In the midst of a crisis over policing, Halifax’s police commission has cancelled its scheduled meetings and is declining to accept public input
A letter written from the East Coast Prison Justice Society and Women’s Wellness Within (I am a member of both boards) to the Board of Police Commissioners identifies several areas where democratic representation at the board can be improved. As I have previously written about, access to the board for public submissions can be near impossible, and the board has no real mechanisms for public feedback.
The letter also indicates that:
[A] 2016 self-study of the Board conducted by former Commissioners Fred Honsberger and Mike Moreash concluded that “the Halifax Board of Police Commissioners has failed to meet its legislated governance requirements under the 2006 Police Act for the past 10 years,” a failure which the reviewers attributed to “longstanding systemic flaws in the framework and support network of the Board.”
Among the concerns raised by advocates are that, unlike what is common in other jurisdictions, none of the policies governing the police are publicly available. For example, the Toronto Police Service — no model of transparency or accountability — posts its procedures online here.
While procedures clearly do not prevent police from harming and killing people, they at least provide a minimum mechanism for holding the police accountable to the failure of their own policies. In February, for example, the Halifax Regional Police beat a 15-year-old Black boy outside Bedford Place Mall. As far as we know, there are no policies for the police governing interactions with minors.
Police commissioners do have access to all these policies, but they have yet to invoke any of them in calling the police to account. I commented in February about how, in preparing their self-assessments, it was suggested that it would be worth asking if everyone had “read the manual.” Proposing policy — a key responsibility of the Board — seems a long way off. The 2016 self-assessment reveals that to that point, the Board had made no policy recommendations at all.
Martha Paynter, the Chair of Women’s Wellness Within, recounts the difficulties her organization has experienced in obtaining the use of force policies for the Halifax Regional Police:
We met with Chief Dan Kinsella and other officers because of our concerns after Santina Rao’s assault. We were particularly concerned that they did not understand the gender implications of this kind of arrest in front of children.
When we met with them, they refused to provide us a copy of any of their policies. We were caught in a kind of loop where they said they welcomed our feedback on their policies, but we were not permitted to actually see said policies.
We are disturbed by the total lack of transparency by this public so-called service, and demand full transparency so that the public can understand what drives police actions.
The daily press conferences during COVID-19 may have created the illusion that democratic engagement with government was not affected by the pandemic, but the opposite has been the case. Little attention has been paid to the implications of what happens when courts are no longer open and hearings are not accessible to public and journalists, or when meetings by council or the police board go online.
The suppression of public input — and refusal to meet during a period where policing is in crisis — reminds us of the dangers we face when we do not have access to those who purport to democratic legitimacy when governing. If they cannot meet that basic democratic responsibility, then it is our duty to hold them to account in those ringing revolutionary words: by any means necessary.