Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Police "unions" are master fearmongers and they’re scaring us to increase police budgets
181 Plays2 years ago
Writer James Wilt joins host Duncan Kinney to discuss how cop "unions" use fear and a permanent war posture to get what they want—increased police budgets.
Recommended
Transcript
New Shows Announcement
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey folks, Duncan King here to remind you that The Progress Report continues to be a member of the mighty Harbinger Media Network, and Harbinger just released some exciting news. Three new shows were just added to the roster. The Breach Show is the first one we're gonna talk about. It's a weekly pod from the fine folks at The Breach, including Pam Palmater, Martin Lukach, and Elle Jones. I'm also very excited for Unmaking Saskatchewan, which is a project by Sarah Burrell, an amazing writer who I love reading, so I'm excited to see what she can do in the
00:00:29
Speaker
podcast form, and finally Victor's Children, which is an interview show focusing on the questions facing anti-capitalist today hosted by University of Winnipeg labor and sociology scholar David Canfield. This is like the ninth expansion that Harbour has done and the people involved continue to make amazing content and I know it might be a little uncomfortable to dip out of your usual podcast routine but trust me these podcasts are definitely going to be worth
Funding Appeal by Progress Alberta
00:00:55
Speaker
it.
00:00:55
Speaker
And speaking of worth it, I have a quick question for you. Do you think what we do at the progress report is worth a few bucks? In the six and a half years I've been running progress Alberta, I've never had to put out a fundraising call where it was absolutely necessary. Where we needed a few thousand dollars to pay our bills and make payroll for the end of the month.
00:01:15
Speaker
but that is where we are at right now. Our current financial situation is not great. And while we do have a plan to become more financially stable, we need some donations right now to get us through this rough patch. So if you want to help us out, there is a link for one-time donations in the show notes, or you can go to progressalberta.ca slash donate hyphen one time with one time being all one word, but really the link will be in the show notes.
00:01:41
Speaker
and you put in your credit card info and you donate, it's really simple. If you'd like to send an e-transfer, it's very easy to do that as well. You can send that to info at progressalberta.ca, but whatever you can donate, Jim and I, we'd be very, very happy to take it.
Introduction of James Wilt
00:01:56
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening. Thank you, hopefully, for your donations, and now onto the show.
00:02:12
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to the progress report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Miskwichiwa, Skigan, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty six territory on the banks of the mighty Kasisksaw, Mississippi, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today is a friend of the show and a Winnipeg based writer and author, James Wilt. James, how are you doing? Doing well. Thanks for having me.
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it's your first time on the podcast that you have, I think written for the progress report in the past. So welcome to the pod.
Police Union Narratives
00:02:44
Speaker
Yeah. No, thanks so much. Love, love what you do. Yeah. And the reason we had you on is an excellent piece that you recently published in Briar Patch magazine, which we will of course link to in the show notes and which I highly recommend. I have like a gazillion tabs open. Oh no, no, let me find it. The title is.
00:03:07
Speaker
you can beat me to it the myth of police as embattled heroes and has incredible art by the way whoever did the art oh amanda prieb she did uh fantastic work and it's like it's a 14 minute read it's like it gets in depth into the subject and i think that's why
00:03:24
Speaker
Uh, I read it with so much interest because there were so many parallels to what was going on in Winnipeg to what is happening here in Edmonton. And let's, let's get into the piece. You started off with, you know, an anecdote about how Winnipeg cops wanted to be paid for working out. Um, and then like one of the insane reasons why they said they needed to be paid for working out was because people getting out of prison were also working out.
00:03:51
Speaker
And then they were going to MMA gyms and they were getting really good at fighting. And it seems like a bit of an absurd anecdote to start off with, but there was a reason why you let off with that in your piece, right? Yeah. So for starters, the anecdote about getting paid to work out, I think was darkly funny. So that was kind of why I started it that way. But I think it also depicts the constant self-victimization tendencies
00:04:20
Speaker
of police not only in Winnipeg but across Canada and everywhere really. But more importantly, I think it demonstrates the way that the Winnipeg Police Association, which is the police union, has long trafficked in very racialized discourses of threat and violence and danger as a strategy of attaining greater funding and resources and powers.
00:04:45
Speaker
And so we can see in this one situation strains of implicitly racialized politics. There's the implicit call for austerity in carceral facilities as if prisoners shouldn't have access to decent food or exercise equipment. And as we know, especially in the prairies, incarceration is overwhelmingly involving Indigenous peoples.
00:05:06
Speaker
implication too from the the cop union president that like these that like people who are being imprisoned are like being fed like protein powder and like you know tuna fish and eggs and they're getting super Yeah, and then there's yeah, I think like building on that there's there's this discursive construction of like the incarcerated or criminalized body in
00:05:29
Speaker
In similar language to what we hear from the states in terms of the quote, unquote, super predator, just this invoking of, like you say, this incredibly threatening large person, racialized person specifically. And so I think it quite acutely represents the way that policing, just like the military or the security state, relies on the constant expansion of supposed threats to the body of the individual officer.
