…….IS A MAJOR INDUSTRY.

Why would we entangle a person who has committed a crime into the complexities of a legal and penal system that often does its damnedest to foil an eventual return to the community as a contributing law-abiding citizen?

Recovery is what the criminal justice system is intended to do. That it routinely fails suggests this system is broken. But no. There is a valid argument supporting just the opposite.

The system works. It is not broken. It works for the benefit of those who control it.

Start with law enforcement and the work of our police services. The first of Robert Peel’s nine principles of policing, propositions almost 200 years old but widely known and accepted in police agencies today, is “to prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.”

“Crime and disorder” in some form will always be with us and these nine truths underscore the maxim that the police are the public and the public are the police. The concluding ninth of these principles recognizes “always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.”

The sandwiched principles from two to eight stress a duty to secure public co-operation, approval and respect, to minimize the use of physical force, to seek favour by an impartial service to law, and to “refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary…..or of judging guilt and punishing the guilty.”

Today’s demands to defund the police are a symptom of decades of abuse and perceived injustices by law enforcement, a culmination of deteriorating relationships between police and disadvantaged neighbourhoods in this country and in other widespread areas of the world. The movement highlights the growing gulf between the police and the policed, and how far we have strayed from the founding fundamentals of preventing “crime and disorder.”

This writer grew up in a community without a police presence. Yes, the village was in the patrol area of the local Ontario Provincial Police detachment, and one of their cars would occasionally drive through the town, as did the Niagara Parks Commission Police on a patrol of their properties. Help from the police, available if needed, wasn’t witnessed in those years. Community policing was the norm, the usual remedy in times before fixed bodies were formed to enforce the law.

Was there ‘crime and disorder’ in that community? No, at least not that came to the attention of the criminal justice system via a police action. Would that be the case if the village were a neighbourhood in an urban area regularly patrolled by police officers? Yes.

Our police services are the first point of contact between a person presumed to have committed an offense and the criminal justice system. The argument for defunding police calls for a redirection of resources to social programming and services to reduce the demands on police, along with appeals for the decriminalization of minor and non-violent offenses to deter the overpolicing of some marginalized communities.

Our police fuel our courts, jails, and prisons. Efforts by the people to transform the status quo threatens the health of a major industry in Canada.

Later………..our public servants don’t have your back.