 So I welcome everyone to our event today. I would like to thank Adelina of 10 a and the criminal justice coalition for today's event called defunding the police, defining the way forward for HRM. I'm Sierra Vitao I'm your moderator for today's event. I'm a second year student at the Schulich School of Law, and the current vice president of careers of the Dalhousie criminal law students Association. Before I introduce our speakers today, I would like to hand it over to Kelsey Jones, who is the director of the indigenous black and make my program at the law school to give our land acknowledgement for tonight. Good evening everyone. I would like to begin this event by acknowledging that we are on Mcmaughey the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mcmaughey people. This territory is covered by the treaties of peace and friendship, which Mcmaughey lost to wig and pass Mcquaddy's people first signed with the British crown in 1726. The treaties did not deal with the surrender of lands and resources but in fact recognized Mcmaughey and will lost to wig title and establish the rules for what was to be an ongoing relationship between nations. We are all treaty people. I also would like to recognize the over 400 year history of communities of African descent in Nova Scotia and the 52 African Nova Scotian communities throughout the region today. Have a good evening everyone. Thank you very much for that Kelsey. I'd like to introduce our speakers. First we have L Jones. L is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, along with numerous awards and accolades for her achievements. L has received your PhD in cultural studies from Queens University, and is an assistant professor in the department of political and Canadian studies at St. Mount St. Vincent University. L if you'd like to could you please just give a brief description of your role for this report. And thank you everybody for having us and for all the work that went into creating this event I know it takes a lot of work on the back end. I was the, I mean, it's not really a hierarchical thing so officially I was the chair of the subcommittee to define defunding the police but that was very collective work it wasn't work that like one person controlled. It was work that we all did together so whether people's names are, you know, on the head of the report or not isn't really relevant. So this is based in generations of work that came before us and then really trying to create a different kind of process so I was part of the team that was writing trying to engage with community, trying to push this forward but there was so many other people around that as well. Our next speaker is Jennifer Taylor, Jen graduated from the Sheila School of Law in 2008 and currently practices at Stuart McKelvie here in Halifax. She's active in the community acting as a mentor for the Dalhousie feminist legal association. And she's also a member of the Nova Scotia policing policy working group. Welcome Jen, could you please introduce yourself and your role on the panel. Sure. Thank you, Sierra. I got into this work because of the Nova Scotia policing policy working group that have a mouthful, but we're a subcommittee of the East Coast Prison Justice Society, and we started working together back in the summer of 2020. And that led into working on this report and supporting L and the rest of the community. In terms of the nuts and bolts of the report I helped with the writing and did a lot of editing so you can blame me for any typos that you find. I'm sure there won't be many Jen. My last speaker today is Harry Critchley. Harry is a third year law student at the Sheila School of Law with extensive experience in community legal work. He is the current co-chair of the East Coast Prison Justice Society, the vice chair of the Board of Directors for the Elizabeth Fry Society of the Nova Scotia and a member of the Halifax Board of Police commissioners. Welcome, Harry. Thanks, Sierra. I really appreciate the introduction and all the work that I know went into this event. Thanks so much to the Criminal Justice Coalition in particular. To echo what Al said, the report and the work that went into it was really a collective effort. There was a large number of subcommittee members drawn from different communities in the HRM who contributed their insights and their perspectives who provided feedback on drafts of the report. I wasn't actually on the subcommittee, I was brought on to assist with some of the research, particularly around doing literature views looking at what are new programs and projects being highlighted in different jurisdictions, what are best practices. So I played a role in doing some of that research and supervising student volunteers who also assist with research and then in the writing. I guess one other thing I will say is I did a lot of that before I was on the Halifax Board of Police commissioners. And I am now a member of that board. And so I'm here tonight to speak as an author, as a contributor to the report. But nothing that I'm going to say is representative of the view of Halifax Police Board, Halifax Police or the City of Halifax. So I just wanted to get that out of the way. Sarah, can I just jump in? I forgot to shout out Francesco and Mariah, who are two Shuluk law students who did some research and writing for this report through the Pro Bono Dalhazi program. So shout out to them and thank you. Thank you all so much. And thank you for the work that you and your team has put into this. So before getting into asking about the content of the report, specifically the recommendations, I wanted to ask about the circumstances sort of leading to the initiation of the report. What sort of issues did you find were happening in HRM and nationally or cross nationally. That means you realize that this was something that needed to be undertaken as a task. I'll go first and then maybe we can reverse order or something later. The first thing I want to say just to situate this a little bit is that while defunding kind of swept into the public consciousness in 2020 particularly following George Floyd, it is certainly not a new idea nor is it a new tactic. In the seminar with Andrea Rich yesterday and she reminded us that of course during enslavement defunding demands were made. The sugar boycotts for example, not one more drop of blood every grain of sugar a drop of blood the very famous, am I not a man and a brother, China that was sold right so that was a defunding demand defund slavery. It was a giant global defunding demand stop funneling money into a country that uses this to militarize and police in order to keep black people oppressed. The Black Panther plan. One of the 10 points was a defunding demand, put money into housing education jobs, right so throughout history, there have been these demands and this has been used as a strategy and tactic by virtually every justice movement. And framing it as defunding may seem relatively new to people, and particularly people who became to this discourse in 2020, but is in fact a very historic. It comes out of a long legacy of action in black communities and indigenous communities in social justice communities in general. In 2020, people became aware of, you know, this phrase that was going around defund the police, including our board of police that was trying to engage in debate upon what this meant, but came up with a definition The definition was have the police do policing tasks and have them not do non policing tasks. So beyond being a circular definition the problem with that is everything the police do becomes policing tasks and part of the problem in fact, as we've downloaded so many responsibilities to the police is the policing tasks have grown to be virtually everything in society like we've, the police have gradually be not only funded more but also we've seen their areas of responsibility increase so that was a definition that didn't mean anything. Through the policy working group, we wrote a letter critiquing that, and we are engaging with them trying to get something different, and that's what the defunding report came out of so when I engaged with the board through. As we was sort of saying, Okay, this definition doesn't work. They initially just wanted a definition that did work essentially so they're like okay well you give us a definition. We went back to the policy working group and thought about what would it mean what did we actually want what would be the point of the definition. And amongst ourselves, we recognize that the problem wasn't defining defunding the problem was putting it into action defining that in policy, shifting a lot of the public ideology around policing thinking about the role of policing and discipline and control and punishment in our society something we're seeing happening in auto right now that's kind of forcing a conversation about police. And to do something and engage with those bigger ideas and not just said okay it's is this this and this and that's where the report came from and particularly our insistence upon that this must be done in a way that publicly engaged that engaged to the people like service organizations who, if we were defunding police would be the ones picking up those roles so we really wanted to create a bit of an ecosystem around this definition and something really practical to show that these aren't ideas that are just theoretical like I said they're not brand new. They're not strange. They're treated as radical and new but they're actually quite practical so in creating a report we wanted something that was very evidence based that had a lot of data that had these jurisdictional scans to show that if these things aren't taking place is not because they're imaginary is actually because of choices that are made by police boards and councils and because and often a lack of imagination and social policy and often then just a lack of reality and social policy. And that our conception of what policing is and what policing actually does our desires for police versus how policing actually looks like on the ground those are often very different so we wanted something to try and intervene in that and also take the conversation that had been happening where people like, okay take money from police and give it to housing we wanted to sort of enter that space of how, how might that take place. What does that look like if a board or council or municipality undertook that work so that was really where the report was grounded and I'll let the other two people take it from here. Yeah maybe I'll just say a few words L about the working group. The working group is, you know, it's not the author of the report but you know like that, for instance, like my role as assisting research came from East Coast Prison Justice which you know it's Jen mentioned, the working group is part of. And so I just want to say a little bit about kind of how that got started. And really that's has to do with personal relationships right so East Coast Prison Justice as an organization we've been around since 2017 and a number of people, Dr for example is is a member of East Coast Prison Justice, quite involved with one of our projects regarding human rights monitoring and provincial jails. In the organization for a long time we had a very strong focus on working with assisting and advocating for people in the provincial jails. And we've worked on a number of legal advocacy legal research legal education projects for people in that area. Starting in 2018, we initiated a project which kind of culminated in 2019 on deaths in care and custody. And so, unfortunately, working with people in custody and the families of people in custody. It is a reality that large number of people died in really horrific circumstances. And when that happens, the families of those individuals are often left basically totally in the dark right there, they're shut down entirely by the Department of Justice. They're shut down by the relevant government body that was, you know, in charge of taking care of that person. A really good example is there was a fellow who died for