The Admission

There is a true thing a Canadian mayor can say that costs nothing to say: that most of what the police are sent to do is not police work. Eighty per cent of calls for service, by the police’s own count, are not criminal matters — they are people in mental-health crisis, in addiction, in poverty, in distress. It is the kind of fact that sounds like reform when it leaves a politician’s mouth. But watch when it leaves, and toward what. In Regina, in 2020, it left the mouth of a mayor on his way out of office, in a debate he would lose, and it was aimed not at moving those calls to people who could help — but at defending the police against the idea of being shrunk. The number that should have indicted the arrangement was spent protecting it. That is the move: not hiding the truth, but admitting it in the one form, at the one moment, where admitting it changes nothing.

§01 — The number that indicts itself

Start with what the number says, because it says more than the people who quote it admit. “Eighty per cent of police calls are not related to the criminal code” is a statement about a mismatch: that the institution sent to the overwhelming majority of these situations is the wrong institution for them. Read forward, the figure is an argument for taking police off those calls and putting a different response — health, mental-health, social — in their place. It cannot be said honestly and then used to argue that police resources must be preserved, because the figure is the case for the opposite. And yet that is precisely how it is used.

• P1 The number is real and known. By the police service’s own accounting, ~80% of calls for service are not Criminal Code matters; the Board of Police Commissioners has restated it. The case concedes this in full.
• P2 A figure about what police should not be handling entails two things: that the people on those calls received an armed, force-authorized, criminalizing response they did not need — and that someone is obliged to move that response elsewhere.
• P3 But when the figure surfaces in a politician’s mouth, it is turned the other way — deployed to defend the police footprint, not to shrink it — and the obligation to reallocate goes nowhere, because the body that could act on it has been captured (§04).
• P4 So the truth is admitted in the one form where it costs nothing: as candour that defends the status quo, by an official on his way out, before an oversight that everyone knows will not move. The confession is laundered into a credential — and the capture is what makes it free.

Counter: a fact that argues for change, spoken to resist change, has not been confessed. It has been disarmed.

§02 — The borrowed truth

The first tell is that the mayor did not discover the number; he repeated it. The figure lives in the police service’s own call data and in the rooms where policing is governed. In Regina, the Board of Police Commissioners heard it from one of its own members — Ward 6 councillor Joel Murray — in almost identical words: “Eighty per cent of calls for service for police are not criminal in nature… they’re people with addictions, they’re people with mental health challenges” — and the board passed a motion calling for a review of police response to social crises and for more provincial funding of social services. The number is not a revelation. It is common knowledge among exactly the people with the authority to act on it.primary

That matters, because if a fact this consequential is already known to the governing body and still produces no reallocation, then the problem was never information. The number can be passed around a commission table, quoted in a debate, printed in a platform — and the calls keep going to the police, because admitting the figure and acting on the figure are two different things, and only the first is cheap. When something true is repeated everywhere and changes nothing, stop asking whether it is known and start asking what stops it from mattering.

Counter: a truth that everyone in charge already knows, and that nothing follows from, is not being suppressed. It is being managed.

§03 — Said on the way out

Now the specimen, exactly as it happened. On 3 November 2020, at the Regina mayoral debate, the incumbent mayor Michael Fougere — eight years in the chair, days from defeat — said it plainly: “eighty per cent of police calls are not related to the criminal code.” He did not say it to argue that those calls should leave the police. He said it to argue against defunding the police — that resources should not be withdrawn. Ten days later he lost the election. The most honest thing said about Regina policing that night was said by the man who was leaving, and it was used to protect the thing he was leaving.primary

There is a pattern in that timing, and it is not unique to one man. The cost of acting on the figure — of confronting the police budget, the police association, the arrangement of who responds to a city’s pain — is paid by whoever holds power and tries. The figure itself is free. So it tends to be spoken at the safe edges of power: by the departing, the term-limited, the defeated, the retired — people for whom the truth no longer carries a price. A confession that can only be afforded on the way out is not a confession the institution has made. It is a confession the institution has arranged to survive.

The most honest thing said that night was said by the man who was leaving — and it was used to defend the thing he was leaving.

Counter: when a truth is only sayable by those who no longer pay for it, the silence of everyone still in power is the real position.

