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POD: How to speedrun a "Managing Unconscious Bias" class
161 Plays2 years ago
Rob Houle joins us to discuss how it's one year out from the release of a landmark report on how to actually fix the Edmonton Police and not much has happened. Instead Chief Dale McFee has introduced a host of reforms—including a mandatory "Managing Unconscious Bias" class that both Rob and I took. Listen to learn more.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:12
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiskwitchi, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the mighty Kaskasaw, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today is friend of the show, Rob Hool. Rob was a member of the Community Safety and Wellbeing Task Force that was struck by Edmonton City Council after the murder of George Floyd.
00:00:38
Speaker
And it's very likely a known critic of police, according to the president of the Edmonton Police Association. But anyways, with all that introduction out of the way, thanks for coming on the show, Rob. You know, happy to be here. I may be on the known critic list. I don't know. I don't know if we'll ever see a list, but it's quite likely that I'm on there with all the back and forth of people. But, you know, it's happy to be here. Happy to be back on the show.
00:01:07
Speaker
Oh yeah.
Community Safety Report and Police Reaction
00:01:08
Speaker
And the COP union was very vociferous in their denunciation of that task forces report. I think they were like, they felt bullied or something. I can't remember the exact language, but it was very, it was very funny from what I can recall. Yeah. They had a very, very negative reaction to the report, even though.
00:01:28
Speaker
They had active serving members sitting on the task force. They had full input. They were reporting back to their, their leadership about what was going on at the task force. So it's not as if, um, there was any kind of under the table conversations. They were part of the entire process. And, uh, in the end de facto endorsed the report. So insulting and demeaning is what they called it. Uh,
00:01:56
Speaker
So anyways, not that we're hearing if I could go on about the stupid Edmonton copy union and how they felt about a thing, but it is very funny to kind of go back to the language they used. So aside from, I mean, we're here to talk about policing obviously today, but you are not in Edmonton right now. You find yourself in another part of the world.
Rob's Law School Experience
00:02:14
Speaker
Where are you and why do you find yourself? How's it treating you there? Where are you treating you right now?
00:02:19
Speaker
Yes, so I'm in Kamloops. I was gracious and fortunate enough to get accepted to law school. So I'm here attending law school, learning a lot about how the law works and doesn't work for certain people. And so I'm in Kamloops. It's nice. The winter was fantastic. It was nice and warm here.
00:02:46
Speaker
was thinking back about Edmonton and all the years I live there and how it's quite different how a short drive can change where you are in the country and what your experience is. But I'm here, everyone's
Task Force Report Progress Reflection
00:03:00
Speaker
enjoying it. It's fantastic. And I'm learning a lot and it's helping me understand how messed up things are and how much more work we need to do to fix things like policing and the law in general.
00:03:13
Speaker
Yeah, so I let off with the Community Safety and Wellbeing Task Force report because I think it's almost exactly a year to the day that the final report was presented to Council.
00:03:27
Speaker
And, you know, it's always worthwhile to take stock, you know, a year later, what have we seen? I think the report put out a lot of very reasonable suggestions on how to improve policing. And then, you know, this happened in March of 2021. And then essentially what happened is like, council was like, great, we love it. We will accept all these recommendations, though they obviously didn't really act on very many of them.
00:03:54
Speaker
And then it was election season and we brought in like an almost an entirely new city council here in Edmonton. And the task force report has kind of just sat by the wayside. Do you think that's fair to say?
00:04:08
Speaker
I think that's a fair statement. I know that there are undercurrents and kind of piecemeal initiatives happening that reflect the content and the nature of the report. And we knew that when the council election was happening that it wasn't going to be a wholesale endorsement or transference of the report to the new council, which is why
00:04:31
Speaker
to the chagrin of some councillors, we had some comments in there about preparing
Impact of New City Council on Task Force Adoption
00:04:36
Speaker
for the election. And if Edmontonians wanted to endorse a report like this, they should maybe vote accordingly. That kind of went over a little bit controversial at council with some incumbent councillors now taking issue with that statement, which again is factual and
00:04:54
Speaker
It really acknowledges the reality of how things work. That was just too far beyond the pale. It was to acknowledge reality working. Yeah, and I think it also, now that we look back, maybe it played a role in the way that the election unfolded, but I know that there's been some initiatives being brought forward. I don't know if it's all 13 recommendations, but for sure there's been a limited number of actions or effort put into
00:05:24
Speaker
recommendation 14.
00:05:26
Speaker
And it is, this is going to make sense why we're running through it now, but I think it's important to run through the general summary of the recommendations just so that we can, we know what we're dealing with and even just to break in about like, has anything happened on this in the past year? So I'm just going to run through them real fast. So number one, move to an independent, independent, integrated call evaluation and dispatch model with representation from police, emergency medical services, fire, community standards and neighborhoods, mental health services, crisis diversion, and key social services partners. Has there been an, I don't know if there's been any movement on that to be honest, aside from the province kind of consolidating
00:05:56
Speaker
into their massive call centers, right? Yeah. And there are recommendations. There was a couple of reports a couple of months back around changing the call center coordination, changing how it operates. But of course we've seen like many other things, the police
00:06:15
Speaker
attempt and Dale attempt to bring it closer to his chest as opposed to letting some of it go. So it's kind of moved maybe a little bit in the opposite direction and I know that the community wants to see more transparency.
Call Evaluation Model and Crisis Intervention Gaps
00:06:29
Speaker
I know some counselors have brought up a transparent call center. Let's hope the momentum continues if we can start to push this thing in the right direction.
00:06:37
Speaker
And it is a low key important one, right? Because, you know, Chief McPhee, Chief Dale McPhee, the chief of the Edmonton Police or Dale, as we're going to refer to him throughout the pod, he was on record kind of publicly complaining about how 32 percent of all calls are not police work. Well, it's like if you don't want.