incite jail in 2014, Clay Cromwell, and his family is still fighting for unredacted report into how he died. You know now, nearly eight years later. And so, we started to work with a number of these families. And at that time there was a problems was trying to push through some really horrific amendments to a piece of legislation called the Fatality Investigation Act. So, this is all a bit roundabout right I swear I'll bring it back to policing. And Nova Scotia is one of only three provinces in Canada, where if someone dies in the care custody of the government, there's not a mandatory independent inquiry. So most other provinces in Canada, basically everywhere, Quebec and to the west, if someone dies in government care custody so that could be a psychiatric facility a jail group home for a child. There's not a mandatory independent process initiated either through the coroner's office or through the medical examiner, which turns into what's called a fatality inquiry, which is usually headed by a judge. And we're one of three provinces in Canada, where it's discretionary. It's actually at the discretion of you the medical examiner which is a political appointment, or the minister to decide whether to do one of those inquiries. In fact, being discretionary we don't do them very often. There was one done in 2009 called the Hyde Inquiry, and there was the restorative inquiry into the School for Color Children, and then now there's an inquiry. And that's despite the fact that over a dozen people have died in provincial jails and federal prisons in Nova Scotia in the last 10 years. And, you know, in many many of those cases people called for public inquiries. Through doing that work a number of us got connected with the family of a fellow named Corey Rogers, and Corey died in the Halifax Drunk Tank in 2016, and his mother, Jeanette Rogers, who's in her late 70s, is I think the most courageous person that I know. She has basically worked tirelessly since Corey's death to push for not only first accountability but then progressive reform. So Corey's death was a really tragic one and really, really unnecessary. Corey had longstanding substance use disorder, and he was arrested outside of the IWK after becoming highly intoxicated when he wasn't allowed to see his newborn baby. He self harmed on the way to the police station. But despite the self harm and despite the fact that he was basically catatonic by the time they arrived at the station, the police decided not to take him to the hospital. Instead what they did was they put a spit hood on his head, which was a mesh bag. And that bag was never removed and ultimately he is fixated and died in the Drunk Tank. And so, you know, this has led to a variety of different legal proceedings. There's a civil matter that settled. There's disciplinary matters which settled late last year. There's ongoing criminal matters that were appealed and now are going to be retried to missionaries. So we started working quite a lot with Miss Rogers on a number of her matters. And in particular was after the two civilian staff who were implicated in Corey's death were charged criminally. One of the retorts from the police was that there was insufficient staffing in the Drunk Tank. There weren't simply weren't enough staff there for them to supervise everyone safely. And that derived from a finding at the trial, which was that despite the fact that they were required by policy to do checks every 15 minutes. They were checking them every four hours or so, and that's how he managed to die. And so, we thought this was just absolutely crazy that in response to the tragic death of an individual it basically directly as a result of the criminalization of substance use that you would invest more resources into a failed system. So together with Jeanette and another one of our members Dr. Lee again she was a doctor with mobile every street health. We spoke to the board and said look, this is not an evidence based solution. You know you shouldn't be criminalizing mental health and substance use issues. And here's an example it's used around Canada we did some research we found this example of a sobering center, right as a civilian alternative. One other thing that I wanted to mention is that Dr. Jones was at that same board meeting as well raised a lot of very similar issues regarding lack of accounting really with the board. And I can tell you that Dr. Jones is treated markedly different than I was in Dr. Genshwer, you know, to the point where a former commissioner asked Dr. Jones at the end of her presentation whether she had anything nice to say about the police. And so that was the kind of standard that we were dealing with early on. And so that was all sort of in the background we were doing this early work, eventually the worker on sobering centers has kind of culminated and now the city is going to invest in the model. Hopefully actually even in this in the new fiscal year will will get started here in health tax which is very exciting. But just to echo L's point that defunding obviously has a long tradition of black and indigenous communities. But it also kind of fits with our, our intuitions about best practices and evidence based solutions right that, you know there's that classic quote that is the definition of insanity to do the same thing twice and expect a different result. Right. And that was sort of the tragedy associated with Corey and his death. And he spelled that out very clearly because his death was was an unavoidable one and it wasn't actually unique one there's a number of individuals, both specifically in health facts and in Nova Scotia and across Canada who died in certain settings in the last couple of years. In HRM alone there's been three people who died in the last five years, sorry last 10 years. And so that's just a bit of background and that was specifically how our organization is because prison justice came to be involved with the working group. Thank you so much, Harry. Before I turn it over to you Jennifer I just wanted to remind participants that you are able to ask questions, just in the Q&A box at the bottom there. Sure, I'll just I don't have a ton to add to my brilliant co-panelist comments. Well said, you know defunding can seem like such a complex and radical concept and like we wrote a 218 page report. We didn't just give the board a definition and move on right like we did give this a lot of substantive attention but also as I said we need to really think about defunding in a practical sense and something that also happened in June 2020 when we were starting our advocacy was the armored vehicle purchase cancellation here in Halifax. I think it was in 2019 that council had decided to buy an armored vehicle like a giant tank for the Halifax regional police. I didn't play in the media at that time but not a not a ton until the murder of George Floyd really prompted this re-examination of how we spend our municipal money on policing here in Halifax. And there was a huge public outcry and council voted to cancel the purchase of the armored vehicle. It's such a really concrete anecdote of how defunding can work and practice, because council also decided to take that money and put it towards anti-black racism initiatives. And we can discuss whether that has happened or has been effective, but I think it really shows the two key pieces of defunding which are, you do have to look at the money, funding is in the word, but you also have to reimagine where the money you're taking away from the police can go. So I think it's really important for people to read up on that if they're looking for a concrete example that happened here in Halifax. That's great. Thank you all so much for that. And as was mentioned by Al and Jennifer you as well, the difficulty with the definition of defunding and Harry just your anecdote to how Dr. Jones was received after discussing her presentation. We know that terms like defunding and detasking police are often met with sometimes be him in opposition. And I find a lot of times that opposition comes from a place of misunderstanding, or just not understanding the full picture of what those terms actually mean. So I would like to ask the panel here. What does defunding and detasking the police mean in terms of the report that you created here. And can you provide some examples that we can use for context just to understand that. There you go ahead. I know you like to talk about the pillars. I do like the pillars. Well, I guess. When we as L said right the the simple thing is, is binding the thing. You know it's this idea of, you know, and as Jennifer mentioned, taking the money away from one thing and reimagining where to where else could go. Well, we really wanted to put some meat on the bones of kind of operationalize the idea. And so we came up with this idea of four pillars. And the idea really was to have an expanding circle right so that was we started with things that are internal to the operation to place themselves and then kind of branching out towards larger social reforms. And I think a basic idea that underlies the reform, the whole kind of sweeter reforms and recommendations that make up the different pillars was kind of twofold. So one was the idea that they should be measured and they should be drawn from kind of community perspectives and community by and right so you know they should be drawn from the community and they should be reflective of the community. And then the second piece which I don't think we ever say explicitly the report because maybe move it to academic but was kind of this difference between and maybe I'll can say a bit more about this, what are called reformist reforms and non reformist reforms. And this is an idea that Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, I always associate with her with this idea that there are certain kinds of reforms that keep the structure and keep the problem in place, but just placate it or address the symptoms. And so a classic example I think in the policing context is body cameras, right, it raises the, the budget. It creates all sorts of other associated issues with privacy. There's limited research to suggest that actually does do the thing that we wanted to do. But it keeps the structure of policing more or less the same, and it keeps our social structures more generally the same. And an on reformist reforms are ones that don't do that. Right, they basically are aimed at changing the social structure right and changing real material conditions for people. And so I think those are the kind of the two ideas underlying the sorts of reforms that were recommended right in the pillars. And I think that comes through and in a really two really concrete ways so one is I've already mentioned is this, you know, we explicitly recommend against body cameras. We went through, they've done these really really extensive meta analyses, which are sort of gold standard social science, and concluded that there's not really statistically significant evidence at this point to suggest that they are effective in the ways that we want them to be. And that research has been done both in Canada and the United States. And so citing that we sort of say like, in light of the cost and the other implications of this practice right the privacy implications for example, we're not in support of it. And then another one that I think maybe surprised a little bit more was that we we didn't recommend any further training. And training is a very, very common recommendation in virtually every kind of report dealing with policing. And we cite a couple examples where training recommendations have been presented, for example in the warthly report. He recommends that the police implement mandatory anti bias training. And basically, in keeping with this idea of non reformist reforms. We didn't recommend training for sort of two reasons. The first was that there's not a lot of accountability methods in place to ensure that the police actually follow through and do the training that's requested. And that's for example the case. And that was a test with the anti bias