"To Maintain at All Times" Defund the police: policy and service delivery in British Columbia's Lower Mainland

he Defund the Police movement has recently garnered extensive media attention. The movement has forced Canadians to assess the effectiveness of the police, specifically in their interactions with persons with mental illness, those experiencing homelessness, and those struggling with addiction. Moreover, the question as to whether these societal issues should fall to the police as the first responder is still widely debated. While the Defund the Police movement has a number of different perspectives, the most commonly supported position is that a proportion of police funding should be redirected towards community initiatives to serve marginalized populations. In the Canadian context, there is a lack of literature on what this would look like in practical terms. This major paper serves to contribute to the limited academic literature on this topic by obtaining the perspective of a sample of police leaders in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland on the Defund the Police movement and examining the potential policy implications of this perspective for the police, the communities they serve, and the partner agencies they serve alongside. From the interviews, three main themes emerged, including differing perceptions of what is “core policing”, the effects of “defunding” on police, and the effects “defunding” might have on partner agencies and the community at large. The central argument of this major paper is that, although it is largely agreed upon among the police leaders in this study that social issues, including homelessness, addictions, and mental health, should not be considered “core policing”, given the constitutionally entrenched funding models for health services and policing in Canada, the methodology of the Defund the Police movement is not practical within the Canadian Context. With this in mind, recommendations for how the aforementioned populations could be properly served are made, including returning to Peelian Principles that states, in part, that the role of the police is “to maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police”.