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Abolish the police
121 Plays4 years ago
What does society look like when community safety isn't handled by armed cops authorized to kill people? In part two of our conversation on disarming, defunding and dismantling the police with Reakash Walters and Molly Swain, we discuss the abolitionist position.
Transcript
Introduction and Continuation of Defunding Discussion
00:00:15
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, and we're recording today here in Amiscuitu with Skyegan, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta. And today we're continuing our discussion that we had last week with Ray Cash Walters and Molly Swain on defunding the police. If you have the time, go back and listen to that podcast. It's excellent. We really do establish the case for why we do have to defund, dismantle, disarm the cops.
00:00:40
Speaker
And today on the pod, we're going to not only give an update on the effort that is continuing in regards to this campaign, but we also want to continue to talk through like what society looks like when we don't have police. But before we get there, let's reintroduce our guests. First up, we have Ray Cash Walters, a descendant of Jamaican Maroons and a community organizer and articling student. She is a part of this group organizing to push Edmonton City Council to divest from police and invest in the community. Ray Cash, welcome back. Hey.
00:01:11
Speaker
Molly Swain is also back with us. She's a member of the group called Freelance Free People, an anti-colonial indigenous led penal abolition group based out of Edmonton, Alberta. And there was just some big announcement regarding to this group, right Molly?
00:01:24
Speaker
Uh, yeah, we're, um, having, we're putting on an event, uh, with along with, um, penal abolition groups from across the prairies. And it's going to be next Thursday. It's going to be a night of song, uh, poetry and abolition. So that'll be Thursday, June 18th at 7 PM. Uh, and more information will be coming shortly. Very cool. And yeah, we'll have link in the show notes, of course. So, so.
Public Response and City Council Action
00:01:52
Speaker
Folks, 15,000 people at a rally, more than 10,000 letters sent to Edmonton City Council. Everyone is talking about it. It really feels like the window has opened. Something has shifted. How are you feeling right now?
00:02:10
Speaker
I think personally I'm feeling a bit of unplaced energy and feeling like the next move that we make is going to be a really important one. And so I think I'm also just feeling a bit reflective and really ready to generate some concrete ideas that we can use to make the change that we're hoping to see on City Council.
00:02:37
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like, um, the windows may be not open. I think the windows been cracked. I think our next step needs to be, you know, shoving, shoving that stick in there to really profit, profit all the way open. Um, I think especially sort of seeing, uh, responses from city council and, um, the Edmonton police over the past, uh, couple of days has really demonstrated that it's, it's now is the time to keep pushing, um, because they are trying to pacify us. They're trying to.
00:03:07
Speaker
you know, offer alternatives that will do nothing to alleviate the present situation. So I'm feeling like there's a shift because they're actually talking about this and they're clearly spooked. And I think we have to keep that going.
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah, there has definitely been a reaction, right? Like the kind of initial kind of wave of energy around, you know, sending the letter to your counselor and that initial rally has kind of like gotten everyone's attention and like the forces that like of the rich and powerful are all trying to scrambling to try and contain it and defuse it and, you know, you know, make it toothless and do what they can without ever actually having to do very much of anything. Right. And, um,
00:03:53
Speaker
We kind of saw that firsthand with the public hearing that Mayor Iveson held earlier this week where him and various other members of city council essentially had a three hour sit down with the chair of the police commission and Edmonton's chief of police.
00:04:15
Speaker
And, uh, there's been a lot of media coverage of this. We're not necessarily here to like recap every single thing that was said or the like particular minutia of the like motion that came out of this meeting.
Police and Public Perception Debate
00:04:26
Speaker
Berea Cash, I know you've watched a lot of it and, and, um, I was wondering what your, uh, what your takeaway from, you know, this, this public hearing is and kind of Edmonton city council's like first steps, uh, in addressing the demand of defunding the police.
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, what's great and encouraging is that I think that the letters did make an impact. Multiple city councilors said, you know, we've never seen a response like this about any single issue. A friend of mine approached Mayor Iverson at the rally and he seemed spooked about that. He brought it up multiple times.
00:05:04
Speaker
Um, and so I'm glad that they have heard folks out, but it really doesn't seem like they're feeling the pressure to make any legitimate change. And, um, I think one thing we'll probably talk about is how kind of chief McPhee is a bit of a smooth talker. And, you know, he had the words, even said the words.
00:05:29
Speaker
reparations at one point. So he was using some interesting language to try to get everyone to just be cool with the status quo. And one thing that I don't think worked out for them was the conversation about 30% of calls are, quote unquote, social work or mental health calls. And there was a moment when Andrew Matt kind of responded and said, well,
00:05:56
Speaker
That's something we're really going to have to look at. If 30% is the number, then that's a challenge. And then at another point, Chief McPhee specifically said, the police can't deal with social work issues. At one point, Chief McPhee said,
00:06:17
Speaker
the police can't deal with social problems. And so. I mean, the question must be asked then, right? Like, well, why don't we just cut 30% of your budget? Exactly. It seems really straightforward. I mean, I tweeted about it and like, you know, thousands of people are into that idea. So I, I think it's an opportunity and I think that we can use this language and this rhetoric to kind of expose them.
00:06:45
Speaker
Molly, did you pay attention to this at all or were you busy doing other better things with your life? I mean, I don't know if they were better things, but I didn't catch the city meeting, but I did listen to the, I believe it was the chief's interview with the CBC.
00:07:06
Speaker
And it's really interesting because he really does seem so confident in people's belief that police are necessary, that he is actually admitting, as Ray Kesh said, he's kind of admitting that we don't need the police over and over and over again.
00:07:27
Speaker
Um, you know, he's, he's sort of almost advocating for budget cuts, like 30% of, you know, your time is spent on, on calls that even you admit, uh, can, can be handled better by somebody else. Like, you know, that's, um, you know, it's, he's going in hard on the Copaganda here, right? Uh, he's really, he's really trying to mobilize a specific type of ideology of fear, I think.
