Tory’s motion will be taken to the city council for debate on June 29.
Mayor John Tory released a list of proposed reforms for the city’s policing system this morning. The changes will include the creation of a new non-police response team for calls not involving weapons or violence. It’s part of the motion that will be taken to the council on Monday.
The motion will increase the funding of programs that support Toronto’s Indigenous, Black, marginalized communities, and others that provide mental health support.
But Mayor Tory’s recommendations do not call for a defunding of the policing service. Instead, he favours the idea of ‘detasking’ the police.
“We must fix that model by changing the way policing is done in order to stamp out systemic racism within our police service and to re-think, in some cases, whether police are the right community response at all,” Tory wrote in the motion.
Protests around the world were inflamed following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. Toronto Police Services came under a lot of scrutiny after the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet during a mental health wellness check by TPS officers which ended up leading to Korchinski-Paquet falling off her balcony.
A similar incident took place in the Peel region last week when the police shot and killed Ejaz Choudry who was experiencing a mental health crisis.
A pair of city councillors proposed a plan to cut the service’s roughly $1.2 billion of the budget by 10 percent. The motion will also be discussed on June 29.
Canada’s largest mental health hospital, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, also called for police to stop responding to calls concerning people in a mental health crisis.
More than 50 doctors published a letter sent to city hall, describing policing as a public health crisis.
Written By: Aldrin Gomes.
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