WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING?

I was thinking about harm reduction and trying to hunt down some more information related to themes from my last output on the topic. In a search for “community-based crisis response”, I landed in an article that was just published hours earlier from CBC about police reform in Winnipeg. Along the lines of the “defund the police” campaigns and messaging we’ve been getting for years now, the news piece is titled, Winnipeg needs to replace police with community-led crisis response teams, groups say.

The crux of the article is that, in response to deadly encounters with police, Winnipeg’s Police Accountability Coalition insists there needs to be a dramatic “overhaul of the current policing system and overall response to mental health and well-being.” Kate Kehler, the executive director of the Social Planning Council, an organization belonging to the coalition, argues that without that Winnipeg is “going to keep going down this very dangerous, dangerous road.” She tells us "A police presence is not absolutely necessary, and it can actually do more harm than good." And she suggests "Our objective is for a community-led response to ensure people in medical crisis receive a medical response first." 

As an alternative to the status quo, Kehler tells us there are at least 107 crisis teams currently in operation throughout Canada and the United States. She says community groups in the United States demonstrate that it is not only possible to respond without a police presence but that doing so saves lives and, of course, that this is a model Winnipeg needs to adopt. From there, a popular and often-cited example from Oregon is touted as the model that should be reproduced locally.

But, as mentioned in the CBC article, Winnipeg already implements a program literally titled Alternative Response to Citizens in Crisis (ARCC). The project was piloted in 2021 and has been in operation since then. How it works is that when a call comes in deemed non-criminal and low-risk, a plainclothes law enforcement officer with specialized de-escalation training joins a mental health clinician from Crisis Response Services and together they tend to the situation. The author of the article suggests “ARCC only provides secondary responses once a situation is deemed safe.” And they explain that this is a problem and why Winnipeg needs something like the model provided by CAHOOTS.

The article tells us that since 1989 the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets (CAHOOTS) program has provided response teams of medical professionals and crisis workers, unarmed and without police. The author explains that CAHOOTS shows up even under circumstances involving violence or weapons. They suggest this is “one model of working with — but also independently of — police” and add the caveat that CAHOOTS does not have the ability to arrest or coerce anyone at any time. The author then explains the program costs $2.1 million, or approximately 2% of the police budget, “but does 20% of the work” and handles “85% of well-being calls.” They also inform us that "No CAHOOTS worker since 1989 has ever been seriously injured on a CAHOOTS call."

SO, WHAT ABOUT THAT?

If any of that was true there would be little room for objection and my offering here would be nothing more than a vigorous endorsement of the plan. Tragically, on the provided details alone I think it’s fair to say there’s no good reason to believe that the CBC reporter or folks being interviewed, and as a result the organizations they represent, are serious people trying to understand the issues they tell us they care about most.

To begin with, on the surface and most obviously, the very title of the article is Winnipeg needs to replace police…, and the accompanying video is titled What could defunding the police look like? But defunding the police is very much not happening in the essential example of such being pitched to their audience. The $2 million budget for CAHOOTS is funds added to the City of Eugene police budget. And when the program sought an additional $225,000 per year to allow 24/7 service, Eugene City Council increased the police budget accordingly. None of this, as such, transpires along the lines of what folks suggest happens or would happen. The City of Eugene didn’t slash the EPD budget in half and dump those funds into “community wellness programs”, and they never would. So, to be more explicit, none of this is “defunding the police”, if that’s your aim. And yet that’s exactly what the article, its author, and interviewed advocates all propose and pretend to be talking about. Doesn’t all that seem odd? As such, to me, everyone involved appears either to be lying rather aggressively or they are perfectly ignorant of the very thing they’re orienting their lives around and going public about. What’s another plausible option?

Then, even a cursory look at the CAHOOTS program itself yields a situation different from what’s presented in the CBC article. And it’s not a little different but just about the opposite of what’s presented. For example, a case study on CAHOOTS from 2020 confirms that “all services are voluntary” and that “if the situation involves a crime in progress, violence, or life-threatening emergencies, police will be dispatched to arrive as primary or co-responders.” How is that an alternative to police? How is that a contrast to Winnipeg’s existing ARCC program, that activists say isn’t doing enough or following the best practices they promote? CAHOOTS doesn’t even attempt to eliminate or reduce police being the first on the scene, which Winnipeg activists suggest would be the whole point to bringing in a CAHOOTS-like program. Right. So what the heck are we even talking about?