00:07:51
Speaker
Um,
Activism Against Systemic Racism
00:07:52
Speaker
and this ideology of, you know, oh, the cops, you know, the cops are here to protect us. The cops are here to defend us. Um, you know, without actually taking seriously the fact that people are saying, well, who's defending us against the cops? Who's protecting us from the police?
00:08:07
Speaker
I think it's also really telling that he'll admit to the existence of social problems and the existence of social inequality, but say that the police can't address it. And I think for me, I think it really demonstrates that the police literally cannot address the existence of social inequality in any sort of depth because transforming relationships of inequality puts cops out of a job. They rely on this.
00:08:34
Speaker
So I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of this kind of this propaganda rhetoric in the coming days and weeks, and it's all going to sound really good. It's going to sound very pleasant and optimistic, and there's going to be calls for more changes and more transparency and more oversight, and it's going to lead to nothing, because that's exactly what's happened with every other city that's tried to make these reforms.
00:09:00
Speaker
Um, you know, I think it's, it's, you know, these kinds of tactics I think are, are interesting and it's really important to keep on top of, of this rhetoric because that's going to be obviously what the EPS, uh, is, is going to be pushing, but also what a lot of, uh, municipal politicians will be as well. Like if this was, you know, a track and field race, you know, like the gun has gone off and you know, the force of defunding the police got off to a quick start, but like there are,
00:09:28
Speaker
there is an opposite encounter reaction happening right now. And that is happening from the police, from the police union, from city council, from the province, from a variety of actors who see the police as this inviolate kind of pillar of society and not what it is. So that's where I think we're at right now.
00:09:56
Speaker
The Chief McPhee is, I think, a very slick, very soothing for people in power. He's very soothing. He gives a very calming presence to them as if something is happening. Definitely, if you listen to him talk and I can see, you watch this meeting and you can kind of see him continue to talk and the counselors continue to nod along with what he's saying,
00:10:20
Speaker
Like unless we are able to continue to exert intense amounts of public pressure through a variety of means on city council, like, yeah, like nothing, nothing will change, right? Like the current proposal on defunding the police that's being put forward is like minuscule, right? Like a freeze in 2021 or something with no actual like defunding that, like there's no actual defunding on the table yet. As far as there goes is a freeze.
00:10:50
Speaker
a year in the future. So that's where I'm at right now. Any kind of further reaction or comment analysis on kind of City Council's open hearing in all of this?
00:11:03
Speaker
I think it's really worth sort of interrogating as well. You know, you mentioned, you and Ray Cash both mentioned, you know, McPhee is, he's very slick. He's got this sort of soothing affect. He's saying all the right things. He's relaxing people. And, you know, I think that that is a really deliberate and honestly white supremacist tactic, right? The rhetoric that we've seen around Black Lives Matter from its inception
00:11:29
Speaker
And the demands of black people and indigenous people in particular is that we're always portrayed as as violent as irrational as a threat to public order and public safety. And so the fact that Chief McPhee is very deliberately
00:11:45
Speaker
presenting an opposite affect in order to appeal to the respectability, the palatability of and try to, you know, sort of propagandize those things of the police to city council, I think is, you know, is in its of itself, like very, very telling of how systemic this racism is, right?
00:12:06
Speaker
I think tactically, we're probably going to see activists and organizers who are calling for defunding start to be demonized as wanting violence in our communities, as promoting disorder and chaos.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, the reaction has begun and it's on us to continue the work. The other
Systemic Racism and Police Brutality
00:12:33
Speaker
part of the reaction that I think is worth talking about is there's been a whole media cycle on this defunding the police idea. Molly, you actually did an interview with Edmonton AM that I thought was really, really good. But in the interests of fair and balanced reporting that we get from the CBC here in Edmonton and really across Canada, they also had on the
00:12:54
Speaker
the president of the Edmonton Police Association later on in the program to discuss this whole defunding the police thing. And we've pulled some clips from that interview, and let's roll those right now. So how are your members feeling about the calls to defund policing in our city? Well, I just want to start on a couple of fronts, Mark. The defunding is, well, first of all,
00:13:22
Speaker
We're very concerned about the feelings and emotions and the biases that have been brought up by the organizers and how this affects us. I can tell you that members have been extremely stressed since there's been going on. Like, for example, I had one member on the phone who was crying to me and was so upset the way that he was what was occurring because he's like, I don't understand. He was like, it was like four days ago while the Satan, the life
00:13:49
Speaker
of a citizen by, you know, CPR, Narcan, and then fast forward a couple days, like, I can't do anything correctly. So I just want to let you know for your audience that the members find this extremely difficult.
00:14:03
Speaker
And so that's where I get concerned about we start to defund certain areas, what will happen to our Indigenous Relations or LGBT2 committee, what will happen to our Muslim relations, what will happen to our neighbourhood foot patrols that go out and they work with our stakeholders, work with our vulnerable and work with the citizens in that exact community.
00:14:23
Speaker
So if you take those areas away, what is left to is like I'll call the core policing. So we only respond when you call like 911 or only respond to a crime in progress.
00:14:39
Speaker
You know, the thousands of people who have gathered across North America and in our city as well to denounce racism that they see in policing, you know, they're doing it because there's been many instances. Do you think there is systemic racism in the EPS? I don't believe there's systemic racism. Racism is, you're not born as a racist as something that is learned. And I feel that there's social economic issues that are going because
00:15:09
Speaker
Okay, I honestly have been taking, I took notes on this. Okay, so I mean, so first with the crying Narcan cop, this is kind of absurd. You know, again, this is not something that requires being a police officer to do.