00:05:58
Speaker
who of course in their mind represents the quote unquote thin blue line between civilization and anarchy or however they conceive of
Comparison to Permanent War Posture
00:06:05
Speaker
it. So we can talk about this more later, but this is what anthropologist Joseph Mascow, who writes about the US national security state, describes as a permanent war posture.
00:06:17
Speaker
And so there's never any possible end to policing or in his case, securitization and anti-terrorist measures and all that kind of stuff. Within this discourse, it only ever increases as the physical size and bulk and threat of the racialized prisoner increases. I think really importantly, and I'll let you get another question in a second, but I think it positions the physical and the emotional
00:06:45
Speaker
body of the police officer at the center of the conversation, which is really what drives all policing politics. And most obviously, we see this in every justification for when police murder someone, usually indigenous or black person, and the basis is almost always supposed fear for their own safety or the safety of others. That's the language which is used to justify
00:07:09
Speaker
lethal force. And so in terms of the police union itself, I think the power of the Winnipeg Police Association or police unions across the country comes in many ways from this seemingly small or relevant incremental approach in which they constantly weaponize media and frankly white supremacist fears to
00:07:29
Speaker
gradually advance their cause over times. And of course, there are the very spectacular, horrific moments of police violence that we see on a very routine basis. But at the same time, I think it's really important to pay attention to the ways that the police unions will just gradually, incrementally try to cultivate this feeling and this affect of racist anxiety.
00:07:57
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you don't use the term in your piece, but like this is, this is Copaganda that we're talking about in specific specific, the specific brand of Copaganda that we're talking about is police union Copaganda, which is, as I think your piece ably demonstrates and goes into great detail is, is one of the most pernicious and powerful forms of Copaganda. Right. Yeah. You know, your piece keeps coming back to this embattled heroes narrative. Right. Like,
00:08:26
Speaker
The cops are simultaneously incredibly powerful and incredibly weak and they always need protection and they always need increased resources. Police budgets are just like the rent. They always go up, they never go down. We have seen the Winnipeg Police Association and here in Edmonton, the same, the Edmonton Police Association, they pick different issues. They're obviously responding to the zeitgeist at the moment.
00:08:55
Speaker
Here in Edmonton, we've seen police constantly beat the drum in the news and on social media about two big narratives like crime and disorder on public transit and increased gun violence and gun seizures. In your piece, you go into this an alleged attempted robbery of an off-duty cop going to his car near police headquarters is one of this
00:09:20
Speaker
foundational kind of myths that they use to be like, well, we need, we need more money. We need, we need more this, that and the everything. I suppose my question here is like this question of police budgets. It's, it's not just in the context of a police union, it's not just, uh, the budget is kind of an inexact large number. What we're talking about here is, is a collective agreement, right? Like these cops actually want to make gains at the negotiating table.
00:09:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's absolutely it. And they have been wildly successful at this over the years. As you mentioned, the constantly skyrocketing police budgets in Winnipeg and elsewhere. Here, around 85% of the now $320 million a year police budget goes to salaries
Police Budget and Salaries
00:10:11
Speaker
and benefits.
00:10:12
Speaker
And the one by please budget has increased from what was then 16.9% of the municipal operating budget in the year 2000. And it's not 26.8% this year and so it is, it's increasing obviously in mass but also the actual percentage of the budget that
00:10:31
Speaker
that it represents. And so we know that I kind of got this in the first, because this is the second piece of a two-part series. And part of the reason that they've been quite successful at this is because they gave up the right to strike in exchange for binding arbitration.
00:10:50
Speaker
And so I won't go too into the details with this, but the binding arbitration process means quite crucially that what happens in other comparably sized cities, so this would include Edmonton I assume, factors into the arbitrator's decision about awarding budget increases or more specifically salary increases to the Winnipeg Police Association.
00:11:15
Speaker
And so as a result, more than 1,000 cops in Winnipeg now make over $100,000 a year. Many rack up massive bonuses through so-called special duty policing. So this is when they work over time at grocery stores, Winnipeg Jets games, liquor stores, so on. And very, very importantly, all of that is pensionable earnings, which became an issue
00:11:41
Speaker
um quite recently and so so the key tendency that I identify in the piece that accounts for this success is you know like there's clearly the binding arbitration um at play but but the the reason that this is sort of socially or discursively um successful is that the the police union has been able to
00:11:59
Speaker
turn almost any situation into an appeal for more funding resources and power. So you bring up the parking situation, which actually very recently flared up again, like maybe two weeks ago, three weeks ago, where the WPA once again really pushed for their secure, safe parking, underground parking, all that sort of thing.
00:12:22
Speaker
at the downtown police headquarters. And once again, they're invoking the same constant threat to the bodies and to the lives of police officers and their inherent right to park in a safe location. And I assume it's the same in Edmonton, but a significant number of officers don't live in Winnipeg. They live in surrounding communities.
00:12:45
Speaker
And if they do live in Winnipeg, they live on like the suburban fringes. And so I think, you know, I won't get into detail on that, but I think that sort of like factors into this sort of thin blue line mentality, that it is like a war zone that you're entering and then exiting. And so I think the safe parking kind of plays into that.