training from warthly. So you had earlier this last year, Nova Scotia human rights for being a decision which came forward and found that the journey to change program one of the anti racism programs at the pilot stage. It's totally optional. And it's only been delivered to a very small percentage of officers. And their other program, which isn't an anti racist program was just called bias free police. It was offered once in 2009 and then not again until 2018. Right so there's real serious gaps in terms of actually their delivery of these programs. And then the second piece was, there's not a lot of, we couldn't guarantee that the training would fulfill the purpose that we want it to fill, right that we would address the concerns that we have. And for instance, I noted that Chris Jack in the Tony I was here right and used to be the researcher for each of you. And so we cite something that he wrote, right, where he looked at the efficacy of a program that the police did called verbal judo, which was a de escalation program. And Chris is an excellent social scientist and he looked at 15 markers of behavioral change. And he found that there's only statistically significant change in five of them. And they were the most basic ones right and they have to do with things like introducing yourself right and saying what your name was, and that there wasn't significant change in the more complex ones. And that another piece of the research that he found was that the effect of the training went down as officer experience went up. Right, so that was another example right that kind of guided by this idea of non performance reforms. We weren't that interested to recommend more training. Maybe I'll turn it over to Elbow to talk a little bit about the other pillars or I could say a bit more about that. I'm trying to make you talk because you don't get to do Harry obviously because he's on the board doesn't get to do a lot of these events so I have, I'm like let's defer let's let Harry speak a bit. The heart for many people of defunding is detasking, which you can also think of as retasking as in retasking community. And that's quite simply removing tasks from the police and placing them where they can be either more efficiently done, better done more appropriately done. The biggest example of this is mental health interventions of course. In health facts currently we do not have cop free mental health intervention so if you call the mobile mental high crisis unit which many people think is like not calling the police. It is still accompanied by plain clothes officers. And as a result there have been many many incidents where people have called for help, thinking that they're going to get paramedics are going to get a counselor or something and you get police in a case that years ago there was a family whose daughter took LSD, and then began basically tripping in her room so they know they called for help and the police came in and ended up tasing her I believe and she was left covered in bruises in her own bedroom. When all her parents wanted was help and there's of course many many many cases of this. We know that 60% of fatal interactions with the police begin with mental health calls and of course that intersects with race with immigration status language status. So that's a really sort of popular and very familiar example right that many many people even if they will say overall they don't support the funding. Most people, by the way, including many police themselves agree that the police are not equipped to do this work they're not trained social workers they're not crisis interveners they don't have the capacity to connect people to other services so that's a really perhaps a very common familiar example to people the idea that why other police engaged in intervening and what is a health crisis. Harry mentioned the Hyde report that began with mental health crisis this is a man who was in a mental health crisis his family called to help and because he was on a warrant he was like returned to the cells. I think he had some prior criminalization and he was on a warrant don't let me get it wrong but he had you know because he was a privately criminalized person he ended up in the cells instead of in a hospital and he ended up in the cells and this happens over and over again the intersection of criminalization and mental health has resulted in so many deaths. So, it seems obvious, I would think that continuing to involve the police in this at such a high cost of fatality of injury. It doesn't make sense when we have organizations that are equipped to counsel people to intervene in people, and of course a quite famous program is cahoots in Oregon, which has been operating for two decades without police involved, and has not had a single death. So, we have overblown idea that well you need to please because of the risk is shown that that risk actually, it can be managed. And of course, should you enter a situation where the person, there's a feeling that there's a weapon, or there's a risk of course the police is still the same call away that they would be anyway so that is one example but our report looked at other areas as well traffic, sexual assault reporting. And of course people are very familiar with this as well that the majority of sexual assaults are not reported. So, if 0.6% of sexual assaults end up in any kind of conviction, we do not have a system that is at all effective intervening in sexual violence yet that is the issue probably most often used when you say that you believe in defunding people say well what about sexual assaults. Don't you care about women. So, we have an example of Kerry low and as Harry indicated before so often we seem police failures their responses to say well we just needed more resources and more offers are seeing this in Ottawa right now right. Well, what we really needed is more officers and of course the people in Ottawa saying but you have the power to hand out tickets all along there was an injunction you weren't enforcing it like this isn't, they didn't have resources is that you made choices deliberately not to do things. This is all the time in policing. If we're familiar with the case of Kerry low. It wasn't the problem that there weren't enough officers. They didn't investigate for a year because they did not believe her and studies show that police continue to believe in rape myths, continue to believe in the idea of victim behavior certain types of victim and as Kerry discovered. And she was actually on the subcommittee so she was part of doing this work. In her case the police police she was a lying drunk. And so they didn't bother to pursue the case so it wasn't a personnel or a resource issue. It was that the police did not feel motivated as she's calling them being like you're going to pick up my clothes are you going to go to the site so we see this over and over again. And so far from the idea that while we need the police, because otherwise, you know sexual assault be running rampant, we know that in fact in many cases the police are an obstacle to investigating sexual assault, and to making victims feel safe and heard. So third party sexual assault reporting is something we talk about in this report, which is using again people and we have a small version like we have a version of this through the same program right through Avalon where you can get the nurse you can get your rate kit and you don't have to move forward with a criminal investigation, if you don't want to. And so by removing the police from the reporting, more people, particularly people from racialized and communities communities that might be like somebody who doesn't have status that scared of being on the radar because you could be deported, somebody that is a sex worker and doesn't want police investigating her people that are scared of the police or the police, right that these communities can still report, we got a much better picture of what is happening because you're much more able to see the assault that isn't being reported. There's still an option should people wish to move forward with a criminal case, and also of course these organizations are much more equipped to connect people to trauma services to do the counseling that people need, and it is more effective so these are other examples. So the point is that this isn't something that's like so strange, or you know this like so out of the way that you just can't say this like you just want to destroy the fabric of society is in fact, as I said examples of the way that we've in fact, in so many ways, defunded every other service and then expected the police to fill that role and that is not the soul like that's not just because of the police we can't just lay that at the feet of the police. This is a result of what I think is a radical shift in social policy, particularly since the 1970s of disinvesting from the public, disinvesting from the collective good, disinvesting from health and education and treatment and all the other things that keep people safe. And then, in that gap, saying well let's fund the police over and over and over again and then when there's a problem if there's an unhoused person, who we show in the report we can't just unhouse a police this incredible amount so there's so much money spent repeatedly for example giving an unhoused person a ticket that they cannot and will not pay. Not only is that an incredible waste of resources, but it ends up criminalizing that person because now when they don't pay, they have a breach, and then you are seen as being in contempt of court you don't pay attention to court orders but it's not believe in the power of the court or you're deliberately being a scoff law you simply do not have the resources to engage in the system, and then because you have breaches, you can actually end up in jail, or end up with these criminal penalties that set people into this cycle of criminalization. So it's not just an inefficient use of police resources. It also becomes an inefficient use of the jail resource at $270 a day to keep somebody in jail, then you know the court mechanism so we see this overall over the time that when you start identifying this, this gets treated as this like strange thing to say but in fact it has been strange to involve the police in that. When you put it that way isn't it strange to have police going and putting a ticket on somebody's tent isn't that stranger than saying maybe they shouldn't. Isn't it strange to have something that's literally called health mental health and then involve non health professionals. Isn't it strange to not have trauma informed people in charge of one of the most intimate violations that take place in somebody's life. And I should have said people of all genders are victims of assault and all gender identities and particularly queer and trans people and people with disabilities it's not just women. You know like isn't it like stranger to do that so this is part of what we're engaging in the report the last thing I'll say very quickly I know these are long answers I'm sorry it's complex questions is that to a certain extent yes some of the languages around people not being familiar terms and some of it is a deliberate way that terrain is wielded right that it we could use any language if so decided all defundings are a good slogan if we called it boycotting or divesting it would be the same thing because it's the often ideas it turned into culture wars and we see this in some of the response where I think people were in many ways looking what they thought was going to be like a woke man against the police, which then could be discredited as just, you know, oh these wokeies, and then when it's sourced and researched it's harder to dismiss and I'm not saying this people out there that aren't dismissing it, but it's harder to take a bad faith take and just say these people don't know what they're talking about when there's data. And so in some cases you've seen a shift to somehow then claiming that this is actually like conservative as one person said that these are actually conservative recommendations and