00:15:31
Speaker
Like everything else cops do, this can and is often done by non-cops. I carry naloxone with me everywhere. And I know people who have administered naloxone and saved people's lives without involving police. And I think, you know, this is a really interesting demonstration of sort of, you know,
00:15:49
Speaker
We're out here fighting for our lives and the police come back with, oh, what about our feelings? And they use examples that sort of continue to demonstrate the inefficacy of having an armed, violent police force getting hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
00:16:10
Speaker
Yeah, everything beneficial that cops may happen to do can and is already done by nonpolice, but only police operate so violently and with so little accountability. I just think it's interesting that
00:16:23
Speaker
As soon as we talk about defunding the police, the first thing that's brought up is, well, what about our programs with LGBTQ communities? What about these programs with Muslim communities? It's like, oh, okay, so now you have shown us exactly what you will cut first. So if you're willing to cut those things first, then perhaps they weren't as
00:16:45
Speaker
high of a priority as you're saying that they were. What about the tanks that various police forces across Canada have and all of these ridiculous guns and weaponry that they're investing all of their money in? They're not talking about, oh, that's going to be the first thing to be cut. So I think that really shows where the priorities are.
00:17:12
Speaker
I've just also seen the chief in the media saying similar things about diversity hires. He's like, well, if you defund the police, the first people to get fired are going to be all of these incredible new hires we've made who aren't white people. That was so strange.
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's this whole buy this magazine or the dog gets it with the gun to the dog's head magazine cover, right? And I do, I think, and Ray Cash may have said this already, but again, it's really telling that the second they start to be put on the defensive, they start making implicit threats that they'll become even more racist. That's exactly what that is. All of the sort of feel good,
00:17:57
Speaker
It's squishy, soft, fuzzy, huggy, kissy, diversity shit. They're essentially saying that this money is sort of this comforter that they're using to wrap around the racist core. What they're saying is core policing is just super racist. It's super anti-LGBTQ to us. It's super classist.
00:18:22
Speaker
we better fall in line with what they want from us. Otherwise, they're going to be even more oppressive. I'm really interested in where Edmonton Police is putting their money on these type of projects. But for example, the RCMP purchased 18 armored trucks for $14 million. And the Ottawa and Saskatchewan Police Services have spent $365,000 on armored vehicles.
00:18:51
Speaker
Like, why if our concerns are, okay, our communities don't feel safe, the initial response is to say, oh yeah, maybe we can stop rolling tanks down your streets. The initial response is instead, actually, you know what, if you do this, then we're going to be more and more horrible and racist and discriminatory to your communities. It's like such a strange response from my perspective.
00:19:21
Speaker
Yeah, budgeting is a choice. And the fact that they're explicitly telling us that they are going to choose to behave in ways that are going to increase police violence in our communities, it should actually be incredibly concerning to everybody. And I mean, of course, this is the move that they're making because, again, the function and form of policing is to do this work.
00:19:48
Speaker
But again, I think, you know, it's indicative of the pressure that we're putting on them that we're starting to see the true face, even if they're trying to, you know, have a kindly soft and soothing mask.
00:20:05
Speaker
Yeah, so I think one thing that we need to do is keep amping up the pressure. And one thing that I would really like to see and we're gonna be asking folks who signed that initial letter to do is show up at every single police commission meeting and let them know that we want them to be defunded and really continue putting the pressure on and also continue eliciting these responses and seeing, okay, like, what are you really about?
00:20:34
Speaker
Yes, yes. And the final clip I think is also, I mean, the implicit threat in the second one there of like, if you stop funding us, we're just going to get rid of all of these things. We're just going to go back to regular old brutal policing. But the third clip is like, he doesn't believe in systemic racism. He is just straight up saying the quiet part out loud.
00:20:56
Speaker
And, um, you know, I don't necessarily expect the president of the Edmonton police association to be super slick PR man, but I, I incredible that like, when walking through the potential questions for this interview, you know, I don't know how you couldn't have avoided thinking that a question on systemic racism was going to come up. And then that's how we, that's how we talked about it, that it doesn't exist.
00:21:24
Speaker
I mean, even JT, our prime minister, has acknowledged that our policing is systemically racist. So to me, that's like a really low hanging fruit. It's exhausting to continue having the same conversation. It's honestly a little bit irresponsible at this point for
00:21:46
Speaker
Media to even ask these questions and one thing that you and I were talking about Duncan with a few other folks and Molly as well are the questions that Sandy Hudson kind of produced for us because at the end of the day like as someone who You know all three of us have been involved in media and and speaking for media and like producing media, etc And you know as someone who's created a podcast I know that I set the standard with the questions that I asked
00:22:15
Speaker
And so when our media are asking these ridiculous, irrelevant questions, then we'll get the low-hanging fruit answers and we'll also get the straight-up irrelevant and just wrong answers as well.
00:22:37
Speaker
Yeah, I would 100% agree with all of
Transformative Justice and Accountability
00:22:41
Speaker
that. I think that it is incumbent upon media to elevate this conversation and to bring in the complexities that we need to push this forward.
00:22:54
Speaker
You know I know things are happening fast right now. And, you know, hopefully we'll continue to see this kind of rapid change but, you know, decades, decades of work, research analysis, you know work on the ground grassroots organizing has all demonstrated.
00:23:12
Speaker
that policing is inherently systemically racist. What I do think is interesting about this response and what I think is a real sort of dog whistle here to particularly sort of the white middle class listeners who still believe that cops are here to protect people as a whole is that the only way that you can look at the data that's available about police and BIPOC that's available in the city and not and come to the conclusion that there is no systemic racism in Edmonton policing
00:23:41
Speaker
is if you fundamentally believe that low income and BIPOC people are more prone to crime, which is exactly the kind of white supremacist assumption that we're fighting against. And that underscores the logics of policing. Like they're just, they're telling on themselves. Like they've been telling on themselves this whole time. It's, it's almost laughable, but because we're so
00:24:06
Speaker
you know, immersed in a police society, people aren't, you know, people take this up as, oh, you know, while everything's fine rather than, wow, like we need to get rid of these guys immediately. Yes. Uh, they are telling on themselves. And, uh, I mean, the other thing about the police is that I imagine they're on their kind of best behavior right now, considering the times that we're in.
