Dr. Jeff Shantz challenges the framing of police reform by examining how law enforcement agencies actively expand into social sectors like mental health and education. The piece argues that true change requires addressing the core of police power rather than relying on recurring, systemic reforms.
Original: OPINION: What do we actually want the police to do?
Thank you for publishing a thoughtful reflection on the role of policing and the limitations of familiar reform attempts. Given the power that police are granted and exercise in society (including armed power and lethal force) communities must always ask pressing questions about policing. And assess why documented harms of policing, from killings of civilians to sexual assaults to racial profiling to corruption and abuse of power keep happening.
Unfortunately, the article frames the issue incorrectly, removing the agency of police themselves in their expansion into social problems such as homelessness, mental health care, poverty, and education. Rather than passive players left to pick up slack, police (and police associations) have actively pushed themselves into areas that should not be part of policing.
Layered policing programs expand police reach in these areas through community partnerships (as in mental health teams) that expand police funding and reach. And typically, police remain the lead authority in these partnerships. We need to properly fund and resource social supports outside of, and autonomous from, police.
Police also actively resist community calls for defunding police and a redirection of limited city funds into community and social resources. We see this in debates over police in schools. While communities have raised concerns about harms of these programs, especially for racialized and Indigenous students, and in some cases removed officers, police have fought to return officers. This has culminated in Ontario with the provincial government imposing police on schools now.
Criminological research tells us that the problems of policing are systemic and, therefore, recurring. Police cultures of defensiveness and insularity play parts in this. This is reflected in notions of the “blue wall of silence” or, more problematically, the “thin blue line” that presents a hostile us versus them stance by police against communities. Reforms are often panaceas, not solutions.
I have attended and observed numerous coroners’ inquests into killings by police. In each case the jury recommendations involve familiar suggestions like training and body cameras. Yet, during their testimony officers regularly report that they cannot remember the specifics of training they have received on issues like mental health or cultural sensitivity. They do remember their arms training, however.
And criminological research shows that body cameras have no correspondence with reduced police violence. They sometimes show a negative correspondence (violence increases). Body cameras are largely about surveillance.
Reforms do not change the nature of policing. If we want to address the harms of policing, we need to get to the core of police power itself.
Dr. Jeff Shantz
Department of Criminology
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Surrey, British Columbia