00:06:54
Speaker
police to show up to calls that aren't police work. The people who take the calls have to direct the correct people to those calls. And it's like, it starts with dispatch. Moving on. Number two, expand the number and use of crisis diversion and alternative policing teams. I know a bit about this. I follow this quite closely. There has been no increase in funding or to the amount of teams with respect to the current crisis diversion team that's run out of 211 by Reach. There has been a small increase
00:07:22
Speaker
it to the amount of folks who work on the community outreach transit teams, which are run by Bent Arrow. But I think they went from three teams to seven teams. It's a pretty marginal increase. And honestly, again, we're going to come back to that 32% number. If 32% of calls aren't police work, you actually have to have the people who can respond to those calls, and those people simply don't exist. The government
00:07:46
Speaker
The city of Edmonton has not invested in the capacity to actually just like send people who aren't police to things that aren't police calls. Number three, enhance recruitment and training to build diverse inclusive anti-racist organizational cultures. This is going to be somewhat covered in the
00:08:06
Speaker
Dale's commitment to action stuff, which we're going to go over. But I think Dale is, he's definitely like saying the words that are reflected in this kind of recommendation. Do you think that's fair? I think so. I think they're doing a lot of good communication and a lot of good selling of this initiative being brought forward. But again,
00:08:30
Speaker
We're not seeing it on the ground. And during the task force work, we've brought up the fact that even though you may be recruiting more diverse people, your class may have an extra brown face in it. You're also having one or two brown faces leaving your organization at the same time, which tells me that there's something inherently wrong in the structure and the people within your organization that you can never keep brown faces around it. Maybe it's because
00:08:58
Speaker
the policing in a poor way or over policing certain communities we don't know but it's it's definitely not seeing on the ground
00:09:06
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, ultimately this is a systems problem, not a people problem. I mean, you can bring in all of the black and brown faces you want into
Diversity and Anti-Racism in Policing
00:09:13
Speaker
police. If police are just gonna be the same police that they were before, they're going to struggle to actually change the culture of the organization. Number five, or number four, I examine and pursue ways of preventing the unnecessary use of force by police, peace, and bylaw officers. I do not believe this has been examined or pursued, especially since we've seen
00:09:35
Speaker
for shooting deaths by the Edmonton police since February 23rd of this year. Yeah. And I think I made the comment on Twitter, I think around how it seems to be regressing to the Wild West in Edmonton. And a lot of that is initiated by people with guns, good and bad. But again, if you're a law enforcement officer and you're
00:10:03
Speaker
emboldened to enforce the law and uphold everything's right and protect people in the first case, you shouldn't be shooting off your gun unless absolutely necessary. And with four people dead, we know that that might not be the circumstance. So definitely moving backwards on this one.
00:10:21
Speaker
Identify how collective agreements are contributing to systemic bias and work to address these challenges. Actually, I did a big analysis piece on municipal collective agreements across Alberta, but specifically police collective agreements. Right now, the Edmonton Police Association and the City of Edmonton are in bargaining. They haven't had a contract since 2020.
00:10:44
Speaker
I don't believe there's been any reflection publicly or privately about how these collective agreements function to contribute to systemic bias. The other thing that recently came out, again, I'm going to be scooping myself throughout this podcast. Listen to the podcast and get the good shit.
00:11:04
Speaker
The past six years of attrition reports, I was
Preventing Unnecessary Force and Bias
00:11:08
Speaker
able to collect. These are available through the Edmonton Police Commission. Rob, how many cops do you think have been let go in the past six years? Give me a number of prices rights now. Well, they have a police force of about how many members? 1900. 1800. I would say at least half of that, 900.
00:11:31
Speaker
Seven, seven police officers have been let go in six years, according to these attrition reports. And sometimes they're a little foggy about why these people were fired. Six out of the seven were constables, so like entry level cops. Sometimes suitability is brought up.
00:11:51
Speaker
But again, they're like, sometimes they give the reason, sometimes they don't. But yeah, it's a shockingly small number. Again, out of like, uh, over the course of those six years, your sworn amount of sworn officers, that is cops with badges has been between 1750 and 1900 or so. So it's like a very, very tiny proportion. Yeah. You're looking at like, yeah, one a year. So you're telling me out of the entire 1800 officers, only one out of all of those cops are being let go for cause probably.
00:12:21
Speaker
Um, but then that, that raises the issue. Well, then if we're seeing all these bad things happen and all these media stories being written and we're seeing all these complaints, then what's happening to these other cops? Are they getting shuffled around and they still have, um, a pretty steady turnover or other people leaving the organization for new roles and other places like that. So it hit, yeah, it's shockingly small and a little probably troubling for people.
00:12:51
Speaker
Yeah, we're talking about a large workforce. We're talking about a decent amount of turnover, people retiring, people leaving, people dying. But very, very few of those people who are leaving the organization, who are leaving the Edmonton Police are leaving because they were fired.
Edmonton Police Commission Oversight Challenges
00:13:07
Speaker
Number six, professionalized policing through the creation of a new regulatory college for police and peace officers. There has been no movement on this in the past year.
00:13:16
Speaker
Uh, police act reform is still in purgatory and I think we're on our like fourth justice minister in three years with the provincial government. I wouldn't expect any movement on that, uh, over the next 10 months, uh, before the next provincial election. So you can forget that one, uh, expect and instruct the Edmonton police commission to fully exercise its authority to provide strong guidance and oversight to EPS in order to drive inclusivity and anti-racism in policing.
00:13:44
Speaker
Uh, what's your take on the Edmonton police commission in the past year since this report has come out, Rob? Oh, it's definitely had, um, a little bit of a turnover. There's new, some new faces, um, some new faces on the board. I know that they're, they're pushing for some interesting things. They just added an extra seat as well, uh, city council did. So that presents either an opportunity for another counselor or for another member of the public to join the commission. But I think.
00:14:13
Speaker
The problem we were, they're going to get into, and the problem that is inherently in these systems is that they only have one employee and that one employee is Dale McPhee. So.