00:24:34
Speaker
But the fact of the matter is that there's just dozens of kind of police brutality incidents that are just like in the hopper, just coming out kind of prior to this. And that's what happened just this week. We had a video surfacing of an Edmonton police officer.
00:24:52
Speaker
essentially jumping with his knee, his knee as the kind of point of contact, but the full force of his body at quite some speed onto the back of a man who was already being held down on the ground by another cop in the middle of being arrested. The video is fucked up. We'll have it in the show notes. I don't necessarily want to play the audio. The guy is just screaming and it's awful.
00:25:16
Speaker
The clips from this that you can hear the cops saying, in the video, one of the officers can be heard calling the man a motherfucker and saying, did you think I wouldn't catch you while the man on the ground whimpers? A second video shows the man arrested, continue crying while officers asking for his name and search him.
00:25:38
Speaker
They help him to his feet with the man who's being arrested saying, what is your fucking problem? An officer then wraps his arm around the man's neck and shoulder and bends him over while they drag and walk him to the police vehicle. An officer is then also heard yelling, don't stare at me.
00:25:52
Speaker
Yeah, just another example of the Edmonton Police Service in action. This was apparently filmed in August 2019. This video has been submitted to the Professional Standards Branch, but like literally no actual statement. No, we don't know who these cops are. We have no further information on whether anything has happened to these cops and just another day in Edmonton. Did anyone see this video or has seen this story as it came out?
00:26:20
Speaker
And obviously it's horrible. And it's also notable when you think about the imagery of George Floyd and the fact that the police had their knee right on his neck eight minutes until he died. And it's the same imagery that we see in EPS with their knees on our necks.
00:26:51
Speaker
And it honestly makes me like I get hot and cold and stressed and sweat. Like I don't know what to do when you see someone who looks like you.
00:27:03
Speaker
whose humanity is being completely ignored and denigrated. I don't understand how we can continue to have this conversation about trust. There's no way for us to have trust when we see these videos being circulated over and over and over. Anecdotally, in my personal experience,
00:27:30
Speaker
I think another challenge that we have is just the straight up indifference to our pain and our danger. I know that there's folks, particularly folks in the north side of Edmonton who have spoken about often if when they do actually call the police that no one shows up for hours and people are in pain or in danger and they don't have any
00:27:57
Speaker
They don't have any other source of emergency services. And so, you know, even for myself, I personally had an experience where someone broke into my home and we called the cops and when they came, they were like just
00:28:15
Speaker
shocked. I mean, the first thing that they did was try to accuse my roommate of being the person who had broken in, even though I said to them multiple times that my roommate is simply my roommate and my roommate is also in danger. He's a black guy. And when they found the person who was actually physically still in my home, they kept yelling up to us saying, Are you sure he doesn't live here? This isn't your this isn't your roommate.
00:28:44
Speaker
while the door was literally broken down because he kicked it out. And you know that story goes on and there's more horrible details, but I was struck by the indifference and the disinterest in securing my safety and my roommate's safety.
00:29:09
Speaker
And then I think leads into some numbers that I dug up this week from the Edmonton Police Commission, kind of scooping myself here, we're working on the story right now. But the when you actually look at how many times the Edmonton Police
00:29:27
Speaker
draw or point their guns or cause physical harm to people. They keep statistics on these and they are stark. So according to the Edmonton Police Commission's own stats, Edmonton police service officers drew or pointed their guns at someone two and a half times a day. That number, I mean, that number surprised me. What are you thinking, Molly?
00:29:57
Speaker
Uh, I have to say, you know, it's, it's a scary number. It's a really scary number, but I'm, I'm not surprised. Um, you know, just also thinking about, uh, my personal experiences, uh, with Edmonton police and seeing them work. Um, you know, they, they do not.
00:30:21
Speaker
It seems like they just don't respect what a gun is, what a gun does, particularly in the hands of a cop. My most recent experience with an armed police officer was a guy who was holding an assault rifle, pointing it at some of my neighbors,
00:30:47
Speaker
Um, and in a clear, clear case of racial profiling. And as he walked away, I heard him say, Oh, I feel so cool right now with this thing. And like, my God, and, and, you know, nothing, nothing for my neighbors at all. Just like, Oh, sorry that you clearly are not the person that we're supposed to be looking for. You just happen to be, you know, the same race.
00:31:10
Speaker
Uh, so we're coming to harass you and point an assault rifle at you and the people that you're with. Um, like, sorry, I guess. And, and they left and you know, that really demonstrates to me that, you know, for all of this, this sweet talking that we're getting right now, um, when it comes to what's happening on the ground, Edmonton police do not respect
00:31:34
Speaker
you know, the people that they're supposed to like supposedly serving and protecting, like you don't serve and protect by throwing people onto the ground and pointing assault rifles at them. Like that's a, that's absolutely. Yeah. Who's being kept, who, who, who, like, who's being kept safe when you're pulling your gun out two and a half times a day. Right. I mean, I've never had a gun pointed at me or my friends, but I am like, like, I don't know, a 37 year old white guy. It's very, um, but like,
00:32:01
Speaker
If you've never had a gun pointed at you or been threatened to be tased or had a baton or been pepper sprayed, it's probably worth contemplating why that's never happened to you or any of your friends because it does happen with quite some regularity in this city, right? Yeah.
