Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

dbergh, Again, my personal position was simply that the phrase 'defunding the police' was a mistake because different people had very different idea about what the fuck it meant.

In this i'd expect you could sub the USA for Canada:

CONCLUSION

Most people now define “defunding” as the reprioritization and redistribution of public resources to improve community safety. To that end, the defund movement is likely to remain a part of the Canadian discourse on improving policing and, more broadly speaking, community safety and well-being.

While calls for defunding in both the United States and Canada may not have achieved immediate reforms, important and progressive changes are well underway in many cities and towns across Canada as to how policing and community safety are organized and delivered. The direct impact of the defund movement on many of these reforms is hard to pin down. But while some proponents of a system recalibration seek immediate solutions to complex issues, progressive communities and their human service agencies are taking carefully considered approaches to get to much the same place. In other words, most stakeholders are not against a recalibration. But these are complex systems. The capacities of alternative service providers must be developed and stress-tested operationally before making wholesale changes in how community safety services are delivered and how corresponding budgets are re-distributed. Recent observations by Micki Ruth, the former president of the Canadian Association of Police Governance and former chair of the Edmonton Police Commission, are on point:

Yes, they [the police] take the bulk of the money because they’re the only players in the field [responding to these calls]… Until we get other people—health, social services, education, a bunch of the standalone non-profits and charities who are all sort of all playing in their own ballpark—until there are those people coordinated and at the table, then when you call somebody at 3 o’clock in the morning, the only number you have [is] the police.
(Cardoso & Hayes, 2020)

There are no silver bullets, but progressive change to policing and community safety and well-being are well underway in many centres across Canada. Our communities will continue to benefit from informed dialogue and debate on these important issues, with common language and terminology as centre points.

https://www.journalcswb.ca/index.php/cswb/article/view/315/881