I'm like well fine if they are that's great like then that means we agree, and maybe you should be yourself advocating to have policies made public because it is outrageous and conservatives as well should be outraged that we give so much money to these institutions like police and prisons, and have no transparency and accountability that should be a conservative issue. So often these things are taken up into the culture war, and then become charged, and it's not because of the content of the policy or whether it's good or not it's just it's the terrain of like this side and this side and this side and I agree I think that there are things that are very conservative and defunding that could be part of a conservative world view. Don't give people budgets if they can account for why don't you know endlessly download money into something that's proven not to work. These should be conservative values and if they're not it's actually a failure not of me, or of us, but of conservative social policies so yeah I think with language that it's true that for some people it's unfamiliarity you do see this a lot with people would say in the surveys I don't agree defunding, and then would like go on in the material to say things that would clear defunding principles like I don't think the police should be involved in mental health and like well that's defunding. We're often seeing this in Ottawa right if you're reading Twitter. A lot of people like well why are we paying you $328 million like to do nothing like a lot of people were basically having that defund conversation, and sometimes you see in the comments people being like I don't agree with defunding but I don't see why these people should get money and everyone's like that's defunding so you do agree with defunding so often people find that when they engage with the idea, even if they don't agree with all of it, even if they don't like some of the content, even if there's things that they think are you know defunding there's often common ground where people be like I don't agree with defunding but and then that but is actually many of the points that defunding is actually about and that is grounded in policy that already exists I'm sorry one more thing and then Jen you get to talk. Ali had a question and I just wanted to say yes exactly what do you ask the first question. I was going to immediately say yes as examples of indigenous policing and then you raise that so a really good example of shifting policing is like the bear clan that began in Winnipeg because they weren't getting service from the police, and just began walking their own streets in their own neighborhoods and handing out food and handing out clean needles and just talking to people and getting to know the people living on the street and intervening and that's very effective. Drag the Red is another example where particularly after Tina Fontaine where again, people are like you're not investigating these things in the community took it upon themselves to begin like patrolling the river and seeing if there were bodies there and, and so these are examples, particularly in indigenous communities where people have begun doing that work on a street level or in other forms like having police like on reserve that don't aren't armed in a part of the community. I don't want to romanticize those because many indigenous communities will say there are problems with some of that policing, but it provides other models where you can just saying that you don't believe in policing doesn't mean that you don't believe in like having social some form of discipline or accountability like it doesn't mean that everyone runs wild like the opposition the opposite to defunding the police is not complete anarchy let's all go murder each other like there are lots of other ways to imagine how we can still keep each other safe how we can still have accountability how we can deal with violence and harm that don't have to involve a tank or increased weapons, or giving more and more money into a system when they can never show us performance metrics when there's no relationship to the crime rate. So I also think that yes there are some very practical examples and sorry I talked a long time I didn't mean to go ahead Jen. I'll talk about anarchy since you mentioned it. Oh, I think that was a lot of the pushback that I was getting from some of the maybe older and more conservative people in my life when I first started helping out with this report. Well if we get rid of the police that's always what they say if we get rid of the police there will be anarchy. It is heartbreaking that we are actually seeing what's happening in Ottawa play out and that is pretty close to I think what a lot of us would have called anarchy and it's happening, despite slash because of the police. So it's a heartbreaking example it's very unfortunate that it's happening but it's also demonstrating some of what we've been trying to say in real life. The problem the other problem with the anarchy argument is that okay, maybe I today do not have an answer for what the world will look like with no police. But I do have many answers that my colleagues and I have put in this report for what we can do tomorrow to start chipping away at some of the problems that we have with policing. And if you're only focused on the end game, you're not necessarily going to take all the steps that we're recommending which are implementable right now. And the other thing I would say, for me personally like I'm a lawyer at a corporate law firm, I'm there right now sitting here in the dark that just turned the lights out. You know, these, I've had to rewire my brain, a little bit like I have always been critical of the police I did a moot in my third year of law school, arguing for basically a criminal code for police powers because the idea of common law police just kind of blew my mind. But I have had to become more disciplined about that kind of thinking and really try to rewire my brain and always approach the exercise of state power with a critical lens, and especially when that state power is backed up by the use of force. When I first started working with the working group, somebody a friend of mine from growing up said, how, who has a police officer in their family said to me, how would you feel if you know it was defund lawyers, for example, if that was the movement. And I think that was a fair point to an extent I understand that this kind of language might be very difficult for people who are in that who work in policing. But I don't carry a gun. No one's going to give me a tank, like the, the state authorization for police to use force I think requires all of us to examine that really critically I would encourage everybody to look at the regulations made under the Emergency Act and what they say about policing what they say about please peaceful assembly. I think, if you approach state power from a critical lens, you're probably going to come on board with defunding relatively easily. So, I'll end there. Thank you all so much for those answers that was terrific. Oh, sorry, Harry, did you want to add something. Maybe I'll just add that, you know, the heart of the report and I think what people have picked up on most is points around detasking. I think it's very easy for people that once once presented with lots of strong evidence right to say yeah you know that doesn't make sense that we would have to please be the first responder. You know, where do you have 20 years of evidence that you know an alternative model works. And I mean, you know that's the one thing that we really kind of gone across in those sections of the report is that these aren't kind of like new or radical programs right so even to go before the report like the example of sobering centers. That's something that exists in 30 municipalities in camp. Right so it's a pretty tried and true approach right we're not on the vanguard in any respect there. And that's true I think of all the detasking areas that we focus on right and just given the number of responses that we receive so we received close to 2400 survey responses we had six hours of public consultation. We did a large number of written submissions and correspondence. We had to kind of narrow down and we picked ones that we thought were representative of people's concerns but also very doable and very evidence based. And beyond that like the, the other kind of pillars of the approach, pretty basic stuff right so, you know, the reforms that are kind of internal to both the operations of the police, and the oversight of the police are things that I think maybe at this point like most people I think would get on board with, even if they were sort of fairly conservative right a lot of has to do with ensuring that things are done in an evidence based way that there's good value for money right so for instance we recommend to this point and made earlier about training that they do a review of training and they say well Howard decisions made about what training is offered and when and how can we get some evaluators in here to confirm that the training we're doing is effective and is keeping with the kinds of calls the police are responding to so for example, we note that in 2017, when they did that verbal judo training they get to two days annually of what's called block training. One day on verbal judo the de-escalation and one day on firearm recertification. You think, okay well that might give you the impression that the police spend half the time firing guns and half the time verbally de-escalating situations. That's not true right like if you look at the data that most police officers never fired their firearm, and most of the time, you know violent crime only makes up a very very tiny percentage of all the calls that police respond to and we corroborate that both with data that the HRP provided to us, but also kind of larger statistics from around Canada. And so that's that's an example right we just say look we should be getting value for money on these things we've got to evaluate these things to ensure that they're done properly. Well as we would in any other situation in any other business unit in New York Valley. And then on the social reform pieces. Again, it was, we received a huge number of submissions of a very very large number of perspectives, but the kind of what we end up settling on was kind of two main target areas right that came over and over again one was about access to affordable housing, and one was about mental health and substance use. And, you know, in the final two pillars of the report have to do with legislative and policy reforms on the one hand, and on the other hand, and again the things that we recommend there are fairly conservative right so we recommend that they, for instance, on the like in terms of a legislative reform, as it relates to substance use. We said that they should create a working group as they've done in Vancouver and Toronto and a number of other cities to develop a model for seeking exemption under the control drug and substance act for simple possession laws in in Halifax right so and then we also say that know the HRM can and show it and it's actually able to under the HRM charter the relevant legislation, able to fill gaps through grant programs where for mental health program so that's something that the HRM is not majorly unable to do right and know we think of mental health as primarily provincial responsibility, but there's actually no reason that the HRM can't play a role in filling some sort of those gaps. And on the housing front we did a similar thing we said, look, we need to dramatically increase our investment affordable housing, we went and looked at the data and we said, on a per capita basis, spending an HRM on housing is dramatically lower than other municipalities in Atlanta, Canada. It was about $2 per capita per year, and even the town of Yarmouth was spending $40 per year, right and St. John Brunswick was spending $100 per year and all those numbers are in the report for you to look at. And basically what we said was the funding should be aligned