00:32:19
Speaker
Yeah, apparently multiple times a day. And you know, this isn't happening in every neighborhood. This is, this is the other thing to realize is, you know, if you're not seeing it and you're not experiencing it, there are people who see it and experience it like probably with some frequency, right? And so I think it's also worth thinking about the ways in which policing and police are being geographically situated and what is considered appropriate in some places as police responses is not going to be considered appropriate in others.
00:32:48
Speaker
Um, and you know, we talk, we talk about North
RCMP Brutality Case and National Outrage
00:32:51
Speaker
Edmonton, uh, where I live. And again, like police presence is absolutely huge. And, you know, thinking about, um, you know, the video surfacing and possible complaint surfacing, again, for every complaint that, um, becomes public and for every video that's released, there are, I'm sure dozens of incidents, incidences that we never hear of.
00:33:15
Speaker
And it's going to be things like getting guns pulled on you, getting tased, getting pepper sprayed, getting, you know, beat down by a cop who's using lethal weapons to do this work. And it's not people who are dangerous to the cops or to other people often. It's just people who, you know, are considered disposable. Yeah. So keep an eye out on that story. We're going to have more details on just how often
00:33:44
Speaker
The Edmonton Police Service pulls their gun out, points their gun, you know, tazes people, hits people, that kind of thing. And then, of course, there was one other story that we have to talk about in the context of police brutality and defunding the police. Chief Alan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewine First Nation.
00:34:05
Speaker
up in Fort McMurray back in March. He had an expired license plate and apparently this was enough of a reason for an RCMP officer to kick the shit out of him. The pictures of him are quite gruesome.
00:34:19
Speaker
Um, also manhandled his wife who has like stage four rheumatoid arthritis or something. And it's, uh, story has gone national. Like Alan Adam is actually a, quite a prominent first nations leader. You know, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation is like directly adjacent to a lot of the oil sands development up in Northern Alberta. And, uh, Adam was charged with resisting arrest, uh, that old standby of cops who need to justify why they beat the shit out of you.
00:34:46
Speaker
Adam held a press conference and demanded the RCMP release the video they have of the incident. Apparently there's a dash cam video that Adam's lawyer has seen that Adam's lawyer sounds very confident will clear Adam's name and aid in the investigation of the police officer. And as a result of this pressure in this press conference, the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team is investigating
00:35:15
Speaker
I'm sure the officer was really unpleasantly surprised when he realized that he beat the shit out of an Indian, a well-documented RCMP tradition, but he chose the wrong Indian that night.
00:35:35
Speaker
That's really all that is. This is the kind of thing, again, I'm sure there's dozens of dash cam videos that we're never going to see of this kind of thing, but Alan Adam is resourced. He has the resources to make this public, to hire a lawyer, to start putting the pressure on the RCMP.
00:35:55
Speaker
And there are very, very few Indigenous people out there who are able to do that. RCMP officers and cops generally, they pull this kind of thing because they are convinced that they can get away with it. And they almost always do. They rarely don't get away with it.
00:36:16
Speaker
uh so you know i think it's uh it's an interesting case um it's an in you know in terms of seeing how this all plays out it's obviously it's it's horrible that it happened um but i think it's really important to remember that this is not the exception to policing uh relations with indigenous people yeah i think this is a great example too of
00:36:46
Speaker
why body cameras and dash cams don't do anything to keep us safe. Because at the end of the day, like, if you didn't have the resources to have a lawyer to require the disclosure to have a press conference and didn't, you know, maybe didn't have all the knowledge as to how to navigate these criminal legal systems, we would never get that video. Like, these
00:37:11
Speaker
bias trainings and you know all of these things that we're saying should be done and that's why they the police need more money is they're doing nothing to keep us safe and another thing that it makes me think of is like when we say okay over an expired license plate not only is that not a reason
00:37:31
Speaker
to engage with someone violently, it also just shouldn't be criminalized. That should not be something that warrants someone with a gun to come and aggressively harass you to be in any sort of confrontation with you. If your license plate is expired, then someone should just remind you to renew it and maybe they even have one for you to just have a new one right now.
00:37:57
Speaker
Like we don't need to do this back and forth this form on your phone, right? Literally like it reminds me on my phone and all I have to do is click a button and then it like automatically just renews my, my license plate. We don't need to have this conversation at all.
00:38:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really good point. And, you know, again, like when we when we talk about how police create criminality, this is the perfect example of that. There is nothing about this that needed to be criminalized and certainly not so violently. I think it's also a lesson for us in our communities that respectability politics doesn't really do anything for us and that it doesn't really matter what our job is. It doesn't matter how much money we make. It doesn't matter how well dressed we are.
00:38:44
Speaker
We are still going to be targets of state violence And because I think that's a story we tell ourselves that like, okay. Well if I get a law degree, you know, it didn't know it doesn't matter so I think that's something for us to reflect on breakdown and and also one of the reasons why black lives matter Across the globe says all black lives matter
00:39:09
Speaker
And yeah, it's, again, forcing a national conversation and it is on the prairies, when you look at the stats and when you look at, you know, who ends up in jails and who ends up being arrested, indigenous people are incredibly overrepresented, I believe is the proper sociology term.
00:39:35
Speaker
to describe what those statistics mean. I mean, it just means that there are more indigenous people arrested and in jails, far, far out of proportion to their actual numbers of them in our society.
00:39:50
Speaker
And there's a lot of research out there to show
Indigenous Oppression and Land Back Movement
00:39:53
Speaker
that. And you can go and find that research. There's a lot of research out there to show that kind of crime directly correlates to poverty and inequality as well. And there's a lot of research out there to show how white people in Canada and settler, the settler state has, it's been a deliberate project of the settler state to keep indigenous people poor and out.
00:40:18
Speaker
of society. And Molly, I think there's one easy trick out there that you've talked about a lot that could help solve indigenous poverty, and it's called land back. And how does that work into the defunding the police conversation?