How then can CBC, the article’s author, these advocates, or the groups they populate be offering anything but poorly constructed propaganda? I mean, how do you interpret "No CAHOOTS worker has ever been seriously injured"? In light of the above facts, I would claim that if the statement was attempting to be honest it would read something closer to “No CAHOOTS worker has ever attended a dangerous or merely coercive situation — the kind of situation we typically send police to respond to and the kind of situation most likely to result in physical interactions, harm, or death; and yet, still, some CAHOOTS folks have been harmed in these most passive of community intervention instances, ‘non-serious’ as those instances may have been.” Pretending they could plausibly mean something other than that, when it is so clearly spelled out, is at best silly. More than that, given what CAHOOTS says they’re up to, is there any reason this recommended harm reduction solution would have saved the lives of those who recently died after their interaction with police? Well, let’s see.

LETHAL FORCE

The most recent case in Winnipeg, for example, was a man with schizophrenia who was previously deemed “not of sound mind” (and thus not criminally responsible for the cocaine and cannabis operations he was running.) Instead of prison or a mental health facility, the man (who “thought he was ‘the messiah’”) was living in the community under supervision on the condition that he remain on anti-psychotic medication. On the day he was killed by police he was scheduled to be involuntarily taken to hospital for a medical exam under a Mental Health Act order. As such there was no room for CAHOOTS. The situation was involuntary and by default was not the kind of call alternative programs, ARCC or CAHOOTS, typically respond to. They just don’t deal with things like this (or even trespassing, refusals to leave, or folks blocking traffic, say.) They just don’t do conflict. More than that, the man in this case responded by attacking officers with a crowbar and fire hydrant and then retreated into his house, where he was shot by police when he charged from a bedroom “armed with a large edged weapon.” That’s a situation alternative programs like CAHOOTS would not only have never been called to (and the existing ARCC was not) but would have retreated from and called in police to respond to if the call had devolved in this way. Right.

The next most recent case was a 911 call from a woman who had fled into a neighbouring apartment fearing for her own safety and that of her three young children due to a severely intoxicated boyfriend. There was “a lot of yelling”, “reports of broken windows”, the man was said to have twice fallen down flights of stairs, and had then marched into a parking lot (shoeless in the dead of the Winnipeg winter). Home patio surveillance footage shows the man stumbling around and then falling face first onto the road, rolling around in pain and yelling out for help. Reports say he collapsed and was seemingly unconscious. From there, when police arrived to stand him on his feet and escort him to the drunk tank, he got physical and there was a tussle. Cell phone footage shows the man kicking and screaming, resisting police and refusing to be handcuffed. Another video shows the man, still on the ground, fending off three cops. Still another video shows a man, not unconscious or dead as CBC suggests, but moving his head voluntarily and who is then cuffed and carried away by six police officers. He was taken to hospital and was reported dead the following day. He was not shot and does not appear to have been tased, though we still don’t have the results from the autopsy or independent investigation to know the cause of his death or what transpired. Regardless, this scenario too does not fit into the “wellness check” category that alternatives to traditional police tend to engage with, certainly not alone and without a police presence. If he wasn’t being violent or threatening violence or refusing to leave the area or modify his behaviour, no call would have been made to 911 in the first place. And, as you now know, if any of that was in play, neither ARCC nor CAHOOTS would ever have been on the scene. Right.

Prior to that, an international student studying at the University of Manitoba experienced two bouts of psychosis. (Some of us suspect cannabis-induced psychosis, which we now know is far more common, particularly for men of this age, than understood or acknowledged prior to Canada’s commercialization of weed… alas.) The first psychotic episode resulted in him going to hospital and the second occurred the day he was shot and killed by police. Manitoba’s Independent Investigation Unit explained that officers were carrying out a wellness check on the man at his university apartment. They’d gotten a report of an armed man behaving erratically. (No ARCC or CAHOOTS.) Upon arrival, police found two other people in the suite and were confronted by a man wielding a pair of knives. It went as you would expect. Through their lawyer, the young man’s family reported that all of this was out of the blue. The lawyer said the man was previously admitted to hospital, assessed, and released. He reported that no one was aware of the man being prescribed any medication but noted that after the hospital visit everything returned to normal. So, knowing what you know about CAHOOTS and other “alternatives to police”, who would have gotten this call? Right.