00:14:27
Speaker
everything goes through him that gets to them. And it's hard to enforce systemic systems wide change when you really can only tell one person to do something. And the approach has always been a hands off approach to kind of directing people to do things. And I had a little bit of a back and forth on Twitter with some of the counselors about where the authority lies and where the direction lies. And it lies
00:14:53
Speaker
most certainly with city council to a large degree, but I think hopefully this new commission can embrace some of the authority and autonomy that they've been given to maybe push things in the right direction. But I think they're going to run into the same problem that everyone else says that the system is structured in a way that is fundamentally
Task Force Recommendations Overview
00:15:11
Speaker
flawed and that it's hard to invoke any real change when you only have to direct one person and that person doesn't really have to listen to you.
00:15:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think technically the Edmonton Police Commission has the authority to tell the police, through the police chief, what to do. But practically speaking, the Edmonton Police Commission does not exercise this authority and really doesn't have that kind of relationship with the chief of police. And this is why it is so frustrating to sit down in these police commission meetings and kind of see them in action, which is that
00:15:45
Speaker
They are the group that is supposed to hold the police accountable, but when you watch these public meetings, and maybe it's different in private, I mean, we're not privy to those conversations, but it seems like this is all pro forma. It seems like the chief is just...
00:15:59
Speaker
kind of going through the motions when it comes to like, I have to be here, I have to tell you these things. And, you know, we've seen a couple of questions from a couple of commissioners in the past few meetings, but it is still the exception rather than the rule that like the commission actually sits up in public and says anything about a given issue and has any kind of questions for, you know, the police. And so, yeah, I think this recommendation is,
00:16:27
Speaker
Without a wholesale kind of like overhaul of the police commission, I'm like just getting rid of everyone and putting all new people on or like, again, police act reform. This is, this recommendation is expecting the police commission to do something one that it's never done and two that it's like never shown any inclination to do. Yeah. And I think just touch on your earlier point, I've tuned into a couple of commission meetings and it seems like it is, yeah, they're going through the motions and it seems like it's just an utter waste of time for people.
00:16:57
Speaker
Like the chief's report is him coming and reading a list of probably bullet pointed things. These are the incidents we had. I don't think that time should be allotted for information that could have been included in an email or a briefing note or something. The chief should be coming and talking about real tangible things, not just, oh, we had a robbery and then we had someone steal some bread and we had this. Like it was so painful to watch and I cannot understand how
00:17:26
Speaker
the commission can allow this kind of process to continue to unfold. And there has to be a real shakeup of how this time is used because it's valuable time.
00:17:37
Speaker
Yeah, number eight, change the composition and recruitment of the Edmonton Police Commission to more comprehensively reflect the community. I think actually that one is probably seen the most action by the Edmonton City Council in the past year. I don't think we have to spend a ton of time on that. I want to get through these nine established mechanisms to provide community direction to peace and bylaw officers employed by the city of Edmonton. I don't believe that has been set up in any meaningful way. And I don't think we can use the crutch of police act reform
00:18:03
Speaker
or the Edmonton Police Commission, like this is just stuff that the City of Edmonton has to do, because those are just direct City of Edmonton employees. Bring more transparency and independence to public complaints process. I can tell you without a doubt that that has not been done. The process and the way discipline is administered
00:18:20
Speaker
by the Edmonton Police is incredibly opaque. 11, implement, measurement and reporting to drive change and encourage ongoing improvements. That's kind of management speaky to me. I don't know if any real movement has been, there's been any real movement on that in the past year. And it seems kind of like, even if you had the data, like what would you do with it?
00:18:43
Speaker
Yeah, this is mainly just to get them to collect better data. So rather than telling us your call response times, and even though you're missing those response times, maybe collect something else so that we can actually measure whether you're doing a good job.
00:18:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's fair enough. Number 12, enact policies and standards that place focus on proactively and effectively providing support to disadvantaged Edmontonians. I would argue Edmonton City Council has not prioritized this and largely this involves going to the provincial government, federal government saying, please give us money to do this, instead of actually cutting the 385 million that they give to the police and investing in
00:19:22
Speaker
Anything else, uh, housing, uh, supervised consumption sites, social workers, you pick, pick your thing.
Police Funding and Election Impact
00:19:29
Speaker
Uh, they haven't, there isn't really been any movement on this and maybe there will be in the next budget cycle, but TBD, uh, invest in urgent needed priorities for community safety. Again, since this report has come out, it's been a year. There's, there's only really been the one kind of budget, uh, meeting.
00:19:45
Speaker
And that was only for the last year of the last council's budget, not a lot. And then finally, the big daddy, the most important one, the one that even the like sitting council just totally washed their hands of and couldn't even bring themselves to endorse was bring police funding into line with comparable cities and tie a portion of funding to specific performance. And embedded within this ask was a recommendation to freeze the current level of funding until alignment with other cities was achieved. And we have simply not seen that, right, Rob?
00:20:14
Speaker
No, there's been, again, increases, increases on going above the previous years this previous this council had a long winded debate about.
00:20:26
Speaker
Whether or not to keep the freeze or to invoke a new freeze, in the end, they ended up giving them a million dollars extra on top of what they had gotten the year previous. And then you still had the police complain that their accounts have been frozen, much like trucker convoy people, when in reality, that is not the case. You actually got a million dollars too.
00:20:46
Speaker
pay people to take a national holiday off, which you should have already been budgeting for, especially if you want to better your relationships with indigenous people. And it left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths.
00:20:59
Speaker
Yeah, that was a particularly bizarre wrinkle to that debate. But yes, you were entirely correct. The city of Edmonton did not freeze. They had the opportunity to enact the most important part of this report that was freeze the budget of the police. They chose not to, they chose to increase the budget by a million dollars.
00:21:19
Speaker
bizarrely to cover increased human resources costs for paying people to work on a new holiday, which was the recognition of Truth and Reconciliation Day that was recently created by the federal government. Yeah, didn't happen, police aren't being defunded, quit whining about it, and the actual debate about whether the police get their budget frozen, which seems like much more likely than being defunded with context of this city council, is gonna happen in the fall.
00:21:49
Speaker
Okay, so thank you for your patience and sitting through with me all these, but it is important because instead of the city of Edmonton doing all of these things and acting on these very reasonable recommendations, Chief McPhee Dale has stepped in and done his own.