with other municipalities of comparable size, right, in terms of how much money we're spending. And then finally in terms of financial reforms. We also said you can apply those same principles to the police. And so we went and looked at the data and said well how much do we spend on a per capita basis for the HRP, looking at the population that that serves, in light of the fact that we are the one municipality in Canada that has two police forces. We said well if you just look at the HRP population, we actually spend significantly more per capita than most cities of our size, and the national average. And so we basically just say, try to align it with other cities of our size, right that's, you know, because we're so much higher right so to give you an example. In Ontario, a city of comparable size to Halifax, you spend $276 per capita on policing in the area serviced by HRP. It's closer to $350 right and again it's a little complicated because certain units within HRP are integrated. But, you know, that's that was the recommendation that we made so try to develop performance metrics trying to look at what they're doing elsewhere. And then finally, try to encourage greater participation on the part of citizens in the municipality in the budgeting process, right. We so the final recommendation that we make and I think it really undercurs everything is this idea of participatory budgeting, which is the idea that people in the city should have greater say about how their money is spent. And so we reckon we kind of lay out where they do participatory budgeting city actually already does it to a very limited extent. But we say, you know, this is the mechanism through which these other things can be accomplished, right, you know, let use participatory budgeting processes to identify what services and what programs are most relevant and most needed to particular communities right either at a district level. You know, within particular communities such as the African excursion community indigenous community, what's relevant to those populations right and empower people in the municipality take to actually buy in and engage the municipality right like, I don't think you need to even say but like the voting in the municipality is incredibly low most people are not engaged at the municipal level. And so as a final point we say, you know, yeah, all this is about public safety about developing any understanding of community, and part of that has to do with engaging with municipality. Right, so that's kind of the full suite of recommendations just to get back to your original question. Thank you so much Harry. After that was great I wanted to get into some of the recommendations just because we're getting really excellent questions in the chat here and I want to make sure that we have enough time to go over those. But before we get to that I just wanted to ask us specifically around chapter seven. We talked about broad social reforms, and I was hoping that the panel could speak to sort of the entities other than police that are needed to make your recommendations work. And do you want to go ahead first you haven't gone first yet. I'm about to sneeze sorry. So maybe I'll just speak to you recommendation 28, which talks about a municipal grant program. And again getting back to this idea that defunding has all kinds of complexities but part of it is about taking money away from pot a lot of it in other pots. And one of the reasons we didn't actually do a line by line here's how you defund the hell effects regional police was because a lot of our recommendations are about putting this money in social programming, but all of the social programs that we spoke with that the committee representatives are involved with that presented at our engagement session in June, they are so overloaded and strapped so it's not necessarily that an immediate influx of money is actually going to solve that problem. But the municipality does have the ability over the long term to create a grant program in our view that would help shore up some of these service providers and enable them hopefully to take on a lot more. And something we often see in this area is this jurisdictional battle how the facts loves to point its finger at the province and say that's a provincial responsibility. And that's all well and good but when you have a problem in your city you're the most immediate level of government that's able to respond. So I think that the grant program as part of that bigger basket of social recommendations is a really important piece because these organizations, social service providers need a lot more stable and predictable funding. So just to move away from specific recommendations for a minute. While the police are obviously the most visible. We see the police in the streets and we do focus on okay this officer did this but of course policing isn't just a practice it's an ideology. And we have to also accept that we have police because we want police right we believe in punishment and control. And I've been saying for example, with, I pointed out you know that when black people being policing coven there were no, they were no convoys for us right when Dr. Gola got run out of new Brunswick. And when the premier basically did all but name him like identified him false accused of spreading coven. It was black people that spoke up and everybody else gave us racist threats when in early in the pandemic there was a international student African international student who was arrested and put into jail in PI for breaking quarantine, because he had a mental health break. And again, nobody was talking about overreach of government that. So we know as I know as a black person that are on freedom is always treated as a normal and acceptable state. And the testimony comes into question when, to be frank the white majority feels that their freedom is being pressed right, and these are deeply embedded ideas these go back to the origins of policing within slavery within colonialism the policing of course, of indigenous territories a literal formation of the RCMP as a colonial force encroach upon indigenous territory, then of course they use in residential schools to literally remove children from community and that's not some just point of interest is embedded in what we call upon the police for, which is for social control of those groups seen outside of the public, black people, indigenous people, queer people and trans people, people who use drugs, sex workers, those with mental illness, people with disabilities, and all the histories of policing and punishment and incarceration are modeled upon these communities and as long as it's only us. There hasn't historically been a problem people in fact call upon police and the same people in some cases that are saying you know freedom from mandates are the same people that call for our borders to be close to us. Right. Like, as long as your movements being controlled that's justice but don't control my movement right and that isn't just, you know that sometimes we're getting this very superficial discourse right now people go you know if it was BLM you'd be cracking up people saying that in Ottawa without really reflecting on this isn't just an act of hypocrisy this is actually embedded that the system is doing what it's supposed to do like this is embedded in policing so I say all that to say that therefore the police are the symptom like they're the product of that, but it's also that thinking the way that we think about society that has to be addressed. And I think in a society filled with images of policing from like. So wellness within for example did a Christmas campaign like don't buy carceral toys right like the Lego jail the playmobil prison the cop dog on poor patrol like between a third and 50% of what we consume in media in any year is crime based, and usually that's like the policing of serial murders and you know like multiple rapists that make you like I watch those shows and anti you know like person that doesn't believe in this I'm like put him in jail beat him right like like they have this narrative catharsis that makes us identify with the force of order that comes in against the evil serial killer right and that is a very very powerful and visceral narrative that has been put into our veins and our brains from birth. And it takes a lot of work to say well, how do we undo that right and that is part of a social shift, and also a shift in behavior. And I want to go back to Ottawa and say what did people find out in Ottawa, they found out that when they went out in their neighborhoods with their bikes or, you know just 25 people going assigning on a corner and saying no you are harming us you don't need to leave my community they got people to turn around. They did what the police couldn't do, because they had that connection with the community they had that call activity and they were able to act. And so much of that power is taken away from us people. One reason that people are politically alienated is particularly at these times people feel like there is no way to enter the political system it happens above you there's a budget made as a matter of what you think it's happening anyway, you know, all the government doesn't matter which party or voting for they're all controlled by corporations and capital anyway this is. So you have young people that are extremely alienated, you have people that are very disinvested from political and democratic and collective systems. And part of this is out roping into people saying well my individual freedom is the most so how do we reconnect people into systems in their communities. How do we reconnect people into the idea of collective care. This is not again just some mythical thing we did it in coven when people are like okay I need to bring you groceries because you're quarantined. Okay we need to raise mutual aid funds because people lost their jobs. Okay we need the government to discharge suddenly a deficit didn't matter right because like no we actually need to give people money so they don't go broke and become unhoused we need to suspend evictions. We did all these so called radical things that in normal times you just said absolutely not, we can't suspend evictions people won't pay their rent, you know, and then when it became a necessity, we were like actually we need to do these things to care for each other. So that social shift also needs to take place so some people have said you know well why did you guys talk about housing like what does that have to do with policing you know like that someone said this reads like a manifesto you know as in like, you know we're trying to create like this reads like you're running for office and it's like no these things are connected because policing doesn't exist in a vacuum. It doesn't cops don't create their own jobs, right like somebody tells them, it is your job if somebody is asking for change on the street to arrest that person. If somebody's outside of Tim Hortons, you have to police them out right like that is a shared ideology that we have all born responsibility for that have been from decades of defunding social services of defunding our health care system defunding like absolutely everything and detasking us as people and neighbors and community members from being able to knock on each other's doors or say is everything okay today or like how do we take care of each other how do we watch out for each other. There's something that we have to call this external force who is increasingly detached from the neighborhoods in which we live, particularly if you live in a black community, or an indigenous community and it's literally somebody coming from outside your community so housing does matter that like daycare does matter how we treat youth does matter these are related issues to why we call upon the systems of discipline and punishment and control and then why we continually fund them so we do talk about as a political and social shift that has to take place along with thinking about policing, because what we have done is called upon the police to be our