00:13:02
Speaker
But more generally, like it really, and this is something I tried to get in the piece is like, it really doesn't matter how badly police fail to keep people safe. And you know, we can talk about whether that's a failure or success, depending on how we define the work of police, but police unions will always manage to leverage it into a case for lack of support. So probably the most heinous example of this that I mentioned in the piece was a situation in
00:13:24
Speaker
Early nineties when there was a trial of three members of the Manitoba KKK and they were being tried for For like threatening genocide and the trial was called off due to a botched investigation by Winnipeg police and
00:13:41
Speaker
And in turn, the police union explicitly blamed it on lack of, quote, manpower, equipment, and training. So once again, we just see this moment where there's just this extreme example of failure to do what it is that they think that they do or what they say that they do, and they just use it as an excuse to call for more funding.
00:14:02
Speaker
Most recently, and I'm sure this is the case across Canada, is with the fascist occupations of Winnipeg's downtown. Absolutely failed, or once again, depending on your metric of what police do, succeeded at protecting the fascist occupation and really enraged a lot of people.
00:14:21
Speaker
So just to summarize, I think they've been very, very successful at this sort of gambit over the decades as evidenced by the constantly rising police
Police and Electoral Politics
00:14:32
Speaker
budget. But I will say that it seems like, and this isn't some sort of quantitative survey data, but it does seem that people in Winnipeg are getting somewhat tired of this game. Like I mentioned the
00:14:43
Speaker
secure parking facility. There's the fascist occupation. I think there's this overall sense that the police union is never going to let up in its demands. And we see disagreement from civic politicians for the first time in a long time. And a lot of this has to do with abolitionists organizing by the likes of Justice for Black Lives Winnipeg and that sort of thing.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah, all this is to say that they have been very successful at it, but I think they may have pushed it a bit too far and in conjunction with the really courageous and important abolitionist organizing that's happening in one of Vega. I think the needle may be starting to move, but we can talk about sort of future struggles later in the conversation.
00:15:30
Speaker
I mean, to follow up on your earlier point in that is that there was a report that came out literally just last month in April that a slim majority, 53% of sworn police officers in the Edmonton Police Service do not live in Edmonton. They live outside of Edmonton. And I come back to the money. The money, it's always important to just hold in your mind how much money a cop makes.
00:16:00
Speaker
Edmonton has the highest paid police in Alberta. I have done the analysis. I've pulled the relevant information. A fifth year constable with the EPS makes $50.89 an hour. That's before overtime does not include pensioner benefits, which are considerable. You need a high school diploma to become a police officer. Yeah, absolutely.
00:16:28
Speaker
Uh, you know, when you compare what cops make compared to either their first responder, other first responders, firefighters and paramedics, or other city workers, again, it, it.
00:16:41
Speaker
it shows how much power and influence the cops have been able to create for themselves. Uh, and, and the important role that they play for the rich and powerful, obviously as well, if we're going to do some material criticism analysis, uh, you know, like a firefighter, you know, averages, or I can't, I don't have the chart in front of me, but it's like around $5 less an hour paramedics. Oh man, paramedics make so much less than cops. And to be an advanced care paramedic, it's like three years of school.
00:17:11
Speaker
uh you know like they actually have training they're saving people's lives like those people make like a comparable fifth year advance care paramedic compared to a fifth year constable they're making twelve dollars less an hour on a much shittier contract
00:17:29
Speaker
benefits and pension wise compared to the cops. The priorities that society has when it comes to paying the salaries of cops, it really shows, right? Yeah, absolutely. And just as an aside, the one thing that consistently happens in Winnipeg, and I assume elsewhere, is police.
00:17:47
Speaker
You know, using Narcan on someone who has presumably overdosed and then or rather has been, you know, subjected to toxic supply of drugs and then and then is they use that as like a PR moment like this is why we need police or whatever when that is like fundamentally like a healthcare response, right, which
00:18:06
Speaker
Should not only be responded to you know with paramedics, but also like many other public services that aren't police and of course like buried and all that is the fact that the reason that people are having to resort to criminalize and toxic supply of drugs is because of the criminalization of police like the fact that
00:18:23
Speaker
Um, you know, a vast majority of drug use in society is, is criminalized and racialized. Um, and, and then the police kind of turn around and take credit for that. Um, as, as if, as if that kind of work, um, cannot, and importantly is not being done by anyone else in society. Yeah.
Differing Roles of Police vs Labor Unions
00:18:39
Speaker
Like you don't need a gun on your hip and the ability to meet out violence to like give Narcan to people. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:47
Speaker
We've been calling them cop unions throughout this chat, but cops, cop unions aren't really unions and they're not really part of the labor movement. I feel like we should develop some kind of name. Police association is so sanitized. I don't have a good one. I sat down for a good three or four minutes while I was writing this outline and was like, what the fuck do we call cop unions? Because they're not unions. They're not a part of my labor movement though.