So there's no reason to believe CAHOOTS or anything of the sort would have saved any lives or even been called out in these cases. They would have displaced exactly 0% of these fatal calls to police which, I hope we can agree, is something rather far from the advocate and activist claim. So what are we talking about, exactly? I really have no idea. But, sadly (and, as ever), if you dare look any further into this, the situation is still stranger than all that and far more misleading.

SO WHAT DO THEY DO?

If you look for information on CAHOOTS that isn’t straight from their own communications team, you’ll find CAHOOTS is in chaos. There are some audits to be found from folks who are not opposed to the program. Those offer quite a different picture from the obvious misinformation found on CBC. For instance, aside from all the good that is done, which is beyond doubt, a 2022 review showed CAHOOTS is commonly overwhelmed, lacks coordination between other services, and as such has poor availability and response times. Basically, the program doesn't work. In fact, the situation is so bad that “city departments are reluctant to even summon [CAHOOTS] because there’s an underlying thought that they won’t be available.” They even found that the situation is in such chaos, with CAHOOTS responding to so many non-crisis calls, often acting in a humanitarian or service capacity, too often as non-emergency public transportation, that they themselves have requested the city update protocols to restrict how often they can be called out. Also of note in the report is that there’s a significant and highly detrimental lack of data collection, meaning the program is absent the kind of monitoring and management needed to ensure it’s being effective. They can't even tell us what their operation actually looks like on the ground aside from random anecdotes from their workers. That, to my mind, is not a program to be emulated. And yet its been celebrated for years as a shining example to be replicated everywhere there is a police force. Yikes!

Similarly, the “20% of the work at 2% of the cost” suggestion is not how the numbers pan out at all. A separate study to the one above recently showed CAHOOTS responding without police, as the folks in Winnipeg imagine, less than 10% of the time. Eugene Police Department numbers say the department itself got more than 137,500 calls for service in 2021 and that fewer than 16,500 of those (or roughly 12%) involved CAHOOTS in any way. And yet even that is not a great view of the contribution of CAHOOTS or a picture of what police calls are being diverted to them. A more detailed EPD analysis from 2019, and presented on the CAHOOTS website, shows that just 10% of CAHOOTS-only calls are for the very things I assumed they were mostly dealing with: suicidal subjects or folks who are disoriented, intoxicated, and/or disorderly. By contrast, almost 80% of CAHOOTS-only calls are for services police would not normally be dispatched for, according to police (who enthusiastically support the CAHOOTS program.) The report also shows that if the most frequent 80% of CAHOOTS calls, the transportation, public assistance, and welfare checks police did not previously make, are excluded from the picture, what comes up is a diversion rate of closer to 2%. But they do explain the issue is more complex than that and a more sophisticated analysis could reveal a true diversion rate somewhere between 5% and 8% — still just a fraction of the 20% claimed all over the place, including in the CBC article. And so it’s probably more accurate to say there is no economic argument for alternatives to policing: that CAHOOTS demonstrates a model something closer to “6.5% of the police patrol budget for 6.5% of the work.”

Another surprise for me when looking at all of this was what the CAHOOTS cohort look like. Anecdotally, in an article endorsing CAHOOTS, just as in the article discussing its failings, there are some pictures of the CAHOOTS folks on the job. Though supporters in Oregon and Manitoba alike offer that the whole approach and appearance of the CAHOOTS team is radically different from the police in every meaningful way, to me they appear indistinguishable from plainclothes cops. I was shocked by that. Somehow I'd imagined I would see my elementary school lunch lady or a retired nurse paired with a young punk full of piercing and sporting a tartan kilt. Nope. Every picture I’ve seen, and I've looked for more now, shows folks in black from head to toe, with the word CAHOOTS in the middle of their backs in white block letters (as if to mimic the POLICE vests we all know). They pair that with a black walkie-talkie slung over their shoulder or alternatively an in-ear device with a coil of wire behind their ear. And occasionally they're in a black cap, too. This gives them the appearance of exactly everyone you've ever seen with a security or law enforcement job. On the Eugene Police Department website’s page describing CAHOOTS, pictured is a man in a dark blue CAHOOTS t-shirt standing next to a police officer, both wearing nearly identical black hats and earpieces. You'd think, or I would think, they'd at the very least offer something, anything at all, that might distinguish them, in the slightest way, from a cop (or border patrol or corrections officer or mall security). To my mind, the appearance factor is far from insignificant. And when you pair that with the fact that folks in Eugene call 911 to seek and receive a visit from CAHOOTS, they seem still less of an alternative to police than any financials or quantitative analysis would expose.