frontline our first line of response and our response for everything, when really even the police themselves will say ideally they would be the last one. Thank you so much. That's terrific. I think it's really helpful to see just the recommendations laid out from you and rather than just in written form and a very formal report that might just be met with antagonism already just from the title of it. So thank you for explaining those recommendations will look like. I think some of the questions here. They seem to be really well thought out, and I have a question here for Harry specifically. Is the board of police commissioners for filling his band aid and if you feel that it isn't, can you speak to some of the barriers on this. Maybe I'll pass on that one. Alright, maybe can I let other people answer that question. Yes, I mean this is why, again, so some people are sort of confused about the pillars and saying, like, what is all of this to do with the funding but of course, without democratic accountability and an oversight body. How do you even begin to talk about like controlling budgets or the police accounting for themselves so what we've seen in boards. Like, I keep referencing Ottawa but it's just so much policing news coming out of Ottawa we just saw their board like collapse and have a hostile takeover by the mayor but we saw the head of the board at one point saying it's not my job to control the police chief and it's like, that is literally your job, like, have you not read the police act like this is your job, but this is actually what has happened to police boards across this country for a long time that police boards tend to believe that their job is to serve the police. And in fact it is to serve people. And then when I for example when I was telling people I'm doing this report a lot of people like, why are you working for the police you're doing a report for the police and I might know it's for the police board but people don't know the difference because we don't have that education around like what are actually the bodies right so just that basic civics knowledge which is so important in navigating the space isn't given to people. We don't have noon to from noon until five on a Monday to go and watch a police board you're not going to know anything about how they operate like when you're probably at work right so an internal study that we cite in our report that the police boarded on themselves in 2016 showed that they hadn't created a single policy, they weren't applying policy, like, these are things that are within the police act that they have the power to do they don't have the power over operations they don't have the power to send this out send this out have this officer go here, but they absolutely have all kinds of power that boards tend to either misunderstand or willfully not use. And so part of this process was also saying that yes like if this is going to be effective boards need to start asking questions they need to start saying like where's the data they need to say, do you need these questions they need to be asking for evidence base, and then they really need to be listening to the public and engaging with like. Yeah, public how can we how can we even begin to talk about the police and we can't even go to a board meeting and we can't present when we're there and we don't know how to like get information and we don't know what policies we're talking about. It keeps us completely unable to engage with the system and then of course it the power moves unchecked right so yes governance is this huge piece of thinking about policing. Oh, can I maybe say I can say two things quick like one thing is that governance is actually a big piece of the report to so there is a whole section of the report, which deals with the powers of the board because, as I mentioned like, there's lots and lots and lots of examples around Canada, where because police boards as a model exists in every jurisdiction in Canada, and they're basically all the same. I'll mention there's this distinction that exists in the police act here and that exists in every police act between what's called policy and operations. And it's actually not an idea that comes from policing. It is applied in corporate governance as well right so a corporate board only has policy powers as well. And then also policy and operations exists in the law of negligence right where the government can't be basically found negligent for making bad policy decisions. Which you have to deal with things like a lot of budgets and things like that. But they can be found to be negligent for operational decisions. And so, one issue that comes up a lot of police boards is that there's a lot of confusion around what these words mean, like policy and operations so at the extreme, as I'll mention, we can't as a board, direct the police to go arrest certain people. And actually, the ability of the police to initiate investigations and to carry on what's called the policing function by the Supreme Court of Canada which is basically arresting people and conducting investigations is a constitutional principle derived from the unwritten principle of the rule of law right and the court recognized that case called Cherise from the 90s, but basically beyond that one core of police independence it's very unclear kind of where the line between policy and operations is drawn. And so, for example, a report that was done after the G20 protests in Toronto by a retired Ontario Court of Appeal judge found that what the police board in Toronto took it to mean was that they weren't even allowed to ask questions about operational matters. You know, they weren't allowed, it was just totally outside the scope of the things that they were even allowed to engage on. Justice Morton found that this kind of attitude which he just said was completely wrong like how could you even have a policy power, how could you implement a policy. And then one image, you know, do the necessary follow up and oversight work to ensure it's actually being implemented without asking about operational matters right operations is just the implementation of policy. And so he found that like the misunderstanding of the board in this very fundamental way, contributed to the massive police brutality and mismanagement of the G20 protests, you know, which led to missions of inquiry, it led to massive class action lawsuits, you know, and not to mention the charge of breaches and human rights abuses of thousands of people right in Toronto. And so that's an example and we draw on that report, as well as another report that was done by Senator Marisa Clare into the operation of the Thunder Bay Police Board. Say look, there are best practices out there for boards that we should be adopting in order for the board to better understand its role. And I mean maybe just one last piece is that, you know, the board has a duty under 553 of the police act act as a conduit for the community it's right in the legislation. But unfortunately, as I mentioned, you know, the board meets in the middle of the day on a Monday at City Hall. And this was a point that long before I was on the board. You know, you know what with the working group we raised if we said this makes this incredibly inaccessible. And I know that when L and Dr. Lee again tonight went that very first time in January 2020. We were the only people there. They didn't actually at first be the people when I got there people from security at the City Hall wondered if I was in the wrong place. Right. Because they said no one had gathered in journalists nobody ever came to the police. And so I think that, you know, this is a shift that's occurring. And there are, hopefully, these reports that we can draw on terms of informing the board's work forward. And very briefly. Yes, so after we did the report I'm trying to not take. I know we have other questions but you can check out in the examiner we have an open letter and we talk about the failures and process that happened after that so they had a public discussion session on the budget, which was like three hours of the public speaking but they let the police chief speak first, they allowed CAO Jack Dubey to come and essentially put his thumb on the scale and say that defunding had nothing to do with the budget and they should be treated separately, and also say that discussing August 18 so that was the clearing of the shelters the violent, which she was responsible for Harry, disinvest yourself in this part of the conversation this is nothing to do with Harry. He's like, Oh, we shouldn't be considering that. So basically said dismiss this public feedback, and then they ended up in camera for an hour with the police chief giving data that he was unwilling to give to the public, but there was apparently so important that it swayed the decision of counselors this is not how process should work in a democratic society so our complaint isn't whether or not they agreed did what we wanted right it's not saying oh well. So you're not doing this and you didn't do it so you're bad it's saying that the way that we go about this is fundamentally flawed how do you hold a public engagement meeting on the same day as then you hold a discussion on the budget and then voted 11pm. How is that good policy and good process so even through this process, and I believe it that many, you know many of the board members have said that you know they want to adopt these things they interested in them they want to take them seriously and I believe that, but it's this wheel structure around that people have a very hard time sort of leaving and being comfortable stepping outside they still see questioning the police chief is like an act of attack and hostility when in fact it's what your job is to ask robust. Very critical very serious questions yes you should be sending them back until they come with the data that makes sense but that scene is you know, being mean or something so so yeah we wrote an open letter about that and about how we still engage are engaging in this process of trying to fight for a fair and publicly engaged process. I can just jump in really quickly. Harry mentioned section 55 of the police act, I spend a lot of time reading legislation and trying to interpret it. And that section is so comprehensive and so powerful. Most of the commissioners on the board of police commissioners Harry excluded. Do not really interpret their powers as robustly as they should. And if you actually go and look at section 55 that will, I think help answer why we have spent so much time over the last two years, focusing on the board of police commissioners. There are no police officers on the board, it is a civilian oversight body. So to us and to me I think that's kind of the best place to target a lot of our efforts because that's the job they're already supposed to be doing. And I'm just going to shift really quickly. I don't know if anybody saw the op-ed on the 40th anniversary of the Ocean Ranger sinking that was in the Herald earlier this week, and it talked a lot about regulatory failures in the oil and gas industry and this idea of regulatory capture that the body that's overseeing the industry ends up captured by the industry and trying to do the industry's bidding instead of properly overseeing and regulating. And that has kind of happened a little bit with the board of police commissioners. Not all of them, but some of the commissioners think that they are supposed to act in the best interest of the police. That's not what their job is under the statute, one of the commissioners who's also an elected city counselor even said that during the most recent meeting on the budget. So I think we have to be, we have to keep pushing as frustrating as it can be because this body has a lot of potential. As we're seeing in Ottawa, I think when you do pay attention to the police board, you can start seeing how a lot of the power dynamics in a city play out but I do think once the attention is there and once the public participation is there, there is an opportunity to make things better. Can we freelance on these