00:40:35
Speaker
Yeah, so Landpack is a slogan. It's a movement. It's a mindset. It's obviously an action, instead of actions, that I think has been generated by Indigenous youth across, whether you call it Turtle Island, North America, Cataskanau. And basically, it's what it says on the package, return the land to Indigenous people.
00:41:04
Speaker
And in terms of what it does for both Indigenous people and the existence of police and police brutality on these lands, you know, Indigenous land is central to our worldviews, our ontologies, to our relationships, both, you know, with the land and with other human, other than human beings, but then also with, you know, one another.
00:41:31
Speaker
And land back, you know, the very short version is land back means that we can start in concrete and widespread ways to reassert our sovereignties through our indigenous legal traditions and our indigenous justice traditions.
00:41:52
Speaker
So, you know, with freelance free peoples, the indigenous anti-colonial abolition group that I work with, land back is truly, you know, a fundamental part of police and prison abolition. It's not the only way that abolition can happen, but in a settler colonial state,
00:42:12
Speaker
um where police and prisons uh again and I mentioned this on the on the last episode historically policing and prisons um were developed and implemented to contain and control indigenous people and and as you mentioned Doug needed to keep us impoverished um bringing the land back or giving the land back taking the land back uh you know
00:42:35
Speaker
takes away the reason that like the very reason that police in prisons have to be at like specifically thinking in Canada, you know, and deals a what I hope will be a death blow to prisons and policing everywhere. So yeah, land back. It's great. It's it's everybody should everybody should do it. Do you have a little land? Give it back. Why not?
00:43:05
Speaker
back. And this kind of goes hand in hand with prison abolition. And I think people are kind of, especially people who listen to this podcast, people who follow Progress Alberta, they can understand police are a
00:43:20
Speaker
a corrupt institution that harms people. Maybe they haven't gotten all the way to prison abolition yet. What's a good kind of like introductory way of thinking about if you're supporting defunding the police, why you should also be supporting prison abolition? Prison abolition and police abolition go together.
00:43:37
Speaker
Very naturally, you know, the police exist in large part to feed people into the carceral system to sort people into, you know, who needs or not, I shouldn't say needs, but who is to be contained and controlled through incarceration and its attendant.
00:43:55
Speaker
penal system, so parole, community work remand, and then who is considered to be free, you know, and whatever freedom means within this liberal hellhole.
00:44:09
Speaker
And so we can't, in my opinion, we can't have one without the other. Policing is truly what feeds the prison machine, and the prison machine is truly what drives policing, is the purpose of policing, to remove people from communities, to fracture
00:44:29
Speaker
to fracture our relationships, to keep us living in fear, to keep us, you know, cowed and oppressed. You know, police and prisons are the dual sticks of the state. And the carrot is for, you know, speaking for Indigenous people, the carrot is assimilation, right?
00:44:48
Speaker
So when we talk about police and prison abolition together, you'll often hear people talk about penal abolition, recognizing that they are sort of two sides. Police and prisons are two sides of the same coin and operate together.
00:45:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think we also talk about the prison industrial complex and the ways in which all of these systems of oppression control and surveillance work together. And so I couldn't imagine a conversation about defunding the police without also talking about how prisons continue to harm and violate and oppress our communities and steal our loved ones.
00:45:36
Speaker
And one thing that, forgive me if this is a little bit off topic, but one thing that's really challenging for me is also the conversations that happen between correctional officers and police out on the streets and how that brings, you know, obviously we know that because prisons can be such a hotbed for basically everything that is horrifying. It's also a place where racism
00:46:05
Speaker
is allowed to run wild and I have a friend of mine who's inside and we wrote an article together for Broadbent Institute and I think we can link it in the show notes if I can put that responsibility on you Duncan. But we wrote an article called Justice for Racialized Prisoners and
00:46:24
Speaker
My friend, you know, he was, when he was on the outside, he was making music with his friends. He lived in, you know, downtown Toronto. And he did something that was criminalized. And so he was sent to prison. And when he got to prison, he realized that in addition to being poor and black,
00:46:44
Speaker
He and criminalized and now incarcerated. He was also just like given this extra label of it's called STG.
00:46:58
Speaker
And because of this label, it's basically being associated with a gang. And this STG label puts you at higher risk of being put in solitary confinement. He was put in solitary confinement over Christmas and New Year's.
00:47:16
Speaker
You are higher security, and you don't have opportunities for parole. It really just makes your life even that much worse. And he wasn't in a gang. He was literally just making music with his friends, and then he realized that the police had told correctional officers that he was a gang member. And this musical group was just obviously also a gang.
00:47:46
Speaker
And it took him seven years to get that label removed and a lot of other folks don't even have that opportunity. A lot of folks just kind of live with this for the rest of their lives. I spoke with folks on the inside who were like, yo, I didn't even know like they made up this gang name.
00:48:03
Speaker
I've never even heard of this gang name and now I'm being associated with this name. And I had a friend just in Edmonton who told me the exact same thing. I'm trying to remember the name that he said, but he said that they called him, oh yeah, the Westside Jamaicans. He was like, what is that? That's not, first of all, it's not even a good gang name. And second of all, like it doesn't exist. And so. Edmonton's Westside is known for having many, many, no, it's not. Like what?
00:48:32
Speaker
Like you actually made that up and then you made my life worse because you made that up. And these are the ways in which if we're having, that's why all these conversations are connected.
School Policing and Community Harm
00:48:42
Speaker
Because if we're talking about police and we're talking about the violence that they wreak on our communities, we have to talk about the ways in which their conversations with other systems of surveillance and oppression continue to harm us when we're over there as well.
00:49:00
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely have a lot to learn on the prison abolition side. I'm a lot more familiar with the police's abolition and defunding arguments, but I'm very grateful to have both of you on. The article you wrote is very good. We'll have it in the show notes. And Molly, you're obviously speaking incredibly well about the issue. Rakesh, you brought up the kind of like the prison industrial complex. And one of the parts of that prison industrial complex that I do kind of want to mention is cops in schools.