So, by my assessment, those touting the CAHOOTS operation are very much full of beans or out to lunch (or out to lunch and full of beans.) No independent budget or operations, no displacement of police work, not even an alternative costume or number to dial. And the program is not only in disarray and dysfunction but they're so desperate to do less for the people who use them most that they're seeking government intervention. Makes you wonder what information the dozen people responsible for the CBC article have.

Even just the above, however, is not me doing some kind of deep dive into the CAHOOTS organization, gaining access to privately held data, offering the results of a FOI request, or even starting to try and make sense of the things I’m being told. All of the above is just what is on the very surface when I do so little as typing the letters “CAHOOTS” into a search engine and then hit ENTER on my keyboard. And just there everything written in the aforementioned piece appears to be at best a fiction, perhaps expressing one's naive hopes. Does the author and their interviewees know all of the above and still offer us wild fabrications? I'd rather think not. What else could be happening here?

To understand the basis for the article and the demands from local community groups, I wanted to find out what’s actually happening in Winnipeg. (Wouldn't it have been nice to get some of that from the news? *sigh*) To do so I sought out more about the actions of police and their interactions with the public.

CALLS FOR SERVICE AND USE OF FORCE

The first thing I came upon was Winnipeg Police Service numbers showing the number of annual calls to police. These made it clear that while calls have decreased by 5,000 overall in recent years, the volume of calls dispatching police for mental health, property crime, and violent crime were up quite significantly. That’s right, even as crime numbers decline, sexual violence and homicides are shooting up in Winnipeg.

Specifically, the city saw more than 13,000 violent crimes in 2022, for example, up from 11,000 the previous year and just over 10,000 in 2020. And the city also saw a record number of homicides, at 53, in 2022. Property crime, too, has been steadily climbing over the last decade, from peak monthly numbers below 3,000 to up above 4,500 more recently, way beyond the five-year average.

More recent numbers show, too, “Mental-health calls to Winnipeg police are becoming increasingly violent in nature.” And in response to that police have explained how they have a number of community partner collaborations, such as ARCC, but that more needs to happen within the community, there needs to be more “partners ‘involved in the social safety net,’” to prevent situations from escalating. So the cops are at the forefront seeking community involvement and help dealing with what is clearly a broader social and public health problem they should not and cannot be made to address.

But what does all of that mean, exactly? Has domestic violence reverted to rates last seen two centuries ago? Are the streets running with blood? What are we actually talking about? How often are police interacting with the public? Of those interactions, how often do Winnipeg cops use force? And how often do things go so completely sideways and someone is seriously injured or dies? Oh, and, of course, how does the situation in Manitoba compare to BC or Nunavut, say?

From what I can find, there were 857 "use of force" reports filed by Winnipeg Police in 2019, which was right in line with the average of 858 reported in the previous five years. So, while that sounds like a lot to me, the situation is most certainly not suddenly escalating out of control. To complement that and make sense of those numbers, I found one report sharing that there were 231,670 calls for service to Winnipeg police. That looks to me like fewer than 0.4% of calls for service involve officers “using force,” or roughly one application of force for every 270 calls. I also found that use of force cases in Winnipeg were well over 1,000 a decade earlier. So, in fact, there has been a decline of nearly 20% in violence between police and citizens at the same time advocates tell us the situation with violent cops is getting out of hand and needs a radical and immediate remedy. That’s interesting and a good start.

