and immigration agents.

Winnipeggers are directly subsidizing these events not only through millions in subsidies — with the province paying almost $5 million, and the city another $2 million — but with a loss of access to public spaces, reduced safety and comfort for those routinely harmed by police, and even undermined transit service (as the city is providing free transit for all athletes, organizers, volunteers, and family members, which will inevitably pose challenges for an already dilapidated transit agency).

This is an enormous party for cops, carceral workers, and big business; the rest of us are simply expected to accept the costs and intrusions.

These pricey frivolities take on an even more contemptible character given the ongoing fight by the families and loved ones of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people (MMIWG2S+) to search the Prairie Green and Brady landfills.

For starters, the MMIWGS2S+ crisis is in large part the product of systematic refusal by governments to provide the services that would prevent such lethal predation; the alleged far-right serial killer specifically targeted vulnerable people in shelters. Further, police have categorically rejected community demands to search the landfills for remains, despite departments in other cities not only doing so but volunteering for the task.

Now, all levels of government are playing a cynical gambit of jurisdictional chicken to avoid taking the lead in funding the urgently required searches.

Following more than 200 days of maintaining Camp Morgan at Brady and the recent courageous blockade of the dump’s entrance, families and loved ones have now established a second camp by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

Camp Marcedes is also immediately next to the Forks, the site of the World Police and Fire Games’ “Athletes Village” featuring bars, food trucks, and socializing.

The contradiction could not be any more pronounced: on the one side, Indigenous families fighting for the most basic degree of respect and support, while on the other, thousands of police and carceral workers drinking and relaxing at an enormous publicly subsidized party.

It is a profoundly shameful manifestation of the deeply entrenched racism of all levels of government, opting to celebrate the very departments that refuse to protect Indigenous lives rather than committing the necessary funding to search the landfills.

It’s for these reasons and more that many of us will be coming together on the evening of Friday, July 28 for a peaceful but enthused Critical Mass bike ride through the downtown in protest of the games.

As has been the case for years, the demand is simple: no more public funds for policing — which doesn’t keep people safe — and an immediate reinvestment into life-sustaining services, most urgently the searches of the landfills.

The games and its out-of-town cops will come and go but we will remain and continue the fight for many years to come.

James Wilt is a member of of the organization Winnipeg Police Cause Harm.