00:49:30
Speaker
And what in Edmonton is called the school resource officer program. This is something that Bushir Mohammed, you know, activist here in Edmonton and friend of the pod has done a lot of writing and research and activism on it is
00:49:49
Speaker
The details of this are starting to kind of come out. And just this week, one of the school board trustees here in Edmonton, Bridget Sterling, has asked for a considerable amount of information and detail regarding what these cops are actually doing in schools, which is good that someone finally asked.
00:50:09
Speaker
So when it comes to school resource officers, this is something that could literally be fixed tomorrow. The Edmonton Public School Board could say, hey folks, budget cuts. We can't afford cops in schools. We're going to actually hire teachers and let's fix it. And there is literally brutal austerity happening in our education system right now. Yet, you know, we still have administrators and teachers who love this program and who will go to the media and say, I love my SRO.
00:50:40
Speaker
And it's incredible to me in this day and age that there are still folks who will say that.
00:50:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's just incredibly selfish. Like, if you look at the stats of the rate that Black and brown and Indigenous children are criminalized as a result of some of these police officers in school, there's a horrible, horrible story that the Ontario Police Commission just confirmed was obviously because of race and, like, water is where
00:51:12
Speaker
But a six-year-old girl, 48 pounds, was handcuffed because she was upset about something. And she was put face down on the ground for, I think it was 30 minutes or longer.
00:51:31
Speaker
And if we didn't have police in school, I don't think that would be as much of an issue. I think that if we had ways of dealing with kids who were upset that involved talking them through things or deescalating the situation, I don't think that a solution to a six-year-old girl is ever to handcuff her and put her on the ground. And so I think that if folks can hear these stories, hear these stories of kids,
00:52:00
Speaker
and just continue to say, why, like, my SRO? Like, that's about you. And you actually don't care about us. So just say that.
00:52:12
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. And I think too, you know, one of the things that I sort of see when we, we talk about these incidences is that we really, we sort of render them sort of these discrete moments in time. You know, it's, this child should have never experienced this.
00:52:31
Speaker
And then sort of, it's like this experience ends for that child, which is absolutely not the case. I've, you know, I've had family members, young, you know, young family members who have been traumatized by SROs. And, and it's really stuck, you know, their experiences have, have really affected how
00:52:51
Speaker
They can even be in school, who they trust in school, if they even still have that trust. We're starting to get some information. The SROs conduct sting operations on children.
00:53:06
Speaker
Entrapment. They interrogate kids. They try to get kids to snitch on one another. You know, they're armed. You're sitting there with an armed police officer who's telling you that you're not allowed to get in touch with your parents until you answer these questions and sign the sheet of paper. That's happening in our schools.
00:53:27
Speaker
It's egregious. It's indescribable that this is not only being allowed, but that it's being celebrated by both police and by Edmonton schools. And that Edmonton schools are paying for it when, again, brutal austerity, education assistance are getting cut.
00:53:44
Speaker
programs for students with disabilities and behavior challenges are getting cut. But we're keeping cops in schools. This is a clear escalation and expansion of the school-to-prison pipeline. And it's going to absolutely disproportionately impact students of color and low-income students.
00:54:07
Speaker
And I know that Edmonton likes to have examples of other cities who have been at first and Toronto has already gotten rid of their school resource officers. So we have a great example of what can happen if we continue to push, but also maybe they could just shortcut this whole thing and just realize it's not useful and it's damaging to our communities and it puts us at danger. So you can just cut that right now.
00:54:35
Speaker
Yeah, like the Minneapolis schools, like they just, just in the middle of what's going on there, they just terminated their contract with the local police force.
Elections and Community Safety Without Police
00:54:45
Speaker
I don't think, I don't think this request for information is needed, but I think, I think this, this crop of school board trustees that we have are
00:54:53
Speaker
are pretty cowardly and pretty resistant to change. And I think we are going to need to apply a lot of pressure to them. And I also think that when we talk about both of these levels of government, both city council and school board trustees, the elections are coming next fall, October 2021.
00:55:10
Speaker
we will have the opportunity to elect new ones. And school board trustee elections are relatively low barrier, and you don't need to raise like $100,000 to win them. People with less resources can get into them. And if you are interested in learning more about running to be a school board trustee, I would be happy to chat with you. It's an awesome offer. I love it. I hope people take it. The one thing I think we want to end on is,
00:55:39
Speaker
This has come up a lot. I don't know what's happened on your walls and amongst your family members and friends and acquaintances and people who you went to college with, but all of this police defunding talk has come up. Quite often what I have run into is people essentially talking through their greatest fears and concerns if we get rid of police.
00:56:02
Speaker
And I think it's worth talking through a few of those scenarios in our final segment here. And I'll offer up a first one, and then maybe we can riff from there. But on the various Facebook walls and Instagram DMs and all of these things, one thing that consistently comes up when we talk about police defunding
00:56:29
Speaker
And, you know, people's fears is who is going to stop serial killers or, you know, rapists, like the very worst and most violent among us. And I mean, this is an interesting question. I mean, this is, I mean, one, we live in a culture that produces cultural products all the time that are focused on like serial killers and the worst people doing terrible things to innocent folks.
00:56:58
Speaker
It's worth pointing out that one, this is a tiny proportion of overall police work. And two, that cops are relatively bad at finding serial killers or even just investigating murders where people don't turn themselves in or they're not standing over a dead body.
00:57:15
Speaker
The two most prominent serial killers of the past 25 years are Robert Picton, who murdered Indigenous sex workers for the most part, and the man in Toronto who preyed on racialized gay men in the queer village. And because those people weren't white or wealthy, they were not a priority for the police, and those murderers were able to continue.