From there I learned that between 2000 and 2017 a total of 14 people were killed by police tasers or guns in the city of Winnipeg. Perhaps just to me, that looks like something slightly different than how CBC and others make the situation look: like police are daily executing people in the streets. And I found that in 2023, there were a total of three people killed by police. Reporting also showed that of the 857 incidents where force was used by Winnipeg police, only three resulted in complaints. And, of those, one failed to be sustained by evidence, another was deemed unfounded, and the remaining one was abandoned. This lack of complaints does not suggest that police are not making mistakes or using excessive force, obviously, but it certainly doesn’t support the argument that they’re behaving inappropriately, either.

Most critically, in looking up these numbers I also learned that “use of force” reports, also known as “subject behaviour-officer response” reports, are required whenever an officer so much as displays or threatens to use a weapon of any kind. So a cop suggesting to a belligerent drunk person that continued disturbance could result in the officer employing her baton would land squarely as a “use of force” requiring a report and would wind up in these statistics. Police unholstering their taser, not pointing it anywhere nor discharging it, would also be a “use of force” and contained in the data set. That dramatically changed my whole perception of what we we’re talking about. And when we consider that use of force cases are going down while calls to violent incidents are on the rise… well.

Think about these realities and the community of concerned citizens responding to police incidents and going to the media to call for dramatic reforms. By analogy, imagine I was reporting on climate change. Imagine I knew that heatwaves and cold snaps were less frequent but there were significant year-over-year increases in destructive flooding and wildfires. And then imagine I interviewed folks who lost vehicles, homes, or family members in these tragedies. Imagine they all had stories about how, very clearly, if firefighters used different tools, took a different approach, and/or prioritized different things their child or dog or home, or all of the above would not have been lost. And imagine those voices were, as a result, unanimous in calling for an end to firefighting as we know it. And imagine that, instead of spelling out all the details, I and my interviewees pitched an "proven alternative to firefighting" — one that does not fight fires at all but, taking 10% of the firefighting budget, still zooms around in firetrucks, wearing helmets and yellow jackets, parking in front of fire hydrants and swinging axes, largely acting as a private Uber service for pyromaniacs and climate deniers... What's a better analogy?

HOW DOES WINNIPEG COMPARE?

To make sense of the violence above I looked at other cities. While Winnipeg’s metro area has a population of 835,000, Greater Victoria is home to half as many people. And at the same time the Winnipeg Police Service submitted 857 use of force reports, in 2020, the VicPD made not half that number but nearly the same, at 792. Notably, years prior and since in Victoria were even higher and closer to Winnipeg’s numbers. For another example I looked at Edmonton, where with a population of 1.3 million, they had a staggering 2,674 use of force reports in 2020. That looks to me like force is used by police twice as much in Victoria and at a far FAR higher rate in Edmonton than in Winnipeg. But then I found a report from the VicPD themselves suggesting they receive on average only 55,000 calls for service annually! (Half the population of Winnipeg and only a quarter of the calls but a similar number of use of force reports? Bonkers! …I could be confused or missing something here but can’t spot it...) Of course, by these numbers we just don’t know whether or not force was justified in these cases. Maybe grandmothers in Victoria are stealing cars at gunpoint at far higher rates and with greater violence than grandmothers in Winnipeg.

Looking for more data, I found a useful national report on policing. It shows the per capita deadly use of force by police was roughly the same in Manitoba as Alberta and BC, and not so far from the rate in Saskatchewan or the Northwest Territories, at roughly 20 cases per million residents over the last 20 years. But it also showed those provinces have twice as much deadly use of force as Ontario and Quebec, who had around 11, and three times that of a province like PEI who had a little over 6. That said, it’s also true that Manitoba saw half the rate of the Yukon, who reported almost 49 deadly force incidents, which was still just a fraction of the walloping 178 cases per million over 20 years in Nunavut. Relatedly, I also found that Winnipeg has fewer police per capita than many other major Canadian cities such as Halifax, Montreal, Edmonton, or Victoria. Montreal, for example, has 212 officers per 100,000 people while Winnipeg has just 174. I think all of that is very interesting for this whole discussion. It also makes me wonder if it's just random that I’m reading multiple articles in major news outlets about seemingly rare instances in Winnipeg and nothing at all about what looks like many regular killings up north? I don’t know. I would be shocked to learn that the reporting is proportionate given that I’ve seen none.

AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

For more context, I also found a useful comparative perspective on police lethality in a criminology journal. The author explores annual per capita “fatal police violence” numbers throughout Europe and the Americas. It was no surprise to learn that in Finland and Norway the annual number of police killings is zero, or that the rate in Belgium and the Netherlands is similarly low, in the 0.3 per million range. That said, I was surprised that both France and England were similarly low. (To me, France and England are the ancestral homelands to rioting mobs and drunken hooliganism… and yet police, by these numbers, don’t seem to be getting so intimately involved.) By contrast, Australia and Canada have rates roughly two and three times that of the highest numbers in Europe, at 0.7 and 0.9 killings per million people per year. But those numbers only seem large when looking to the lowest rates of police lethality in the world. Argentina and the United States were higher still, at 2.1 and 3.4; but compared to Brazil and Venezuela, the US and Argentina, who are among the highest on the list, look like utopias of nonviolence and examples these worst cases may wish to emulate. Brazil has a rate of 30 annual cases of fatal police violence per million people while Venezuela experiences an incomprehensible 185. So, doubtless, Manitoba and Winnipeg, have work to do, as virtually everyone does, but they don’t even appear to be anywhere near the bad end of things, nevermind some kind of stinging outlier. And, of course, these numbers, like the previous set, are interesting but don’t spell out the causes of these deaths or what are the undoubtedly countless variables at play leading up to and resulting in them. As such there are no simple or obvious remedies either. But there is more to learn.

The journal article explains how, for example, most cops in New Jersey will respond to something as slight as verbal abuse with arrest. And they tell us this is nearly incomprehensible in the European context where going hands-on with anyone almost at any time is deemed a needless escalation creating unwanted risk for everyone involved. At the same time, the article explains that in the Netherlands or Norway, police aren’t on the receiving end of verbal abuse nor are they getting in car chases with suspects sporting handguns or assault rifles. So the policing environment really could not be more different. Culture is a real thing! They tell us that, for example, in England or Germany, police simply did not anticipate violence, even from an encounter with criminals. Even in a situation where a suspect flees from police in a car trying to escape arrest and crashes into another vehicle, according to this review, police in Berlin and London still report expecting passivity, not a verbal assault or flying fists or gunfire. So, it’s apples to oranges. What this international perspective could imply though, if anything, is that one’s response to being engaged by police has a significant impact on the outcome of that interaction. But, that said, there’s just so much unknown that it’s pretty hard to say anything truly definitive.

PINEAPPLES TO KUMQUATS

Thinking about this, I was reminded of a fantastic six-part podcast on gun violence in the US. It’s amazing and everyone should listen to it. It illuminated so much that I’d never heard before on a topic we’ve all heard so very much about. One very interesting revelation, among many, came in episode four, which is titled Moral Hazard. Though the series exposes how deaths from guns are on the decline, it reveals how that is not due to better policing or laws or controls against illicit weapons getting into the hands of criminals or the mentally unwell. Deaths from gunshot wounds, it turns out, are virtually impossible in major urban centres in the US at present due to the tremendous expertise and tools Americans have uniquely developed and deployed to very quickly and effectively deal with those very specific and staggeringly common critical cases. Astonishingly, a trauma surgeon is asked, if he could wave his magic wand, what medical resources, interventions, or miracles he would gift the world to reduce gun deaths. He responds saying he wouldn’t actually ask for any additional medical tricks or tools! He explains that the system is so excellent, so efficient and effective, that they can already save 95% of people who come in, meaning that only those people with the most traumatic and unlucky injuries don’t make it, and as such novel medical interventions (like advances in wound dressings or blood product or better and faster medical attention) are unlikely to make a dent in the remaining 5%. Further reductions in gun deaths, he insists, can really only come from social interventions, not medical ones.

Among so many other things, that exposes how gun violence has stopped correlating with gun-related death figures in the US and how those cannot be compared to other jurisdictions. The very same bullet wounds even in a major urban centre in France or Belgium, say, or anywhere outside the US would yield far higher fatality rates. So, to the point, even a police-involved shooting, the most traumatic violence you can receive from a cop, in San Francisco or Washington DC is very unlikely to kill the person on the receiving end and cannot reasonably be compared to the same fatal police use of force figures in São Paulo or Winnipeg. Those numbers just mean very different things.