questions? Like, do you have to ask them or can we just start addressing them? I like a lot. Please feel free. I know some of them are really good. I'm trying to. Yeah. There was a good, I don't think, I keep saying it's the breach. I don't think it was, but there was a recent just an article, it might have been in the breach talking about how corporations are increasingly donating to police foundations. And they'll often have you believe that that's just like youth sports equipment, but they've also got like drones, they've got like weaponry and tanks. I think Vancouver got a tank out of it. Calgary has got weaponry. They get SWAT teams. So this is exactly one of the concerns and police are starting to use this discourse of like, well they might defund us so we can turn to private forces and it showed that like Enbridge, they've got like 10% of us all these oil companies are donating into the Calgary police foundation. And that is very worrisome and has been Detroit that has happened right where essentially you have the city collapse, and the rich people got their own private policing and it doesn't exist in poor neighborhoods like so poor neighborhoods call 911 like whether that's an ambulance or police and like nothing happens, and then rich people have their own private security so that's certainly a concern and we actually are connected right that. And this is what we mean about the social shift that we can aliens could come down tomorrow and zap up every police force. But you know if we haven't changed how we think about policing yes we would just start paid rich people would pay private security corporations and step in and have right so this is what I mean about policing being an ideology but you're certainly correct. The other thing that of course happens is every time we identify problems within policing they somehow get more funding. I keep hate bringing up Ottawa but you know it's like a complete police failure and then like you know, this is why we need more officers so we saw it in racial profiling right they racially profile people and then they're like well we just need more minority officers and more training so I guess we need 10 million extra this year. No matter what happens police somehow managed to turn it into why they need more of a budget with failing to police sexual assault so give us more officers, you know, we're sexually harassing our own officers give us more officers right so. That is is the difficulty Michael Jackson the lawyer talks about this a lot right that crisis is actually part of the life cycle of an institution that institutions go into crisis and then engage in these forms of reform that then allow it to extend its life and we certainly see that a lot with policing that when they are faced with critique, they respond by needing more budgets, and then yes they will also and are reaching to private billionaire corporate forces. This is the biggest investor in police technology, the biggest investors of body cam is taser through axon that is subsidiary of taser so they make so called non lethal weapons that kill people. And then they also make the body cameras that is supposed to stop police from killing people Motorola has cameras with facial recognition, and so on and so on and so on. And this leads into my second point which is the question about police unions which is a great question. Police unions are among the most aggressive forces in policing. Every time that a measure is hard for so stopping, you know, stopping racial profiling, you know we know it's not stopped but the fight against street checks or carting. We have seen like clockwork the same thing happened in every city, the police are told it's unconstitutional to car or street check and Jen would obviously know about this wrote the opinion on this. And then they always claim that this makes it impossible to their jobs and inevitably they'll be a leak from the police union to the media, talking about how they've lost confidence in the chief, morale is low, they can do their jobs this happens, just like clockwork. And so, in a sense, makes our point for us, because people often want to say well you know there's just a few bad apples. They want reform, but then when you have basic things mean putting like maybe don't be racist like systemic racism exists. There's a pushback in Ottawa chief slowly was the first black police chief, and I'm not doing the defending him and oh poor him because he's a police chief and he wanted to be part of a system right so, you know the leopard eight your face, but it was a clear point that his own rank and file were very much against him because he said systemic racism exists so they didn't say great, we don't want racism the police force either that embarrasses us, get rid of them. They made Nazi memes about him. So, you know this idea that all we need is more training is completely belied by the culture police unions that resist every single form of accountability that fight for officers who are being suspended because they kill people to be suspended. Desmond Cole in his book talks about how when dally wants you on beat Adram and Abdi to death, officers war wristbands with his badge number with it on it in solidarity and imagine being a black person stopped by an officer wearing that wristband who's like, I love, and I'm proud of and I'm here for the person who beat a black person to death. Like, so yeah I think in a way it's helpful in that again it demonstrates you know a lot of the the myths that people want us to believe that it's just a few people then why are all of you flying within blue line like how is that working. So, those are some quick answers I'm just trying to get the answers in, and that also kind of covers yeah somebody said like they don't suspend officers exactly like officer complaints we do talk about that. Just on the union point we should maybe mention that because of a collective agreement increase, the police budget is going to be like 5.7 million. In addition to the extra 2 million that the chief asked for and that that's because of the union. And there are all kinds of questions about whether that piece should have been in the budget that went before the board of police commissioners a couple weeks ago, but it will be going before councils I just wanted to point that out. I'll go ahead. No that was it I was trying to go through the questions and make sure that they were given answers. So, if anybody else like run through the Q&A. Jennifer you're reading my mind over there. I was actually going to ask about this reason vote and how the applications of the vote to increase police budget and Halifax here, what the applications have for your work on the report here. Just to be clear the board voted to recommend the increase to council. So there is a possibility however slim that council will reject that and send it back to the board. I don't know if Harry feels comfortable talking a bit about the process maybe of how that is supposed to play out. I mean, so the primary responsibility under the police act or the budget rests with the board right so the as a practical matter that the police are not actually their own legal entity right they're just a business unit of the HRM like any other business unit so like Parks and Recreation is the same right there they're all part of the HRM. And so the CFO for the HRM will recommend a target and say this is sort of what we want your budget to come in around. And then based on that target the police will prepare a budget. I think generally, I don't want to speak to critically but I think it's almost always higher than the target that's presented right there, you've come with a proposal to the board for an amount. And then the board deliberates on the amount. And the thing that's distinct between the board and council is that because of, you know, this importance of insulating decision making about about policing from kind of political politics right and you know the scoring quick wins for councillors to boost the reelection. The board is the only entity that's able to actually dictate the contents of the budget so the board is able to say, you know, I think too much money is being spent on this or not enough money is being spent on this or I think this is an inappropriate line item. So the contents of the budget are for scrutiny by the board. In practice what happens is that the proposal that's presented actually only deals with the overs so they will say our budget last year was 89. Now we'd like 91. Here's how we're going to spend the 2 million, which which I've argued is not a keeping with Lisa. So if that process is completed, it goes to council and council is only able to say either yes or no to the amount that's presented. They can't, they can comment on aspects of the budget, but they can't dictate that if you change. But if they say no it goes back to the board for reworking, and then goes back to council to finally be passed. That's kind of the process. I would say that we had strategic conversations before we undertook this work so this isn't something we did lightly we had those conversations about how does this work get co-opted how many other reports have existed and being buried. How many community, how much community energy has been spent in these processes that go nowhere and recommendations and don't get picked up. What does it mean to participate in that that's something that we very consciously talked about among ourselves. What we decided is that one, it was important to have this kind of public engagement on an issue that hadn't been engaged before. So there's been other things on policing the Marshall report and there is a question also about the Marshall report in the Q&A if anyone wants to take that. You know, like the Wortley report obviously most recently, there's been all kinds of work by the African Nova Scotian community in the Mi'kmaq community on these issues this isn't new but in terms of defunding it was different and it did offer this opportunity to engage this conversation. It also was important to me and I think the people, the rest of us that these processes so often led by white men. So how much of this work is led by black women. This is black feminist work in its origins the convergence conference, like we're abolitionist point like the entire board of that was like black feminist, you know people identified as black feminist, and then often this work isn't done by black women but it was important to have a report that and we didn't use this traditional structure like leading or not but still that the idea of a board empowering a black woman and somebody said that to me yesterday like this is madness like is it they thought that kind of was awesome as a result and I had to disabuse them but they're like, you mean your actual board let like a black woman do a report on defunding like how is that working you know. So that can be powerful to people, and then we also knew that this work could be useful to people in other ways so it's one thing to say take money from police and give it to housing it's another thing to say how. So, many people are saying that in their own municipalities and new Brunswick they don't even have like police board meetings they're like our meetings like eight minutes long like you think your board is bad. The meeting was 11 minutes. So reporters using the time to just bring up recommendations and ask them like, what do you think about this recommendation the Halifax report, which is giving them a way to engage with their board. Edmonton did an anti racism strategy. And they were they actually brought me in to just give them some advice and to work together based on doing a community strategy that rejected some of these ideas of top down report and really tried to do community engagement and they have done a really beautiful anti racism strategy from a community that's facing racial hate attacks so black Somali Muslim women that are literally having people run up on them in parking lots jump out of cars and beat them having the his jobs pulled off and being told that there's nothing you can do. If you were the aggressor