00:19:15
Speaker
They are not, I think it is important to just state out loud. Yeah, yeah, definitely. That cop unions aren't unions. I mean, if you... Go ahead.
00:19:25
Speaker
No, I haven't looked into the super long history of the Winnipeg Police Association, but there's this mythology around the 1919 strike because police broke ranks and joined the strike and then they were replaced and all that sort of thing.
00:19:47
Speaker
But then after that, I think it was called like an athletic club or something. They basically constituted themselves as an athletic club. And then it was only in the 70s, I believe, that they actually formalized as a union which had collective bargaining powers and that sort of thing.
00:20:03
Speaker
I don't have a specific name for them, but I think it is a really important point, especially if we do bring in a materialist analysis of what police do. We can think of Lenin's special bodies of our men as what police function as in society.
00:20:19
Speaker
But I think people are often confused because police unions do function in many ways as conventional unions, like they work to win their membership, higher compensation and benefits and pensions and workplace protections and so on. And the police officer within like very conventional strict terms is a worker in the sense that they are paid a wage by an employer. But with that said, I think it's essential to understand police in terms of their actual function within capitalist society, which we've been kind of
00:20:46
Speaker
Hinting out which is you know they exist to protect ruling class interest in white supremacist occupation and private property although I think the mileage on the latter point will vary as noted with the whole car McDavid laptop fiasco which recently posting about in terms of you know whose private property is actually deemed worthy of response to.
00:21:07
Speaker
But, you know, fundamentally, they exist uphold class domination, which is inherently mediated through race and gender and disability and so on. And they basically temporarily paper over the contradictions of capitalist and settler colonial rule. So they're clearly on the side of the oppressor. You know, we can also see this in terms of the role of police, you know, obviously responding to indigenous.
00:21:30
Speaker
resistance to colonial infringement on their territories, but also if a labor union goes on strike and if they strike out of turn or in a way which violates an injunction or whatever, like we saw at the Regina Co-op.
00:21:46
Speaker
the refinery strike. The police showed up en masse to that. So if we think about it within the broader picture of what police actually do, I think it's really important sort of following your suggestion that they are not considered a worker in terms of any kind of political sense. They might be in a very strict economy. If we're just thinking about the wage relation, then I guess. But I think we need to be going beyond that and thinking about the actual political function of
00:22:14
Speaker
of police and society. I don't have a catchy name yet, but I'll keep thinking on it and let you know. Yeah, keep thinking on it. It's important to also internalize the gains that police make as quote unquote workers through their collective bargaining rights and through the police associations. Those are quite often gains made at the expense of other workers. Exactly. Here in Edmonton, every city worker accept the cops.
00:22:42
Speaker
took two years of zeros, 2019, 2020. Cops got one and a half percent. That adds up. When you take zeros, it's not really appreciated. Our minds don't really think logarithmically, but zeros have a huge effect on your earning potential over time. That's why it's even more insane that paramedics have had so many years of zeros as well. Yeah, absolutely.
00:23:06
Speaker
It is wild. And then here in Edmonton too, the constant attacks by the Edmonton Police Association president with regards to the transit system, making the transit system seem unsafe.
Material Interests in Public Spending
00:23:18
Speaker
That is the second biggest line item in the Edmonton city budget. And very often, that is how big cities are set up. First largest slice of the pie police, second largest slice of the pie transit.
00:23:30
Speaker
And so when you have police going after transit, there are very clearly material interests at play here. Yeah, I agree. And one thing that really jumped out at me from your piece was just how involved that Winnipeg cops got involved in politics in that city. Can you kind of walk us through what the Winnipeg's got up to with regards to just straight up electoral politics, not just your usual pressure and lobbying and propaganda, but actual people on getting involved?
00:24:01
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is another important distinction between what most labor unions would consider their political priorities and the priorities of the police associations, or whatever we decide to call them, is that historically, the Winnipeg Police Association had kind of like an ambivalent relationship with electoral politics. Like they endorsed some liberal candidate from here back in the early 90s, and then kind of just like
00:24:26
Speaker
were in the background for a while. There's a Winnipeg cop, Shelley Glover, who was a conservative MP and she actually recently ran for leader of the Progressive Conservatives in Manitoba. She ran for mayor and the WPA briefly endorsed her but then walked it back because there was some sort of protest from WPA's membership. So that was kind of a weird moment. But then more recently, especially within the last decade,
00:24:53
Speaker
They've gone full-throated, very, very committed supporters of certain political candidates. So Sam Cates, who was the arguably deeply corrupt mayor of Winnipeg for a long time, ran for re-election in 2010.
00:25:12
Speaker
at one of his press conferences wore like a Winnipeg Police Association jacket and made very strident commitments to, you know, the Winnipeg Police Association's interests. And the WPA like endorsed him like immediately, like an hour after he announced that he was running for reelection.
00:25:30
Speaker
And the police union provided volunteers to Dornoch for him. They did radio ads. They also very explicitly and in a very gendered way attacked his opponents and described her public safety strategy as a quote unquote Mary Poppins approach to quote unquote public safety.