Chief McPhee's Program Critique
00:22:06
Speaker
Commitment to action is what he's calling it.
00:22:08
Speaker
City Council has largely abdicated their responsibility to act on these recommendations and just expected Chief McPhee to do it all. And of course, he stepped in with his very own 95-point program to fix it. Rob, how familiar are you with Dale's commitment to action?
00:22:27
Speaker
Well, I know that during the task force work, there was this talk from the police that were on the force, the task force about, oh, well, no, Dale's got this plan. We're going to change the way we're doing policing. We're going to be proactive. We're going to build relationships. They started doing engagement sessions and the usual kind of processes that they always do when they sit down with people to talk about things in a big open space.
00:22:54
Speaker
but, and then I've looked into it recently, it seems a lot like it's more of the same that we always get when people are pushed to do something different. They fall into the same old cycle. Yeah. Like here's an example of the like kind of corporate baffle gab that you'll find in like the commitment to action. Uh, this is in the latest implementation plan that was presented to the Amundsen police commission just recently.
00:23:20
Speaker
Quote, our goal is to prioritize an ongoing and restorative approach to policing within our service delivery. We recognize that our ability as a police force to fulfill our duties is contingent on public approval of our actions and on our ability to secure public trust. Therefore, we will ensure the findings from the report are embedded throughout the organization and thereby create measurable change within the EPS to lead as a forward thinking police agency.
00:23:42
Speaker
Uh, you know, there's just, there's a lot of words there without actually fucking saying anything. And, and, and you'll find this throughout the kind of like commitment to action stuff. And it, it's very reminiscent of a rhetorical technique that's quite often used by, uh, right-wing shithead Ben Shapiro. It's called the gish gallop. Have you ever heard of the gish gallop, Rob?
00:24:04
Speaker
Uh, not in a, any fulsome way, but I am familiar with Shapiro and I am familiar with people wasting people's time with long-winded, very verbiage, heavy sentences. And that's exactly what it sounds like on paper.
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah, so it's a rhetorical technique, you know, used by Ben Shapiro and other similar folks, where you would simply attempt to overwhelm your opponent in a debate by providing an excessive number of arguments. And it doesn't matter about the quality or the accuracy of the strengths, those arguments, you just pull up everything, you say it really fast. And it's like, well, who could be against blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you know, we'll link to it in the show notes, but like you can pull up the commitment to action implementation plan. And it's like,
00:24:45
Speaker
They've got six different priorities that they've identified, and then underneath all those priorities, they'll be like, here are all the things that are currently being implemented, and I'll just run through them really fast. Critical operational risk and ethical evaluation initiative, reasonable officer response framework, community police training module, mental health training module,
00:25:03
Speaker
youth-focused officer trainings, customer service improvements, experiential learning shifts, interpreter and translator training, community-led curriculum development and training, complaint-informed training, inclusive promotions process, and managing unconscious bias e-learning. And it's like you read all that and you go through this like 25-page report and it's like, look at all the things that they're doing. And it's like, wow, they certainly are doing a lot of things.
Unconscious Bias Training Issues
00:25:26
Speaker
But what happens when you actually pull back the curtain and actually examine what one of those things actually is? And Rob, you and I were both lucky enough to take one of these trainings, the Managing Unconscious Bias E learning module, which according to the rhetoric and the information in this,
00:25:50
Speaker
Commitment to action implementation plan is now mandatory for every single Edmonton Police Service employee. You had the opportunity to go through it, Rob. What were your thoughts? Well, where do I begin in this?
00:26:08
Speaker
As a footnote, I have a degree from the University of Alberta. My major was in psychology, so I'm very familiar with kind of these tests and processes like that and multiple choice things and also working with the city and working on a lot of these initiatives, trying to change the way that we're training people to make them less racist, anti-racism initiatives. This course,
00:26:38
Speaker
is just terrible. I don't know how else to put it. It's terrible from start to finish. And as I was going through it,
00:26:52
Speaker
I was getting this sense that it's not here to educate me on bias. It's here to kind of tell me and make me feel good that I have these biases because everybody's biased. And you should just embrace the bias, recognize that you have it, but then embrace it. And it has language like that in there and it's very unsettling when you go through it. And it made me feel bad doing it because
00:27:21
Speaker
This isn't what we should be teaching cops. And this isn't what is really relevant to their job. And yeah, dumbfounded. Recognizing bias is half the battle, Rob. Um, so, so, uh, that's actually like one of the things not, they don't say half the battle, but they say recognizing your biases can help you avoid blah, blah, blah. Uh, so just a bit of context on how we took this training. So anyone can go and take this training, uh, for the low, low price of $25, you can, you can.
00:27:50
Speaker
take it through the Canadian Police Knowledge Network. You sign up for a student account. And this is the actual course that the Edmonton Police have developed. And it is now mandatory for every single employee who works at the Edmonton Police Service to take this training. And it is trumpeted in their equipment to action implementation plan. And the best part about this, Rob, to me, is that if you're so inclined, you can speed run this course in less than five seconds with two clicks.
00:28:17
Speaker
There are no mandatory questions. There is nothing that is read aloud that you have to sit through. There are no questions you absolutely have to answer and get right to move on. It is literally text on a screen that you click through and you are under no obligation to even click through it in any order. So for $25, five seconds, two clicks, you can get your certificate in managing unconscious bias from the Canadian police knowledge network. Yeah, I think that's one of the most clear and
00:28:46
Speaker
And upsetting things about the whole course is that there's no requirement to even answer the questions. There's no requirement to get any of it right. You just have to click the tabs and do your best kind of skimming of it that you can. And then you're cured of all your biases. And it's really unfortunate and they have
00:29:11
Speaker
these images and there's verbiage around, well, check out these scenarios. What would you think this person looks like? And I was like, okay, yeah, but maybe your bias is racism. Maybe it's not just an innocent bias. Maybe you're a racist, but oh, let's not think about that. Let's just think about how everybody has a bias.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah, and the Canadian Police Knowledge Network say this course is gonna take an hour. It does not take an hour. In the presentations of the Edmonton Police Commission, it's a much more realistic 20 to 30 minutes to take this course. Again, you can speedrun it in two clicks with five seconds. If I had the opportunity to ask questions to the Edmonton Police, which I will obviously, we'll get to that part later on in the pod, I would have asked what kind of auditing is done to make sure that people don't just click through to the end because based on the course I took, you can just do that.