That reminder had me considering hospitals. And that’s when all of this and my concern about police use of force in Winnipeg blew up entirely.

HOW DO COPS COMPARE TO NURSES OR EVEN CHILDREN?

I would be very surprised to learn that you feel differently when you hear about someone seriously harmed or killed by accident, neglect, or excessive force based on the setting or who is inflicting the harm. If that's true, why not look at violence or fatality rates within the education system or medical system versus from our policing system? For me, perhaps because I’m a monster, “Why did he die?” comes much more easily to my own lips when I hear about a case of a kid attending history class or someone out on the playground at lunch or when someone with a respiratory issue or mental health emergency goes to hospital than when someone charges at police with a crowbar or drunkenly wrestles with six cops, refusing to be detained during a domestic violence call. And as such, I’d love to know why one scenario is so maximally animating other people while even, say, ten times the amount of needless harm and death gets comparatively zero attention — to say nothing of the rampant public outrage (laptop stickers and backpack badges, banners and graffiti, social media posts and news articles, protests or riots in the streets.) That seems curious.

Recent surveys show us there is a crisis of violence in schools with 40% of boys experiencing physical violence and 20% of them report being threatened with a weapon while on school grounds. The same information gathering shows 25% of students surveyed in schools in Prairie provinces, for example, experiencing unwanted sexual contact. And of all these cases only 30% of incidents, surveys show, were reported to anyone. Even teachers in Ontario, 54% of those surveyed, reported having been on the receiving end of violence from their students — representing a seven-fold jump from just 20 years prior. There were even 622 stabbings in Toronto schools in almost as many days, between Jan 2021 and Nov 2022, including recent fatalities. AllChildrenAreBastards? 1312! Yet, even more astonishingly, numbers like this emerge despite half of all schools in the country having no requirement to report acts of violence. And, of course, all of this comes as schools cut ties with police and end their officer resource programs and the public becomes highly animated over police “use of force” (which includes threatening to use a baton or unholstering a taser) toward someone threatening or actually being violent toward police or the public.

But the situation is worse in hospitals. I found lists of all “critical incidents” occurring in the province of Manitoba and reported to the health authority. All hospitals in the province see about as many patient visits annually as Winnipeg police have annual calls for service, in the 250,000 range. And I found that hospital critical incident reports show cases of serious unintended harm, deemed “fairly rare” in the media, are in the hundreds annually. And it looks like deaths of this nature average in the dozens each year, with 30 unintended deaths in Manitoba hospitals in 2022. To me that looks like, with a similar number of interactions with a similar population, occasionally the exact same population, hospitals are unintentionally killing ten times more people than the Winnipeg Police Service and seriously harming far more.

But also notice how different these cases are. There were only two deaths known to have been caused by police in 2023 in Winnipeg. Both of those men were in the midst of a psychotic episode and intentionally coming at police with weapons. Zero of the 30 people killed in hospitals were suffering a mental breakdown or attacking hospital staff. Those killed were all "unarmed civilians" in hospital on wellness grounds and seeking care. None were attended by people carrying firearms, conducted energy weapons, chemical weapons, or bludgeons of any kind. And those unarmed caregivers are not typically attempting to apprehend or subdue folks trying to avoid capture. The level of coercion and danger in the hospital setting is really at the opposite end of the spectrum from so much of police work. The hospital setting is highly controlled and contained, of course, meaning there are none of the bystanders, speeding vehicles, or people charging at surgeons or palliative care nurses with crowbars. And those same nurses and surgeons are also not being called in specifically to address outbreaks of violence or intoxicated idiocy. In fact, they have cops on-call to do just that. Right.