00:25:54
Speaker
But then so that was Sam Cates and then Brian Bowman who is still a mayor about to go out the door but he ran for mayor and they have like the WPA hates Bowman. There was a- And I don't know where to pay politics that.
00:26:12
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That well or anything. But it's not like Bowman is some firebrand abolitionist, right? No. He's probably pretty tepid, mild critiques of the police, if any, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in 2019, there was this interesting moment, and it speaks to the political power of the union was the police pension arrangement in Winnipeg is absolutely egregious. So I mentioned how overtime earnings are pensionable. So they tried to address that in 2019.
00:26:40
Speaker
But more aggressively, they tried to restructure the police pension plan outside of collective bargaining. So currently, like at the time, and still for a reason, I'll get into a second, is that the city pays 18.5% of pensionable earnings and members of the WPA only contribute 8%.
00:27:02
Speaker
And so that's, once again, to speak to your point, that's different than every other city employee. And so the city tried to rebalance that so that the city and the membership would both pay 11.5%. And this absolutely sent the WPA and its membership into a rage, which I haven't seen before.
00:27:25
Speaker
So they basically went to war with Bowman over this. They at one point they stacked council chambers with like dozens of off-duty cops. There's a great picture on a CPC article about this where you can just see them like glowering.
00:27:41
Speaker
You could argue that this is regular union politics. This is just membership defending their own interests. But this was a show of force, physical force. And so it eventually went to arbitration and the arbitrator sided with the union, which the union was very happy about.
00:28:00
Speaker
And all the members got big payouts and all that kind of thing, but they have never let that go. And so the resentment for Bowman has only increased since. But yeah, there was a really notorious attack ad that was leveled against Bowman a number of years ago in which they
00:28:16
Speaker
depicted a break in entry happening and a child sheltering in a closet and trying to call 911, but no one was picking up at the dispatcher. And this was because Bowman hadn't successfully funded dispatcher or the police. And so the implication was that your child was going to get murdered if Bowman gets reelected.
00:28:41
Speaker
Wow. Really, really egregious stuff. And like with the Cates campaign in 2010, they also did like another door knocking campaign right before collective bargaining where it was something like a hundred
00:29:05
Speaker
off-duty cops and cadets, which are their knockoff cop wannabes in the city, where they door knocked and then talked about how important it is that police get funny. They've been making increasingly aggressive outreach, which I think is really important. I don't want to go on for too long because I know that you have other questions, but I think it's really important to understand this as
00:29:34
Speaker
Is the police union recognizing and engaging in like a very lived ideology within Winnipeg like I think oftentimes we think of ideology as sort of something in the realm of thought and you know language of false consciousness and we have blinders on that prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is but
00:29:51
Speaker
And this is true in some sense, but I think in terms of how the WPA approaches politics increasingly, is that ideology has a very institutional materiality and it engages people at a very visceral level. It appeals to people's emotions and feelings and desires and these sorts of things. So we can talk about Althusser's concept of interpolation through which
00:30:12
Speaker
an individual becomes a subject through active participation and response to the world. And so, you know, Joseph Mascow talks about this in a different way, but by describing what he calls the excitable subject. And so like in terms of the national security state, so like it produces this internalized affect of anxiety and fear. And so I think, I think this is like, this is part of why the WPA is engaging increasingly in outward facing politics.
00:30:39
Speaker
Is that they, they sense some sort of pushback to what they have largely succeeded at because of other supportive of Kate's and other very cop friendly politicians. Again, not to say that moment is some like died in the wool abolitionist or anything but
00:30:55
Speaker
Well, I think what they're doing is, and this is also in response to racial justice movements and abolitionist movements, but they are actively recruiting Winnipeg's mostly white and suburban populace to support them and to support their ambitions through the cultivation of conscious and unconscious fears and anxieties, which are all profoundly racist in nature.
00:31:15
Speaker
And so this is like a long-winded way of trying to think through like why it is they're actually responding in the way that they do.
Public Support Through Fear
00:31:23
Speaker
Like obviously engaging in outward facing politics can have material advantages just in terms of like winning favors. But I think it also, I think it spans far wider than that in terms of trying to encompass Winnipeg's mostly white and suburban populace into this very like racist and specifically anti-Indigenous
00:31:45
Speaker
And so I think that's, I think that's part of, you know, it may not be like cooked up in a lab in terms of like, this is what the WPAs plan is, but that's definitely the, the function and the result of this. So that's kind of a long winded response to your question, but
00:32:01
Speaker
No worries. I think the Edmonton Police offer, I read your piece and I was like, oh yeah, the Edmonton Police are doing the exact same shit. The Edmonton Police largely stayed out of the election that just happened, but they are increasingly becoming very political and it is coinciding, of course, with collective bargaining.
00:32:21
Speaker
Um, you know, we, we saw the police union president here, Michael Elliott file a complaint with the integrity commissioner against Michael Jans, who's a counselor here, uh, literally about like Twitter posts where he's, it's not like he's saying like ACAB or anything. He's just like, he's Twitter posts where Michael Jans is making like mild criticisms of the police and like talking about police.
