Abolish, not defund, police forces
Activists tackle police violence, systemic racism and demand to abolish police forces.
Journalist and activist Desmond Cole suggested challenging the police forces in Canada by not defunding but abolishing the police violence on Wednesday, Sept. 9.
Scholar Strike Canada organized a two-day event to host digital teach-ins on police brutality and anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence across the country.
Cole spoke at the Abolition or Death: Confronting police forces in Canada teach-in.
The free public teach-in was live-streamed on Scholar Strike Canada’s YouTube Channel from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. and was recorded for students and educators to use.
“I just pray that my words this morning can do justice to the struggles we’re all collectively facing and the hopes that we have for our future,” said Cole.
Police Brutality
According to Global News, there are nationwide calls to action to defund the police in order to put more funding towards community services like mental health and homeless prevention.
Cole said, “It’s poor, it’s black, indigenous, and other racialized people and also people living with disabilities, mental health issues, queer, two-spirit, trans and gender non-conforming people,” who are constantly facing police violence.
Cole mentioned his experience reporting and how specific police violence is just being ignored by the Canadian criminal justice system.
“ It’s the tens of thousands of strip searches that the Toronto Police engage in every year for which are the purposes of humiliating people because they almost always find nothing,” he said.
Cole said, “It’s also the routine sexual harassment and sexual assault of women, queer, two-spirit, trans and gender non-conforming people,” who also serve as police officers are assaulted by their own colleagues who again know that they are not going to get punished for their crimes.
He touched on white supremacy by explaining how the white settler majority who are living on stolen indigenous territories are benefiting from all of this state-sanctioned police violence.
Systemic Racism
Scholar Strike Canada is in solitary with the Black Lives Matter Movement and demands for defunding the police and redistributing those resources to those who are affected by this systemic racism.
The organization demands the creation of sustainable and healthy communities.
Cole wrote a book on the experiences of Black Canadians called “The Skin We’re In A Year Of Black Resistance And Power”
He mentions the controversial procedure of carding - Community contacts policing which is an intelligence-gathering policy involving stopping, questioning, and documenting individuals based on their race in his book.
Cole also mentioned the Six Nations Land Defenders and how the government is tackling that dispute. “That court injunction essentially makes it illegal for the six nations to defend their own territory,” he said.
According to Cole, this “gives the police the right to arrest them and clear them off the land for the sake of a developer.”