So, how are hospitals killing so many people? Well, the hospital critical incident reports I have access to are extremely sparse and vague. Rather than a cause of death or definitive statement about what took place, for example and as you might expect, they tend to only report the location. So common are lines such as “Client found partially on floor beside bed.” What is that? Other variations are things like “Client sustained a fall resulting in injury.” The “injury” in this case resulted in the fatality of the “client.” To me this euphemistic business-speak is nothing less than gut wrenching (not more objective or less laden with emotion as I imagine is intended.) And then what does it mean to “sustain a fall”? Like, were they pushed, did they jump, or did they just keel over? And was it down an open elevator shaft or from a seated position in a chair? What are we talking about? Another report says “Client fell from transfer device.” Here I presume the ”client” wasn’t 25ft off the ground nor that they “fell” on their own. Beds in hospitals tend to have arms or railings to prevent falls and the report notes that it was a “transition device”, so what are the odds they “fell” and were not more accurately “dropped”? Even my grandfather at 92 probably would have survived a “fall” from a bed, doubly so if he was surrounded by nurses and doctors with medical training and every form of life-saving equipment. So all of this seems perfectly wacky to me, both in the total lack of relevant detail but also that they employ the language they do, such as “client fell”, as though killing someone under their care from a, what, three foot drop as they attempt to transition them between a bed and gurney, say, is in this context a little “oopsie” (and according to everyone everywhere an “accident” or “error” and not ever “abuse” or “brutality” — which it surely must be) and yet still delivering the same result as someone drunkenly going over a fifteenth floor balcony.

When not offering something quite so absurd, these reports still offer similar vagueness, like: “A patient experienced a change in their medical condition. The opportunity for earlier recognition and intervention was not realized.” Sure, that’s an admission of fatal neglect, but it still says nothing about what actually occurred. Other cases are more specific and tell us hospitals are administering fatal overdoses (typically and tragically overdoses of curatives) or failing to provide necessary prescribed medications. They also tell us they deliver unnecessary surgical procedures that kill or cause serious injury. Every year, too, some number of people choke while eating and die during their stay in hospital. That just blows my mind. Surrounded by medical professionals and in a setting fully saturated by monitoring systems and alarms and every resuscitation tool available, every year someone’s brother or aunt dies from an egg salad sandwich. And, perhaps most surprising, these fatalities and incidents of significant harm were just as high prior to the pandemic, in 2019, as they were during and since. ANAB?

SOLUTIONS

Given what I’ve shared with you, are the Winnipeg police exposed as particularly dangerous people to be around? Or is it so much more obvious that they are merely gifted with virtually all scenarios where people are on their worst behaviour, especially when those people’s minds are altered or entirely lost, and those folks have already been violent and/or are waving weapons around? And is there any evidence, even a shred, that any of the proposed “alternatives” to policing — even the “best” and “proven” examples from around the globe — would or even could save the lives of anyone? Is there even any room to think that if a radical new program (very much unlike CAHOOTS) was implemented that the community would experience less harm? Where is the evidence for that?

There simply are no people anyplace you can point to who are volunteering to take on the job faced by police in Canada. But I strongly encourage concerned citizens to induct a team of pacifists to pilot the Winnipeg Cuddles and Kisses Committee. Your team could sport shirts of chain mail and hockey goalie helmets, dose yourselves with MDMA and equip science fiction-grade stun rays (to be used only in the most dire emergencies.) The WCKC could take all wellness checks, traffic stops, domestic disturbance calls, and bank robberies — you know, filling the gaps of existing “alternatives to police” and standing in for cops in any and all scenarios involving or even potentially involving coercion or violence. Great. I still don't see how harm and unintentional deaths decline dramatically, given how rare they are in Winnipeg and how much more common in seemingly every setting.

Why not acknowledge how uncommon the harm is, and how strongly correlated those cases are with threats and violence from the community? Why not notice how, like seeking better survival rates for gun-shot wounds in the US, the meaningful interventions are more likely to come from the social side of things and convincing more people that the best way to save lives, their own, is to refuse to go hands-on with or point weapons at first-responders or those carrying out legal orders, regardless of their label or dress?

To me the whole article and its argument appear less as attacks on police or police procedure and more like a rejection of the existence of biology. Psychosis, adrenaline, and testosterone are strange things to deny outright. I promise you they're real and your intentions or presentation have no bearing on outcomes. But, silly me, the folks most concerned about all this cannot be expected to have considered what could be done differently and how because, of course, they show no evidence of so little as attempting to uncover what is actually happening.