The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police are calling for more funding to clamp down on protests.
“National issues and global conflicts have led to an increase in the frequency, duration, complexity, risks and threats of these public assemblies in cities across our country,” President of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police Thomas Carrique told CTV. “This increase is creating an unsustainable demand on police services and operations across Canada.”
The right-wing media likes to frame calls for higher police spending as a question of “safety” and curbing “violent crime.” But you cannot police away what is a result of capitalism in decline. And the numbers don’t lie: police spending has no noticeable impact on crime statistics.
However, Carrique’s comments do, in fact, help illustrate what the real role of police in our society is: to defend the capitalist class and maintain the status quo by clamping down on whoever protests it. In this period of crisis, the police are used to brutalize the poor, attack the left and, as we see today, repress anti-genocide protests.
A recent study by the University of Toronto found that police spending is the largest budget expenditure for nearly all of the largest municipalities in Canada and Quebec. And, police spending has risen sharply in nearly all of them since 2010.
Still, according to Carrique, even with the increased police budgets police have struggled to keep up and repress over 1000 demonstrations against Israel’s siege on Gaza. This, apparently, has cost police forces “tens of millions of dollars that they would have had no opportunity to budget for.”
As such, we can expect more demands from police forces for more tax dollars to repress protests against genocide.
Carrique attempted to scapegoat immigrants for the unrest—from unnamed “parts of the world” where force is an “acceptable vehicle for social change.” But this is obvious racist hypocrisy coming from a representative of the same Canadian state that is backing a genocide.
Nevertheless, this tells us everything we need to know about the state of capitalism today. With the system decaying, the bottom of society is falling out as many struggle to make ends meet. The response of capitalist governments all over the world is to increase military and police spending to defend the present order. They cannot solve the problems created by capitalism, even if they wanted to. And, so they can only resort to repression.