00:32:43
Speaker
Uh, that was apparently egregious enough for the, uh, the police, the copy union president to file a complaint with the integrity commissioner, integrity commissioner, uh, threw it out thankfully. But again, the police union president here, Michael Elliott has been relentless in posting about transit disorder and weapon seizures and the criminal trial lawyers associations policing committee put out a release last week that attempted to quantify this. And I'm just going to read from a section here from that release.
00:33:16
Speaker
The Edmonton Police Association president, Staff Sergeant Michael Elliott has tweeted in ways that appear to encourage increased public fear of transit on the days of council's decision and in the 16 remaining days of 2021, the decision here that's being referenced is the decision to
00:33:31
Speaker
only give the police a $1 million budget increase as opposed to an $11 million increase. EPA, in the 16 remaining days of 2021, EPA President Elliott tweeted about transit disorder 11 times. That is more than he tweeted about transit disorder in all 348 days prior to the EPS budget decision in 2021. In March 2021, the month with the most transit disorder that year, EPA President Elliott tweeted about transit disorder once.
00:33:57
Speaker
So when, when they're not in collective bargaining, when they're not mad at city and trying to get, and not mad at the city for not giving them the full budget increase that they wanted. They don't tweet about transit disorder, but when it's collective bargaining time and they're mad at the city for not giving them all the money they want, it's time to ramp up the fear, right?
00:34:14
Speaker
Back to the statement, the amount of attention that Elliot pays to transit safety in his tweets overstates the dangerous present and appears to have more correlation with decisions about the EPS budget than with actual transit disorder rates. This is like textbook, you know, cop union, copaganda, right?
00:34:35
Speaker
I mean, I know you're, you don't live here and you're not like in the daily news cycle of Edmonton. So I ask, I ask you as someone removed from the day to day of, of, you know, the Edmonton news cycle, that this all seems very familiar, right?
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And that's an incredibly damning and seemingly accurate analysis of what's going on. The timing and the linking of it to upcoming collective bargaining, or in this case, the budget deliberations, is incredibly important because it always ramps up like this, on a very predictable cycle.
00:35:11
Speaker
We saw this recently in Winnipeg, obviously different circumstances, but the WPA has recently gone full knives out for the police chief, Danny Smyth, and this has been building for a while, but it's this perception that Smyth isn't standing up enough for membership, not fighting hard enough for budget increases.
Internal Discontent in Police Department
00:35:37
Speaker
all these sorts of things and so like the WPA successfully got like a third-party review of like workplace conditions and the review concluded that there's you know low morale and that Smythe is making all the cops sad and of course quote current events slash political movements end quote was also blamed for this which we've seen consistently as well just like
00:36:03
Speaker
This constant invoking of the pressures that police and police unions are feeling because people are criticizing the fact that they're killing people. And so, yeah, in this case, we also saw this ramp up right before their collective bargaining agreement expired at the end of 2021 as they began to ramp up.
00:36:26
Speaker
for a new round. And so I think to your question, this is very cop union, textbook sort of response. And I think we see this in many other parts of North America, like throughout the US, like always seen indications that police are going on very targeted, like fear-mongering campaigns.
00:36:49
Speaker
in response to alleged defunding, which has, of course, never actually happened, right? But they'll pull the card that, like, oh, you know, we've been defunded because of what happened in 2020, and therefore crime rates are going up. However, they define crime, which is, of course, heavily political and heavily racialized.
00:37:09
Speaker
Um, but, um, but, you know, as I was kind of, as we were discussing earlier, like, uh, the quote unquote crime rate will go up and the police claim that they need more money, but then the crime rate will go down and then the police claim that they need more money because like, the system works, right? Yeah. It never actually never, never ends. Exactly. Exactly. Um, and so, so this is, this is exactly what cop unions do. I just got into that, uh, on, uh, there was a transcript that I pulled together of.
00:37:40
Speaker
Danielle Smith, a friend of the show, Danielle Smith, interviewed Chief Dale McPhee in a year-end interview.
00:37:46
Speaker
And like, that was exactly his, what the point his underling made at the, like the end of the interview. It's like, if you were a business and you saw success happening, would you just like choke off all the funding? And it's like, okay. Yeah. But police budget goes up, whether crime goes up or crime goes down, I guess. Right. It's like, the spice must flow and the police budget. That's right. That's right.
00:38:11
Speaker
And to go back to transit here in Edmonton, I'm not going to sit here and deny that there isn't violence on public transit or that transit isn't a problem. We have more unhoused people than there have ever been in the history of Edmonton because of COVID and because of this provincial government's
00:38:30
Speaker
disinterest in providing housing for people who are unhoused and providing relief to people who are unemployed. The situation is bad, but as a person, when you see a relentless attempt to spin the transit system is unsafe, you have to realize that there are very clearly material interests at play here.
00:38:55
Speaker
Yeah, the police want more funding. The copy union wants a better contract. And, you know, they also want to delegitimize spending on transit and also stigmatize people who use drugs.