00:30:07
Speaker
Yeah, they they have the other thing that really struck me they have this I've some sort of Danish video a video from Denmark of some sort that yes has Maybe a handful of brown people in it but you never really see them because they're on the margins of this bias test and
00:30:29
Speaker
that is just wrong as well. And then they do a lot of that reinforcement stuff with, there was this question on percentages, right? And how many people do you think prefer black people to white workers or white workers to black workers? And you have to guess this population number. And it turns out it's like, well, 75% of the population prefer a white worker to a black worker.
00:30:56
Speaker
That does little to cure people's biases. It only reinforces them by making them understand, oh yeah, no, 75% of the people that are in the world think the same way
Structural Changes vs. Implicit Bias Training
00:31:07
Speaker
that I do. And that is entirely the wrong way to teach about bias and to correct people's biases.
00:31:14
Speaker
Yeah, and this course really relies on the work of some scholarship called Project Implicit, which is run out of Harvard and has a very popular and publicly available like implicit association test that anyone can take and that is both and is referenced in the like learning modules. Like you can, it clicks out to the, to the, you can click directly to this Project Implicit and it's kind of
00:31:37
Speaker
part of the foundation of the learning materials. But Rob, would you be shocked to know that Ulrich Schimic, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto Mississauga, says his research suggests that the implicit association test that is at the core of Project Implicit, he suggests the tests can't delve into our unconscious and reveal our hidden prejudices. Quote, it's basically a roulette wheel that comes up with a random number.
00:32:02
Speaker
and implicit association tests, quote, shouldn't be used as a criterion to evaluate whether implicit bias training was successful. It shouldn't be used in a training context, Shemek concludes, adding that it is questionable, if not unethical, for a test to claim to provide scientific feedback if that's not the case. For the most part, it has been oversold and offers very little, says Shemek. Yeah, and that's reflected in the rest of the content of the course and how
00:32:31
Speaker
There is no real substance to it. It is just a gloss over of society and it doesn't get into racism. And really, I don't think it has
00:32:44
Speaker
any if a handful of references to actual police work. So you're trying to train police officers to be less biased. You think your situations you rely on and other things like that would be police based and they're not. And I think that's also a huge issue with this checkbox course.
00:33:06
Speaker
Yeah, so let's just go over a question. This is from section eight, the bias interrupter guidelines. There's a knowledge check. Again, you're not obligated to get these questions right, or even to complete these questions to get to the end of the course, but here it is. Review the scenario below. How would you approach this scenario? Your response is a personal reflection and will not be recorded.
00:33:25
Speaker
Here's the question, you were on your lunch break and over here two colleagues talking about the newest member of your team who just transferred from another division. A colleague mentions that they looked up the new person on social media, quote, I just discovered that she liked political party exes page last year. I can't help but wonder if she is going to be a good fit with this team, unquote.
00:33:45
Speaker
And then there's a little bullet points for your reflections. What assumptions are being made? What negative impacts may result from this bias? What would you say or do to interrupt the potential biases in this scenario? It's also very hilarious that they're talking about political parties because cops would definitely be very concerned if one of their colleagues liked a Justin Trudeau or a liberal page or something, let alone the NDP.
00:34:07
Speaker
But then look, okay, I'm just going to type in lol as an answer to this question and hit submit. And I get an example reflection. You could have said this or this other thing, and then you can literally just copy and paste that and put that as your answer. But it doesn't matter anyways, because it's not recorded. So I don't see how a political affiliation question that isn't being recorded, it isn't being
00:34:35
Speaker
calculated in any way, shape or form, has anything to do with the Edmonton Police Service, how they do their job, or whether or not they're going to be working with a colleague who likes XYZ. A question on race and a real question on racism and biases would have been better situated there.
00:34:54
Speaker
Very much so. Here's from the example reflection. There's a very funny thing. To interrupt the potential biases in this scenario, you could encourage your colleague to acknowledge that they are assuming something about a person they have not met. Using counter-stereotypic imaging, you could encourage your colleague to look to other individuals that they are acquainted with who have differing political views than they do in order to make a positive association.
00:35:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's another thing. Because your grandma came up in the course as I was doing it is that there's a portion there where it talks about when you're interacting with someone that you may have a bias against, try imagining a famous person from that culture or from that community as you're engaging with them and that might help you deal with your inherent bias a little bit better.
00:35:40
Speaker
And I was sitting there, are you like, is this for real? Like while you're arresting.
00:35:46
Speaker
a black or brown person, you should really be envisioning that you're arresting like Michael Jordan or LeBron James or Harriet Tubman or someone like that so that you feel better as you're costing this person. If you're arresting an indigenous person, maybe it's Graham Greene or someone else like that and maybe you feel better and that helps you deal with your biases a little bit more.
00:36:11
Speaker
that is entirely detached from reality and I don't know how that's good advice to anybody.
00:36:18
Speaker
It's entirely removed from policing. Here's one of the questions on the page prior. What can I do for an implicit preference? I don't want here. Here's the answer. Focus on strategies that prevent implicit biases from presenting to do this. You can quote blind yourself unquote from learning a person's gender, race, et cetera. When you are making a decision about them, for example, having their name removed from the top of resume. Uh, if you only evaluate a person on the things that matter for a decision, then you can't be swayed by Democrat factors. Motherfucker, like you are literally a police officer staring at someone in the face on the street while you arrest them.
00:36:49
Speaker
You are not able to just like, this is not an audition for a fucking orchestra seat where you were able to place a screen between yourself and the person. This has nothing to do with modern policing. Another strategy, this is from the answer, another strategy is to compensate for your implicit preferences. For example, if you have an implicit preference for young people, you can try to be friendlier towards elderly people.
