I had a whole post written out but my browser glitched out and I lost it. :/ But basically, the Thunder Bay Police Association is responded to criticism by saying "we're not racist, you're racist!"
Last week, they accused the leader of Northern Ontario's largest indigenous organization of driving a wedge in the community (which, itself, drove a wedge deeper into the community as there was a fair amount of backlash against that) and now this week, they're responding to the OIPRD report of institutional racism in the city with "We're not racist! Murray Sinclair is just vindictive!"
They even went so far as to spell Patty Hajdu's name incorrectly.
They literally start off with "after careful review" but then totally miss the point that Sinclair's report, which was done on behalf of the Ontario Civilian Police Commissioner, was looking specifically at the actions of the Police Services Board (which, as a civilian body, does not have police on it) and that the OIPRD report was looking specifically at three dozen cases where indigenous people's deaths were investigated by the police, whether they were considered solved or not.
And, yeah, it's easy to have a high solve rate when you see a half naked indigenous person lying dead on the ground and declare "Oops! they got drunk and fell! Crime solved!" before the coroner's plane lands (which, according to the report, they did
nine times in less than a decade.)
And the mayor's responses to these are 1: "Every city is like this" (and what a fucking depressing thought that is) and 2: "Disbanding the board for a year means we can't tell the police what to do!" (Because yeah, that's been working well for the past 48 years!)
Honestly, though, the
tone of that response from the head of the local police union is really alarming. I thought Keith Hobbs (who held that position in the 2000s and later became mayor; currently on trial for corruption) was bad but that letter has to be one of the worse rebuttal press releases I have ever seen.
Also, saying "our funding is low" and then claiming "it's only 7.9% of the budget" is not a very effective argument. Their budget is $40,696,300 and the city budget is $245,975,400. Now, that's 16.5% of the budget (and they're 10.2% of the city's $400M gross budget but that's not representative of final costs) so I don't know where they got the 7.9% number from, but a more effective argument would have been "we need X amount of additional funding". This in spite of the fact that our police service consistently runs in the red and since neither it nor the city are allowed to have a deficit, that funding is eventually covered by drawing from reserve funds and then increasing their budget the following year anyway.
Every city is like this?