00:57:46
Speaker
I don't know. What are the other kind of like scenarios that you've been running through and talking through with people who you're kind of bringing along on the kind of police defunding train?
00:57:59
Speaker
Um, I know that one that I've heard, um, when I've been talking to people that I think is, you know, this is a really important discussion to have. Um, and it's important discussion to take seriously is what about, um, domestic abuse and rape. Um, and I think, you know, the best response to that is, um, cops don't prevent domestic abuse or sexual assault. Um, they almost, when they do respond, which is almost never, um,
00:58:27
Speaker
It's always after the fact. It does not center the person who has experienced the harm in any way. Often it takes away those people's choices in terms of how they want to proceed, how they want to heal, how they want to see justice being undertaken.
00:58:44
Speaker
And when you look at the statistics, particularly around sexual assault, very few, and a lot of these statistics because of the way that people see sexual assault and rape happening tend to be focused on sort of cis women. So very few, it's quite a low percentage of women that actually even go to the cops and report a rape.
00:59:11
Speaker
out of those very few rapists ever see even trial and a tiny percentage. I think it's, you know, I think it's like less than 5% ever see any sort of consequences anyway.
00:59:23
Speaker
And so, you know, police, police aren't actually keeping anybody safe, or even really, you know, getting justice even you know if we define justice, sort of in, in sort of a strictly carceral sense even even in that sense, people aren't seeing any justice.
00:59:41
Speaker
And it also ignores the fact that cops are a huge source of domestic and sexual abuse. I've seen stats that estimate that 40% of cops are domestic abusers. Policing is incredibly misogynistic occupation and it draws in misogynists and seems to reward them with big salaries and great benefit packages.
01:00:07
Speaker
You can also look at the example of Val d'Or Quebec, where 37 women, I think most if not all of them indigenous, came forward with allegations of rape from Quebec cops. And, you know, if we're talking about oversight, and even independent oversight or crown oversight, I think only one of those cops ever
01:00:31
Speaker
you know, saw any consequences for that. And, you know, there's tons and tons of anecdotal stories from BIPOC women in particular of cops sexually abusing, harassing and raping us. So again, I think it's, you know, we are taught over and over again that cops protect us from other people. But, you know, when we start to dig into
01:00:57
Speaker
you know, gendered violence in particular, the question, you know, needs to be who's protecting us for cops. I think
01:01:06
Speaker
We also need to lean in how we to better understand how we can take care of each other and how we can take responsibility for each other's safety. I recently wrote an article with Rachel's dollars, a prof and transformative justice advocate out in Halifax about like what it means for
01:01:33
Speaker
us to be each other's business. And I know this is something that I've been saying and maybe people are going to get tired of it. But even if you think of, say the biggest profile example of this, right? Like Michael Jackson and the kids that he abused.
01:01:49
Speaker
So many people knew that this was happening and so many people did nothing. And we know that these stories happen over and over and over in our communities, wherein an individual is causing harm and because it doesn't really feel like it's our business,
01:02:10
Speaker
We don't necessarily intervene. And we really need to transform that sentiment, especially when it comes to domestic violence and domestic abuse. The criminal legal system isn't doing anything for these issues. And I think that even folks entranced crowns, defense, everybody knows that the criminal legal system is not
01:02:32
Speaker
doing well with dealing with sexual violence in our communities. And so I would really like us to reflect on what it means to look out for one another and what it means to like kind of be nosy, like find out what's going on in the lives of your close friends and take responsibility for their safety because we are the only ones that are going to be able to keep ourselves safe.
01:03:00
Speaker
It's up to us, right? If we're going to defund the police and abolish police in prisons, we are going to have to figure out radically different and awesome ways of taking care of each other. And that's what you're talking about is the start of doing that, right?
Conclusion: Pursuing Justice Through Community Efforts
01:03:15
Speaker
I think, I think that said it all. That was an incredible, great, generative way. I think it's going to leave people feeling like, you know, Oh, there is a way out of this. Sorry. I've just been so grumpy this evening, just being like a cop bullshit. Um, so thank you very cash for, for taking it in that direction. I think that's really important.
01:03:33
Speaker
No problem. I think I learned that in poetry, where if you take someone to a really dark place, you do have to let them know where the door is at. And I think that for myself, just in order for me to be okay, I've been really globbing onto this transformative justice work because it can be so devastating to see
01:03:54
Speaker
us die over and over and over and over and over and over. And to see no one doing anything about it. And so trying to find tools to that, you know, bring me hope and also just like give us skills. It avoids despair, like literally from my own self. Yeah, totally.
01:04:15
Speaker
Totally. And I think, I think too, just for the random listener, you know, like people turn off when, you know, they're not given at least like, you know, some, some hopes and positivity that, yeah, that open door. Um, yeah. And I tend to, yeah, I tend to get to, to a little too grumpy about that sometimes. So yeah, thanks again. I don't think it's too grumpy.
01:04:41
Speaker
Well, thank you so much, Rakesh and Molly for coming on the pod again. These have been two really, really fantastic conversations. I'm very grateful you took the time. Of course. That's it, folks. That's it for this podcast. If you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear, you can reach me on Twitter at Duncan Kinney. You can also reach me by email at DuncanK at progressalberta.ca.
01:05:07
Speaker
I usually don't do this, but if you want to reach out to these folks on Twitter, what's the best way for people to follow you online, Raykash? Just my Twitter handle at r-e-a-k-a-s-h, which also happens to be my first name. First Raykash on Twitter, nice.
01:05:28
Speaker
And Molly, uh, I also am on Twitter, probably too much. Uh, and you can find me at Oda Pemsu, which is O-T-I-P-E-M-S-I-W. Yeah. And I'll put both those handles in the show notes as well. They're very good follows. I do recommend following Rekesh and Molly. Um, yeah, that's it folks.