00:37:15
Speaker
Oh, man. Yeah, and that whole, if you have an implicit preference, that is just whitewashing and watering down people's biases and racism, and sure,
00:37:30
Speaker
our culture and how we're brought up play a role and how we who we who we associate with and other things like that but at some point during all of that introspection you have to come to the realization that well maybe i'm a racist and maybe these implicit inherent biases that i'm trying to avoid by imagining someone else or being friendlier to older people maybe maybe i'm just a jerk and maybe i'm a racist and maybe i shouldn't be a cop or maybe i shouldn't do this or that right
00:38:00
Speaker
And even if you aren't racist, it doesn't fucking matter. The system is broken. The system is racist. The idea that taking this training could have any fucking effect on the fact that policing is a racist system is laughable, right? And it's part of the grander neoliberal kind of modern project to just individualize everything. Oh, it's your fault you're a racist police officer. And it's like, sure, there are plenty of fucking racist cops out there.
00:38:25
Speaker
But policing as a system is racist. It's designed to be racist. It's racist on purpose, and you can't unlearn it because you are a cop in a system that is racist. Yeah, and then it goes on to look at, I remember they included a Maya Angelou quote or something like that in the context. There is a Maya Angelou quote. Yeah, about how
00:38:52
Speaker
You're nothing, you're not responsible for the change or some highfalutin quote. And I did try to Google it to see like whether or not she said it, because in a lot of these things that are created in a lot of these presentations, people just manufacture stuff and there's, I found it. I found it. We are only as blind as we want to be.
00:39:12
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So I couldn't find any evidence that she had ever said that. I didn't see it. I didn't find it in any of the prints. And it reminded me of kind of the, there's that popular African proverb that if you want to go far, if you want to go far, go together. If you want to go quickly, go alone or something like that. And like, there's also been a little bit of scholarship around how that is in a proverb. It was probably created by some guy and made it sound
00:39:43
Speaker
more appealing by making it an African proverb. So again, sprinkling in Maya Angelou quotes, sprinkling in other brown little images makes it feel like maybe I'm not as biased, but again, maybe I am because there's 76% of the population that feel the same way.
00:40:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's just it's it's laughable and like again if you are within the Amazon police services civilian or sworn officer and you are taking these trainings I Send them to me. I would love to take more of these I would love to know what is being put in front of these work of these folks in order to make them, you know more anti-racist or less racist or whatever because again, I
00:40:28
Speaker
These trainings are never going to solve the inherent problem at the core of policing, which that it is like it is a tool of white supremacy. Like there's simply no getting around that and all the training in the world isn't going to fix it. And you too can fall into bias traps. Don't fall into a bias trap, right? As some of the language used in this course.
00:40:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's your fault that you're arresting all these brown people all the time. And it's like, well, yeah, probably a little bit. But then also it's like, that's how the system works. The system is set up to arrest poor black and brown people. That is the system working as it was designed to do.
Journalistic Challenges and Media Accreditation
00:41:11
Speaker
All right. OK, so I think we've we've set our piece about the fucking the the commitment to action, the managing unconscious bias thing. I also since I've got you on here, Rob, I've got to ask you about the the latest TIF that I've had with the Edmonton police. And that is about this this bullshit around the police media accreditation that has been revoked. In my case, I assume you've seen our posts on the matter. You're kind of familiar with the basics.
00:41:39
Speaker
I am, yeah, and I've been watching some of the press releases, I've been watching these ridiculous media availabilities they've been having around shootings and all these other things, and how
00:41:53
Speaker
It's very, of course, it's a strategy, but it's very disappointing that other media outlets are falling into these traps, these media traps, and just going along with some of this rhetoric, because it's not good for anybody.
00:42:10
Speaker
Yeah, so I do want to thank Taproot and Mac Mail for the work that they have done asking questions about this and reporting on the fact that our media access has been revoked. Unfortunately, like almost every other single outlet out there has barely mentioned it at all or just straight up ignored it. But yes, our media access to the email list, to like the email notifications that go out to reporters, access to press conferences,
00:42:36
Speaker
and to show up and ask questions at press conferences, and the ability to send in questions to the Media Relations Unit and have them answered, that's all been revoked. So we are persona non grata according to the Edmonton Police right now. Our status as accredited media is currently, quote, under review. Why it is under review and why our access has been revoked has not been explained.
00:42:57
Speaker
And because of the arbitrary and seemingly punitive nature of these actions of the Edmonton Police, we filed a discreditable conduct complaint against Chief McPhee with the Edmonton Police Commission. That is going to start grinding through the gears of the bureaucracy there. I think it's also important to point out that I tried to resolve this quickly and quietly and
00:43:18
Speaker
The police were not interested in resolving the situation quickly and quietly. And so we were forced to ask questions publicly at a police commission about this, we were, we again believe the actions of the Amazon police chief have brought discredit to the Amazon police service. And so we're moving forward with the with that complaint.
00:43:38
Speaker
But also it's like, it's important to note that this, when they kicked us out of the press conference on February 24th, so there was a press conference on February 24th, the day after Edmonton police shot two people dead.
00:43:50
Speaker
One of them, an uninvolved bystander in their home. And we, as we always do until recently, we got the email, Chief McPhee, media availability to talk about something. It wasn't even clear what the press conference was about. And in that press conference, he gave the few details that he did give about the fact that Edmonton Police shot two people dead, again, one of them, an uninvolved bystander in their home. And we tried to get on that press conference and we rebooted off.
00:44:15
Speaker
no explanation given, and then like 10 days or almost two weeks later, we're told, by the way, fuck you, you're not media anymore. And so, again, and that's it. There hasn't been any correspondence, I haven't had any correspondence with anyone from the Edmonton Police for quite a while, two weeks now from since March 14th, no, since March 10th, 20 days now. And we're still under review, whatever the hell that means. But, Rob,
00:44:42
Speaker
while this is arbitrary and punitive and brings discredit to the Edmonton Police Service, you can kind of understand why, right? And not just even the personal kind of like, we had a somewhat, me and Dale had a somewhat contentious exchange at a press conference like a week before I was booted. But like over the past 18 months, like we have done some real reporting on the Edmonton Police that they have not liked, right?