00:39:07
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And it is really interesting and by interesting, I mean horrific to watch this from Winnipeg because there's been similar things that have happened in Winnipeg in the last few years. And to speak to that specific point of trying to delegimize
00:39:28
Speaker
Spending on other public services, like Mo Sabran, who is the WPA president, actually said a number of years ago in response, once again, in a lead up to budgets or whatever, that money would have to be reallocated from other areas of spending. And so he was asked what kind of cuts could be made.
00:39:47
Speaker
And he specifically said that the WPA wants to see an end to things such as free Wi-Fi on buses, which doesn't exist, bus rapid transit, which barely exists in Winnipeg, active transportation, so like walking and biking, which is like incredibly underfunded in Winnipeg.
00:40:05
Speaker
like curb cuts and bike lanes and shit. Yeah. And then the reopening of Portage and Main to pedestrians, which once again did not happen and wouldn't have even cost that much money. And so his direct quote is, there's a lot of wasteful spending that could create more money to go to things like policing.
00:40:22
Speaker
And one of pegs transit system is like horrendously underfunded like we don't have light rail. We don't have anything like that. It's just like it's just buses and even then he constitutes this as wasteful spending and just as like one one other like hyper specific example which which comes to mind and this this goes back to one of your previous points about
00:40:42
Speaker
The relationship between other labor unions or other municipal workers and cops is that we know that cops actively harm other union members. And in Winnipeg, we recently saw this when an indigenous bus driver for Winnipeg Transit was returning home to the north end after her shift.
00:41:02
Speaker
Was like quote-unquote misidentified or whatever and was surrounded by cops with their guns pulled and like completely traumatized her right so I got this is like this is a this is a union this is a labor issue right like is that Indigenous workers are being like systematically targeted and harassed and traumatized By by police right so it's not like it's obviously not specific to transit but I do think like that your point about how there's this confluence between
00:41:29
Speaker
competing public service and the people who often like rely on this public service being being like stigmatized especially people who use criminalized drugs like in the washrooms of Edmonton which they then decided to close which was like an unbelievable decision for so many reasons that I probably don't have to stay but but yeah it's it's horrifying
00:41:52
Speaker
So James, I mean, I know what you're saying. I hear what you're saying, right? Like that situation with the indigenous bus driver was surrounded by cops, gun drawn, feared for her life. I mean, I'm sure it was bad for her, but have you considered how sad and how low the morale is for cops right now?
Impact of Police Actions on Safety
00:42:07
Speaker
That's right. It's been constant over the past two years, ever since the massive rallies in Winnipeg organized by Justice for Black Lives and the work of Aisha Hudson's family, just to keep her memory and the fight for justice alive.
00:42:27
Speaker
Like every sort of incident that happens is responded to by police doing exactly what you just said. Like just this feeling of like low morale and being sad and depressed and having PTSD as if like people shouldn't be saying anything critical of police and also as if like you couldn't get another job which doesn't require like the systematic destruction and murder of like Indigenous and Black people.
00:42:52
Speaker
So yeah, it's absolutely consistent. And of course, like telling that it's not happening only in Winnipeg, but in Edmonton and elsewhere as well. Yeah, like a post media analysis that came out over the weekend found that Edmonton police are responsible for 30% of the homicides in Edmonton this year so far in 2022. They've killed four people this year out of 13. And it's very reminiscent of like, you know, this, I mean, I'm not the first hack to make this joke, but it's like, oh, yeah, like,
00:43:22
Speaker
The Vietnam War happened and the biggest cultural memory of it in the United States is of how sad the soldiers were for murdering all those people in a dreadful imperial war. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And to speak of another specific example in Winnipeg, which I only kind of alluded to in the piece, was there was a suicide of a police officer last year.
00:43:50
Speaker
And in the eulogy, or what do they call it? The obituary rather. It was like abolitionist movements, more anti-place movements were explicitly blamed for contributing to the depression or whatever he was experiencing that led to his decision to take his own life.
00:44:12
Speaker
And that in turn factored into the WPA going knives out on Smythe because he allegedly, according to the union, didn't respond to this in a serious enough way, like didn't visit the widow of the person who died for
00:44:30
Speaker
several days or whatever. Even in death, they find a way to blame people for criticizing the absolute heinous, murderous institution of policing. It is staggering how consistent this is, but I think it also indicates
00:44:59
Speaker
that the work that abolitionists and anti-police movements are doing is getting to them. They know that eyes are on them. And hopefully this pressure can just continue to ratchet up in terms of demanding budget increases. Or budget decreases rather than increases. Not here to call for budget increases.
00:45:20
Speaker
I'm taking a bold step to call for more police. This system, it simply cannot be reformed. It cannot be changed piece by piece to be made into something more humane that treats people with dignity and respect. It is fundamentally incapable
00:45:39
Speaker
of being reformed.
Advocacy for Abolition and Resource Reallocation
00:45:41
Speaker
And any attempt to change it even in the slightest way is met with the resistance that we're seeing now, some of the most vicious and ridiculous and most weaponized kind of copaganda that we've ever seen. Just from like, you know, again, no police budgets have actually gone down in the context of post 2020, post George Floyd, in every major Canadian city, the police budget has gone up, right? Yeah, like substantially, yeah.
