Defund the police? This is how much Canadian cities spend on policing
Cries to defund the police have rung out in protests across the United States, sparked by the death of George Floyd, seen in a video pleading and gasping for air as a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee against his neck -- long after he had already gone silent.
There is still confusion around what advocates mean when they say #DefundThePolice. For most proponants, it does not mean getting rid of the police, but reallocating some of that money elsewhere. Even a 0.5 percent trim could potentially make a huge difference for social programs that only get a tiny slice of a city budget each year - programs that could help reduce crime and provide more mental health support, for example.
Thousands of people protest to defund the police in support of Black Lives Matter and all social injustice against racism in Toronto on Friday, June 19, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
As result of the movement, police spending have come under a lot of scrutiny, especially in the United States, but also in Canada. While Statistics Canada offers a lot of excellent data on policing, I couldn’t find any kind of database that aggregated information on spending and budget numbers for Canadian cities.
So I spent a lot of hours combing through 2020 city budgets and financial statements from 2015 to 2019, compiling and calculating numbers to see where things stand for Canadian police departments. Two stories came out of that digging:
This one takes a look at the 2020 budgets in 18 of Canada’s largest cities, regions and provincial capitals.
The second story takes a closer look at how much Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal have spent on policing over the last five years. It also touches on how much is spent on other social services in some of these cities.
Thanks to Mahima Singh for making the numbers look pretty with interactive infographics.
I thought all this would be fairly straight forward when I started. But who knew every city presents their budget differently, includes different items, breaks it down or categorizes services differently, etc. The list goes on. Finding the right numbers was not always easy. So there are a lot of caveats. Some cities were especially challenging to sort through. I learned a lot digging through the documents, but I also felt like I barely scratched the surface. And there are questions that I didn't have time to answer this time.
As an aside: A while back, I wrote about Operation Pre-Frontal Cortex's petition to bring Advance Peace to Toronto. It's an interesting program designed to be run by the city and it’s been credited with significantly reducing violence in U.S. cities like Richmond, California. The program cost is a drop in the bucket for a city like Toronto.
For further reading and data on policing in Canada, Graham Slaughter looked at the decades of police numbers collected by Statistics Canada, with infographics by Jesse Tahirali.