LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Stefanson’s new war on crime

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/11/2022 (679 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last week, Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative government announced a war on what they call a crime in this province. They created a new interprovincial police unit to target persons involved in repeat transgressions.

The PCs gave more money for downtown street patrols in Winnipeg. They provided money for a new detention centre space in Brandon, suggesting the bigger space was needed for new arrests that are looming as the PCs adopt a tougher approach to dealing with transgression.

The PCs are out in full force talking about going after bad guys and getting tough on crime to anyone who will listen. No doubt some Manitobans are, especially wealthy property owners. These kinds of ideological stunts can be popular with conservative thinkers, and the PCs in Manitoba clearly have a punitive mentality on issues of transgression and distress.

They would rather lock someone up, punish them, push them further to the margins, than fund social services groups and community outreach that will actually help people.

This punitive thinking doesn’t lead to long-term safety, and you don’t have to have a PhD in criminology to see that. For more than 50 years, we have had a carceral, colonial approach to responding to transgression and distress in this province. We have funded the Winnipeg Police Service to an extent that it is now bringing the municipal budget into a position of structural deficit.

If a police-first approach to dealing with transgression worked, it would have already. We would have less transgression in Manitoba’s cities. We would have healthier communities and neighbourhoods. We do not, and this is because we have defunded the community groups and social development programs that actually keep people healthy and safe, that deter transgression before it happens.

Instead, we have given that money to law enforcement agencies, who really have no tools to help people be safer or healthier. Police simply respond with violence after a transgression has already occurred, and then lock people up. Some Manitobans might think that makes them safer, but it does not.

There’s a book by Todd Clear called “Imprisoning Communities,” which shows the more we imprison people in certain neighbourhoods that already tend to be racialized and marginalized, the more those neighbourhoods go into a socio-economic decline that is associated with future transgression. Policing doesn’t stop crime, but causes conditions for transgression to flourish over time.

That is what’s going to happen if this war-on-crime announcement resonates with enough Manitobans that the PCs sneak back into power next election. Declaring a crime war is cyclical, part of how conservatives cling to power, and it has disastrous effects on already marginalized families and neighbourhoods.

This war-on-crime declaration is also designed to make us forget about the way this PC government abandoned people during the pandemic.

If enough Manitobans forget how the PCs refused to fund initiatives to expand health care, if enough people forget how the PCs have cut public education from kindergarten to post-secondary, we will have another four years of PCs widening the punitive carceral net and dismantling the social safety net. All that will remain is a bulky, expensive criminal justice system that does not actually produce real safety — a night-watchman state.

If enough Manitobans are seduced by this war-on-crime rhetoric, it will not end well. The more we pump money into policing and imprisonment, the less healthy our communities will be.

This declaration of a war on crime by Stefanson is a hail mary for the PCs, and it speaks to the poverty of their platform. They want to turn the page. They have nothing to say about the crisis in health care that they’ve created by closing emergency rooms and failing to hire more nurses and doctors. They have nothing to say about the pure horror that is happening right now in hospitals across the province.

The PCs want people to forget that they abandoned Manitoba during the pandemic. They want to project blame onto others, people who are already on the margins of society. Declaring a war on crime is a classic conservative approach to scapegoating the poor.

To the extent this war-on-crime rhetoric works, the lesser Manitoba will be, and the more pain and suffering it will guarantee for racialized, marginalized, everyday working people across the province.

KEVIN WALBY

Winnipeg