have got together and started what was a process for them that was really important and they drew on stuff that we did just as we drew on their public safety thing so much y'all has said that they've used elements so we didn't just do it for this idea that we never thought about it. I don't think any of us ever thought was going to be like great El. Thanks for the report. Let's take $100 million or at least what do you want to do with it you know like that was never going to happen but what we have done is created a document that makes clear how it could be done that is being used in other places that is I think different than has been done before we also tried to as I said like rethink the process of how policy is made that it doesn't have to be top down and hierarchical and only the, the province of particular experts and what happened you know maybe council will not pass budget they probably will but that's one year right this work freedom work is long work changing systems is long work. Any of us that engage these systems whether it's a prison system deportation we know that like every you have to chip away at it in such like excruciatingly slow ways. Someone was told me about dissertation writing that there's two speeds slow and stopped and I think that's the same as like this kind of work, as long as you're not stopped slow is okay. You know so I don't think we ever believe that it would just be cosigned we knew it would be difficult but I think it did create something that doesn't mean it's perfect it doesn't mean that there aren't critiques of this it doesn't mean that when people go like why another report but that's not a reasonable response these are just our reasons for engaging in this. Thank you so much. We probably only have time for one more question. And I think I might take the opportunity here to ask my own, just as a person who in the future will hopefully be a legal actor serving their community I'm just curious as to what sort of roles we can take on or what sort of work we can do, both for legal actors and those who are just interested in their community and helping you know what can we do to help forward these recommendations past. What's going on right now. I can maybe jump in. And I think you can think about doing the work through your paid job your nine to five or your day to day and or doing it more on an extra curricular basis. And maybe you do both if you're a defense lawyer for example you might also be doing policing related work in your in your spare time. You know going back to what I said before about trying to change the way you think it'll it'll kind of infiltrate everything you do as a lawyer once you've taken that step for yourself, but I think right now, if there's something in this very long report that peaks your interest, you know their housing organizations that need help there are addictions organizations that need help you can find a piece and and work on that and you don't necessarily feel need to feel like you have to bite off the whole thing, you can just take little bites and work on one particular thing that interests you at a time. And there, this is an amazing community like you're never going to have to reinvent the wheel there will be somebody working on the issue that you're interested in so I would say join up with them. Yeah, I would say. I totally agree with all of Jen's points to me a couple other things to like. One thing, you know, and this this relates for example to police board is just knowing what the rules are right and what the police act says, and having been reading it right and then maybe going to a police board meeting right that if you went to like two police board meetings, you would know more about the police board than like 95% of population. Right. And, and so I think like, you know, as someone as a lawyer as a law student, you have a particular kind of background and particular kind of interest you think critically you read critically. And I think, you know, ensuring that rules are are comply with that sounds super boring, but it's actually a very important and ongoing tasks like one of the things that I noticed before. And this was like, you know, when we first started when we first started writing letters to the board was that it says in the police act that they're the board is required to create a policy regarding extra duty and off duty employment for officers. And they hadn't done this, and you know and you could understand why that would be a pretty important policy to have. Right. In fact, the legislature thought it was so important that they didn't even put it in the regulations they put it in the act they said, you know, if you're going to create any policy, make sure you have one of these. And they didn't have one. So we wrote them a lot. I wrote them a letter and I said, what the heck what's going on here. And then, and shortly thereafter a very shoddy policy was made. And what it said was, we agree in, you know, the HRP already has a comprehensive policy on the subject. And we support it in full. And I said, No, sorry guys actually in the act it says you got to define what the word extra duty means, and you haven't done that right so you still haven't met the law. Right, so even just basic kind of pedantic tech attack stuff like that, you can go a long way, right, you know, as particularly a municipal level. And I mean, you know, Halifax is the biggest municipality in Atlanta, Canada. And that's the kind of issues that we're dealing with at a very basic governance level. And so I mean anywhere there is a municipal police department. There is a municipal police board. And then beyond that anywhere where there's a contracted RCMP in a municipality, even municipalities like where my partners from Colchester feet, right like big, big area like near Amherst. That's they're contracted by the RCMP and they're required by law, have what's called a police advisory board, right and they can't they don't have the same powers as a police board but they can make recommendations the RCMP. And these bodies exist like there's, you know, like 30 or more police boards in Nova Scotia. And so like, you know, if you want, and if you're from a particular area of the province you have particular passion, like, you can join one of these bodies, right. You can get involved you can write letters. You know, it's, it can be a fairly significant time commitment. And that's a challenge and hopefully something that in Halifax were changing. Soon you know I, there was an amendment to the budget that was passed which was approved in principle the idea of increasing the budget for the board for the purpose of hiring a staff, which would be excellent right we know we're a entirely volunteer committee that has no staff support there's no policy person there's no research person. And so that would be a huge improvement right if we had someone who could, you know they woke up in the morning and their job was to think about the police board. And so I think as a lawyer you can play a really key role in that really boring way. And then as you know as Jen mentioned, you can also become involved like you have such a tangible skill. It's so valuable in so many contexts, kind of regardless of the area of practice they have whether you're doing criminal defense or corporate law like, you know I can tell you I'm on the board. And I have lots and lots of experience working in provincial jails, but actually the people who are incredibly valuable on our board is our person who does employment law, right, or the person on our board who knows a lot about finances. So we're kind of regardless of what your interest or like tax law, we have to have like a volunteer tax lawyer give us all this advice because we're a charity. So we're kind of regardless of your area of interest or your practice like there's so much you can do that is like liberatory right that is, you know, on an abolitionist horizon, right and so I think you know you don't just have to be doing criminal defense. So what yeah I guess I'll leave it at that. I'm not a lawyer and I certainly, I mean, Harry gets delegated with all the tasks and like yeah just do that bit that I wanted to. So, and it's really important like I'm not. I don't like the fine grain stuff of combing through the act that's not me but it is Harry skills so he's able to bring that skill not just to this work but a lot of work like if your friends and Harry like you get the 3am drop in your mailbox is like some like obscure document from like China, but it's really important so those kind of skills I'm not saying I don't have research skills but I'm just saying that that, which I think is a very lawyer kind of skill is really important. In activist workouts feel like you can walk it so far, you do a lot of the emotional work, a lot of the framing things in public ways, and there's usually a lawyer needed at some point. And that's not just criminal or immigration, it's a min law is really important in prisons and stuff like, and all of this intersects with the unfreedom of people so yeah the civil law system we never talk about it we also talk about criminal in terms of race but we know the civil law system is heavily implicated in how people experienced systemic racism we haven't even begun to like unpack that and think about it you know. The administrative law structures and these things are so far beyond the average person that anybody who can make that legible or do that work it's a huge part of activism. I can't think of anything serious I've done that didn't involve a lawyer at some point, giving their time so you can give your time into community like stuff that yeah maybe like a boring skill that you do at your boring corporate law firm in the community just becomes a really important activist skill in the evening so I really encourage people to find that, and to give that energy into your communities. Find the things that you're good on this someone who needs it so thank you for listening tonight you also answered some questions Harry someone was wondering if members get paid and how they get appointed so you kind of answer that. I know that Jen is a hard stop so I don't know. I just wanted to say to despite all the talk about boring stuff. Jen's way less boring than I am I'm the boring one. She does the cool corporate. She's doing the corporate law stuff day in day out. That's boring. That's such a good couple to end on. I don't know about this word on line three and you know I'm a poet so I'm like. Like, but that's good you know and it's the different ways of thinking the different ways approaching the world but also yeah that's that dedication so. This couldn't have got done if I had been stuck doing the loan that y'all would be waiting another 20 years I couldn't have got done without like this team of people. It was love work for Atari called today our love letter to the city we did this work for free. Because we wanted to make a change and we wanted to do something substantial and you know just. Put it together and you know in a lot of love and friendship and comradeship that is part of the work of freedom and abolition as well which building those relationships using our capacities and giving of ourselves to the collective good so I feel like we did our best to do so. And I think that that is a wonderful way to wrap up this event. Ella Harry and Jennifer thank you so much for joining us. This was an absolutely interesting talk and I was very honored to be moderating for you tonight. Thank you so much to our participants. If you tuned in late, this was recorded and it will be posted. Just keep an eye out for the criminal justice coalition posts on that. And please join us for our next event, which is March 3. And that will be looking at the cultural reports and African Nova Scotian Justice Institute. And that panel will be looking at the work of the Institute and the impact of the racing cultural assessments. And I'll have a wonderful evening. And be sure to look at the criminal justice coalition's Instagram page as well as the Dalhousie criminal law students Facebook page. Thank you. Thank you.