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Winnipeg has a problem with incarceration and embedded criminalization. It’s so weird too, because its history of union activists being killed by police during the strike would lead one to believe that it could be some kind of utopia.
(Weird to me, to be clear)
But the social work programs here literally funnel students into all kinds of programs that are police-based.
We should talk about how often in social work, the advice given is to “call the police”/“work with the police”.
I wonder if that is unique to here, or in most social work programs?
I do outreach here with the orgs/community groups that are not police-focused, personally, because I cannot handle the “social control” piece of social work.
And that advice to “call the police” is given by people that you really wouldn’t expect to hear it from, (at least, I have certainly been shocked at who has recommended/advised me to call them)
It seems like they have put so much money into policing here, that they are really, the only people to call for help if you feel like you can’t handle (whichever) crisis.
Like, you can’t really call mobile crisis, it sort of doesn’t exist.
They will just try to convince you to present at the Crisis Response Centre, anyway. And if you’re on meth, the CRC will turn you away.
This province and city have defunded anything that was closer to being “good” in the last decades.
And the hospital is so scary with all of the security everywhere.
Winnipeg feels like “a city full of guards”, and frankly, I am shocked that we were able to get them out of the library.
I guess embedded police is what you get tho, with “community policing” models.
When we first moved here, (in the first year), I had to disrupt a physical fight between my neighbours. Living in the North End at the time, I really saw just how awful the police treated people, and so when it happened, I just didn’t call them and did it, myself.
In hindsight, I am so relieved that I did that, (as frightening as it was at the time, and in the months after, because the guy that I stopped continued to live there), b/c I honestly couldn’t have lived with myself, if I had done what many people tell me I should have, & called.
The fact that my neighbours would likely be dead if I had called feels chilling.
And like, did I want to live next to am abuser for months? Ugh. But what mattered at the time was what that neighbour wanted, and she very clearly said to me that she didn’t want me to call the police (I asked, of course), that she “just wants him to leave”.
I am super privileged tho, and I have a rather tall partner, who was willing to just be around as much as possible. And all I could really do was the same thing for her, just “be around”.
And I never heard another fight while they lived there, (that was how I knew the first time, I heard it).
But as communities, we really need to talk about what it looks like to respond differently, when “calling the police” is such a knee jerk response, because the reality is that it gets people killed.
The reality is that we can’t call the police for “help”.
Their very job is “enforcement”.
They have tried really hard to justify themselves, and as their budgets have risen, money has been drained from critical public services. Critical community care.
Imagine: a woman who is in a position of being abused by her partner, and she asks you to “not call the police”. That is an awfully strong indictment, imo.