00:46:09
Speaker
And so I mean, I think I want to we're getting close to the end of our time here, but I think, you know, make that you make it in the kind of final few paragraphs of your piece that it's like that that police and prison abolition is the way forward. Like, what does that mean? And how does that work?
00:46:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is building off like, you know, decades of work by black feminists and indigenous people in Canada and the US and around the world. And the argument that the likes of like, Angela Davis and Mariam Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore make is that like, we know very clearly that
00:46:51
Speaker
Police not only fail, police in prisons not only fail to keep people safe, but they actively make conditions far less safe for many, many people. And so we can think about this most viscerally in terms of the police murders that we've alluded to in April 2020. What if a police killed in the span of 10 days? Three indigenous people, Aisha Hudson, Jason Collins, and Stuart Andrews.
00:47:15
Speaker
And so that's a very obvious example of how police make people, especially indigenous and black and other people of color, far less safe. But also, as you pointed to, I think really accurately, is that the police actively deprive and hoard resources that can and should be going into other public services that actually
00:47:39
Speaker
improve safety and like every time I use the word safety I kind of want to put in air quotes because it's been like weaponized in such like racialized and anti-poor way but like but in terms of actually like providing things that people need to to survive and thrive so like
00:47:54
Speaker
Housing foods harm reduction which includes safe consumption sites and safe supply of criminalized drugs legalization and regulation of drugs 24 hour safe spaces non violence and anti carceral crisis response.
00:48:12
Speaker
Good public transit, even things like the clearing of sidewalks of snow, which is like every winter in Winnipeg, I don't know how it is in Edmonton, but every winter in Winnipeg is an absolute crisis for people with disabilities or seniors who use mobility aids.
00:48:27
Speaker
because the city absolutely fails to clear snow and so this leads to people with disabilities being unable to leave their houses for like weeks or people who do like slipping and falling and like fracturing their leg or their arm or whatever, right? So like thinking of that as a public safety issue, I think is really important. So kind of like just like following that idea that like the police are currently like hoarding all these resources that can and should be, you know,
00:48:55
Speaker
redistributed to to other public services and this is something that like black feminist abolitionists like constantly stress it's not just about defunding or abolishing the police it's about refunding and building up um like community alternatives right so like so that's i think really the vision is like understanding that police and prisons don't keep people safe that they actively endanger people that they're hoarding the resources that we actually need to keep people
00:49:18
Speaker
Safe, and I think finally, no, I mean, I'll just end it there for now, because I don't want to blab on for too long, but I think those are like the really important points is that- Yeah, no, I think you've ably summed it up. And I think, you know, read James' piece, you know, if you're taking the time to listen to, you know, 45 conversation between me and James, you're clearly like, you have an opinion on police.
00:49:44
Speaker
And you should be relatively sophisticated now when you see kind of police union statements in the wild and take the opportunity to talk about, well, what are the interests of the police union president when he appears in the media and says X?
00:50:01
Speaker
They are currently negotiating a contract right now. They are incredibly highly paid. Repetition is important and consistently knowing what to say when these things are brought up and saying them over and over again so that people internalize that
00:50:16
Speaker
Cops are not neutral actors. Cops are not your friends. Cops are acting in order to secure their own material interests over and over and over again. And they do so through the means that we talked about over the last 45 minutes. They will make you feel unsafe. They will go into the media and bang the drum of fear.
00:50:32
Speaker
in order to make gains at the bargaining table. And it's important to remember that. So thanks so much for coming on, James. What are you working on right now? What should people know about? Now is the time to plug your pluggables.
00:50:47
Speaker
Cool. Thanks. I'm on Twitter, James Wilt. I wrote a book about public transit a number of years ago to Android stream of electric cars. And if people are interested, there's a whole section on the importance of free transit, which I know that there's a great group and events I'm working on.
00:51:06
Speaker
and integrating that with anti-police organizing. So there's that, and then there's an upcoming book that I have in July called Drinking Up the Revolution, and it's about theorizing a leftist politics of alcohol, which to me feels sorely missing. So those are the two main things. Yeah, follow me on Twitter if you want to keep up to date on other things.
00:51:29
Speaker
and by James' book and his other book when it comes out later this summer. Thanks for coming out so much on James. It's nice to finally get you on the pod. Folks, if you like this podcast ... Oh, no worries. Folks, if you like this podcast and you want to join the 500 or so other folks who help keep this independent media project going, it's very easy. There is a link in the description, or you can just go to the progressreport.ca slash patrons
00:51:52
Speaker
putting your credit card and contribute. We'd really appreciate it. If you can't, if you don't have a credit card, just reach out to me via email or Twitter. I'm very easy to get ahold of. I'm on Twitter at Duncan Kinney. You can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAlberta.ca. If you think I got anything wrong or if you want to give us money, I answer both requests, both kinds of requests, and I will read your email. Thank you to Jim Story for editing. Thank you to Cosmic Family Communists for our amazing theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.