00:45:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's been a lot of important reporting, for instance, the plane and other things like that, that people had no knowledge of whatsoever were brought to light by some of the work that you were doing. And I think that that's important work that needs to be done because people need to have a real sense of
00:45:30
Speaker
A, the authority that police have, and B, the maneuverability and the flexibility and the lack of transparency that exists when they're doing these shady things. Who knew that this little Cessna that was flying around Edmonton was actually a police plane and was surveilling people? Who knows what else they're doing?
00:45:51
Speaker
So yeah, no, I think a lot of great work. And I think that is part of the problem that Dale and others see is that increased transparency leads to more questions that you have to kind of ask and answer. And they're not used to doing that because they're used to being able to do whatever they want without any consequence.
00:46:13
Speaker
Yeah, like very rarely do the Edmonton police face a critical media and someone with the time and skills to actually dig in and find stories that make them look bad. And yeah, like it does look bad that the Edmonton police service had a secret plane that they kept secret for more than 30 years.
00:46:29
Speaker
and never told anyone about it and never told anyone how much it costs. That's a bad look. It was also tremendously, probably tremendously embarrassing for Dale that I reported on the fact that he attended a UCP fundraiser where UCP MLA is dressed up in T-Rex costumes and raced on a horse racetrack.
00:46:46
Speaker
That's pretty embarrassing, 100% true, and he acknowledged it, but embarrassing. We reported on the fact that according to a peer-reviewed study that was published in a journal, 76% of frontline officers never carry naloxone despite frequent drug poisoning deaths in EPS holding cells. Instead of actually doing something about that, they put out a whole webpage on their website rebutting us and rebutting the study.
00:47:12
Speaker
Now that they're not able to answer questions, is the EPS doing anything on tracking naloxone used by officers? We don't know. We don't just reprint EPS media releases, which is a lot of reporting on the police. A lot of what passes for crime reporting is just like, oh, something happened and the police put out a release. There isn't even an effort to find a secondary source.
00:47:38
Speaker
reprint Edmonton police media releases. We are going to try and if we do, if we're gonna write something based off a media release, we're gonna go out and find more. And that takes time and effort. And so it's understandable, but it's also totally unacceptable. The police do not get to pick and choose who the media are. I'm a journalist. I'm a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists. I went to journalism school. I do journalism for a living.
00:48:08
Speaker
I'm sorry that my particular journalism is not to your particular taste and liking, but like, that's why you get paid the big bucks, Dale. You know, every once in a while, some shithead like me is going to sidle up to a press conference and ask a question that you like, you may not like the tone of, you know?
Transparency and Accountability in Policing
00:48:22
Speaker
Yeah. And it really helps to keep people accountable and helps to shift away from the, the copaganda that happens. And, and the clearest example is let's have a press conference about all the gun violence. Yet no one asks a question about.
00:48:38
Speaker
how cops keep gunning people down and whether or not there is a imitation firearm or whether or not this person was doing XYZ, it shouldn't matter because in Canada, we don't have the death penalty, but the Edmonton Police Service and their officers are taking it upon themselves to be the judge jury and executioner in a lot of these situations.
00:49:00
Speaker
Yeah, we still don't have basic foundational information about the people that the Edmonton police are killing. We don't know their names. We don't know the officer's names. We don't know how many bullets were fired. It's very easy for them to say, oh, it's Acer now. It's not our responsibility, which is great for them. They don't have to do anything. Three, four years later, a report comes out and maybe nothing happens.
00:49:21
Speaker
But that's just unacceptable, right? When the police kill someone, it is not just, they're not just killing someone, obviously, a fucking tragedy, terrible, horrible. The police are the people who are responsible for keeping us safe, ostensibly, right? And when they take it upon themselves to kill someone,
00:49:37
Speaker
there is a whole level of transparency and disclosure that needs to happen around that. And it is simply not happening. And they're choosing not to do it. And they're using every excuse in the book to not tell us just basic foundational details that we need as a community to process the trauma of someone being removed from society. They have been killed. They're not coming back.
00:49:57
Speaker
And so I'm extremely frustrated with Amundsen police and Acer and the entire system in Alberta that that refuses to actually give us information that the public needs in order to process like an absolute fucking tragedy. Like a man was shot in his home, like on his couch, you know, like watching television to totally uninvolved in any police action whatsoever. And we don't know that person's name. You know, it's like it's it's boggles my mind.
00:50:26
Speaker
Yeah. And in a situation where if you look at the photos that are online, if you look at the social media images, there is a good distance between the person that they killed, the perpetrator and the cops. And they're standing on the other side of a fence or a couple of fences and our little key tracks and things like that. And you have to, even with a basic understanding about guns,
00:50:50
Speaker
that you're not going to, unless you're like Bruce Willis or someone like that in the movies, that you hit everything on target, there's going to be a lot of risk in those situations. And for, yeah, someone sitting on their couch to be dead now and to have little recourse in the public and to have little scrutiny, it's very disappointing and it's a major flaw in the system.
00:51:17
Speaker
Yeah. And that was like the picture that came out was just absolutely terrible. Like three cops lined up shoulder to shoulder, guns drawn, the guy on the, he's on the other side of two separate little like chain, chain fences, like little chain fences, like knee high, but still. And then, uh, and then there's just an apartment building right behind that guy.
00:51:35
Speaker
You know, right where the cops are aiming. It's wild. But I did make a point earlier I want to get back to, and it's going to be our final one. And again, I am going to be scooping myself a bit here. So again, people who listen all the way to the end of the podcast get the goods. But yeah, I said, Chief McPhee makes the big bucks to occasionally deal with an important question from a journalist. But Robert, if you had to guess, what do you think Chief McPhee makes in a year when it comes to like what actual big bucks are we talking about here?
00:52:04
Speaker
Well, I've done a little bit of estimating and based upon some of the figures that are out there, I would have to guess he makes at least over $300,000 a year.
00:52:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's not a bad guess. Unfortunately, we have no fucking clue what he makes. It is a fucking secret. The Edmonton Police Commission did not respond to media requests to disclose his salary, Chief McPhee's salary, and in fact, are making me file a Freedom of Information request in order to get it. That has been sent, the wheels are in motion, but FOIP requests take
00:52:38
Speaker
a long time to process. To answer again, a very simple question. What does the chief of police here in Edmonton, Dale McPhee, actually get paid? No idea. And this is very strange, because almost every other major Canadian city
00:52:53
Speaker
tells the public the salary of their chief of police. Vancouver's police chief, 378,000. Victoria's police chief, 244,000. And that contract is a public document. You can just Google Victoria police chief contract. You can look at it. Winnipeg's police chief, $291,000. Toronto police chief, $332,000. Dearly departed Ottawa police chief, Peter Slowly, made $341,000 last year.
00:53:20
Speaker
Appeal police chief Nishan Duryapa earned $327,000 last year. Nova Scotia's police chief, $253,000. Regina's police chief, $257,000. Saskatoon's police chief, $244,000. These are all findable with a Google search, but for some reason, the public here in Alberta cannot know
00:53:42
Speaker
the yearly salary of the police chief, presumably one of the highest paid people in the city of Edmonton infrastructure. He's officially, I guess he officially is an employee of the Edmonton Police Commission, but the Edmonton Police Commission is a creature of the city of Edmonton.
00:53:55
Speaker
And, uh, we just have no idea. Like we know the salaries of like counselors, we know the salaries of the premier. We know the salaries of like anyone who works in healthcare who makes over like 135 grand a year, like nurses, paramedics, like senior managers, we know their salaries, but for some reason, chief Dale McPhee salary, just, just, just a state secret. Yeah. And even then.
00:54:20
Speaker
within even the EPS structure and the collective bargaining agreements and things like that that are online, you can guesstimate how much other officers are making, depending on their seniority and other things like that. But for one person to be void of all of that transparency and to really, even when they announced his new contract,
00:54:44
Speaker
Zero information about how much he's actually getting paid a contract that I think was signed with the previous council before they went out Again raises a lot of questions and it makes me feel a little bit more uneasy. Maybe he's making maybe he's making a cool million maybe it's 500 million dollars like who knows we don't know and That is that should be concerning for everybody.
00:55:09
Speaker
Yeah, it should be concerning. Calgary
Public Engagement in Budget Talks
00:55:13
Speaker
does not disclose the salary of their police chief, but they do disclose the salary range. We know that the chief of police in Calgary can make anywhere from between 240,000 to $300,000 a year.
00:55:13
Speaker
I
00:55:24
Speaker
We know that the salary range for the chief of police in Lethbridge, a man doing a terrible job, by the way, is 200 to 225,000. They don't even publish a range here in Edmonton, which is like, come on. But, you know, it's just another way that like Alberta, there's this peevish sort of like default secrecy here where it's like even the most basic fucking facts are just state secrets for no, for just arbitrary reasons.
00:55:51
Speaker
And it's just as a journalist, it's just me bitching now, but it's just very frustrating.
00:55:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's frustrating also kind of as an Edmontonian because, yeah, the commission is responsible for hiring the chief and for paying the chief, but that direction comes from city council. And I don't think a lot of people understand, and I think it was Councillor Jans that brought it up on Twitter or something like that, that at the end of the day, council is liable for all of the actions of police. It's not.
00:56:23
Speaker
Their union fees don't pay for lawsuits and other things like that. The city of Edmonton is on the hook for all of that. And they're on hook for paying this guy X amount of dollars. So you would hope that they would have a better sense of what is actually going on rather than everyone washing their hands of the issue and keeping things in the dark.
00:56:46
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. And we've gone a little long, but it's obviously, you know, a subject we're both passionate about, but final thought, I think before we kind of close it, close out the pod. And that is the, the report, the original report that was published a year ago now.
00:57:01
Speaker
again, incredibly reasonable, overly reasonable suggestions that the city of Edmonton is just starting to inch forward on only a handful of them. And the big daddy, the freezing of the police budget and redirecting the money that would be going to the increased police budget instead of redirecting it to things like social workers and affordable housing and that thing, that is going to come up in the fall. And you need to be public and present for that and let your city councilor know that like,
00:57:30
Speaker
Freezing the police budget and redirecting that money is incredibly reasonable. We should be defunding the police. $385 million is a ridiculous amount to spend yearly on police when 32% of calls that they get are not police work. That's what I want people to leave with. Do you have anything you want people to leave with, Rob? Yeah. I think that it's past time that we realize
00:57:55
Speaker
The role of police, they have a role to play that is to keep people safe. They should not be doing social work activities. They should not be doing all these other things that they're doing on top of being a police officer because it is risky. There's a lot of danger in it. But if they just focus on that, they can do that a lot better than some of the other things. And right now our trajectory is that.
00:58:19
Speaker
the leadership of the EPS want to bring all of that stuff back and really start to control it. And I think this council has an opportunity to have a different conversation. If you don't like our report, that's fine as well. Come with better solutions, come with better recommendations, because we all know that the system is fundamentally flawed and needs to be changed.
Closing Remarks and Further Engagement
00:58:40
Speaker
That is a coherent thought to end it on. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rob, for coming on. How can people kind of follow along with the work you do, your social media stuff? How can people find you online? I'm still on Twitter. Twitter is my main thing. Neha, Rob is my handle. I'm up over 1,300 followers now, so I could use some more. I tweet often, and that's my main kind of thing.
00:59:08
Speaker
There you go. Yeah. He's follow Robbie's tremendous. Uh, also if you want to follow me, I'm all on Twitter far too often and at Duncan Kinney, if there's anything that you think I need to know or things I missed or mistakes I made, I'm very easy to get hold of by email as well. Duncan K at progress, Alberta.ca. Thank you to Jim story for editing. Thank you to cosmic family communist for our theme. Thank you to our guests, Rob, for coming on the show. Thank you for listening and goodbye.