§04 — The captured brake

Here is why the admission stays cheap: the body that is supposed to translate it into action has been hollowed out. In Canada, civilian control of police runs through police services boards — and those boards have been faulted, by judicial inquiry after judicial inquiry, for failing the oversight they exist to provide. The structural reason is documented: boards are under-resourced and, as the governance literature puts it, become dependent on the police to tell them what is possible — what options exist, what a budget can be — and so cannot set independent, community-oriented direction. The watchdog is briefed by the thing it watches.primary

And where a board, or a mayor, does try to take the grip, the police union is there. Police associations in Canada wield open political power to punish reformers and to shut down calls for stronger oversight; the textbook case is the Toronto Police Association’s “Operation True Blue” (2000), a fundraising drive aimed in part at targeting political opponents. A mayor who moves to shrink the police footprint is not having a policy debate; he is picking a fight with an organized political force that can help end his career — which is exactly the fight a mayor on his way out no longer has to win. The brake exists on the org chart. In practice it is held by the vehicle it is meant to stop.analysis

And the pressure does reach the mayor’s door — and is absorbed there. In 2014, two Regina officers mistook Simon Ash-Moccasin, an Indigenous man, for a suspect and forcibly detained him; the province’s Public Complaints Commission found the force excessive. He brought that finding to City Hall to put it to the same mayor, Michael Fougere — and the meeting did not happen; the mayor, it was said, had other commitments and learned of the visit too late. The institutional answer was an apology from the police chief and a pledged officer “refresher course” — the training-as-exit the series documented in Case 08. A substantiated victim of excessive force came to the civilian head of the city with a commission’s finding in his hand, and the system met him with a missed appointment and a class. (Ash-Moccasin also raised racial profiling, which the commission did not find; he carried it on to a human-rights complaint.)primary

This is the series’ oversight pattern, named before in Vol. II · Case 07 and Case 16: a mechanism that satisfies the form of accountability while the function drains away. The eighty-per-cent figure is safe to admit precisely because it lands in front of a board that cannot move and against a union that can.

Counter: a fact only becomes dangerous when something can act on it. Capture the body that would act, and the most damning number in the city is just conversation.

§05 — The strongest case

The fair version of the other side is real, and the case is stronger for stating it. Many of those non-criminal calls genuinely do reach the police because there is, today, no one else to send: alternative-response and mobile-crisis teams exist but are thin, new, and unevenly funded, and a 2 a.m. crisis does not wait for a pilot program. Some share of the eighty per cent involves a real risk of violence or self-harm where a trained, calm presence — which is sometimes a police presence — is the safer option, not the worse one. A mayor cannot, by himself, stand up a parallel health system overnight; “defund” was a blunt slogan that often outran its own plan; and a politician resisting a sudden withdrawal of the only responders a city currently has is not, on its face, acting in bad faith.

Grant all of it. It still does not reach the claim. The strongest defence argues for building the alternative — funding the crisis teams, the housing, the health response that the figure says are needed. It does not argue for spending the figure as a reason to leave the arrangement untouched, which is what was done; and it does not explain why a number known for years to the governing board has produced so little of that alternative. “We can’t reallocate overnight” is true. “So we will quote the number and protect the budget” is the laundering. The honest response to the eighty per cent is to start moving it. The response on the record is to admit it, and keep it.

Counter: “there is no one else to send” is an argument for building someone else to send — not for citing the gap as a reason to preserve it.

§06 — The harm the number hides

The figure has a cost, and the admission is built to leave it out. To send an armed, force-authorized institution to eighty per cent of calls that are not criminal is to route people in crisis through the one response designed for danger — with its power to restrain, to charge, to escalate, and, sometimes, to kill. The eighty per cent is not a statistic about police workload. It is a statistic about how a city meets its most vulnerable residents: not with care, but with a uniform and the criminal law standing behind it.

That cost has a name in this city. Samwel Uko — twenty years old, in mental-health crisis — went twice to a Regina hospital for help on 21 May 2020, and on the second visit was removed by security before he was assessed; he was found dead in Wascana Lake hours later (the full record is Case 42 and Case 08). He was the eighty per cent: a person who needed the help the figure says the police should not be the ones to give, met instead by the apparatus of force and exclusion. Case 43 showed what that apparatus does when it medicalizes the force it applies. This case shows the city’s own number conceding that none of it should have been a police matter — and then declining to move a thing.primary

Eighty per cent is not a number about police workload. It is a number about how a city meets the people in the most pain.

Counter: the admission that most of these calls aren’t criminal is also an admission that most of the force used on them was spent on people who needed care. That second sentence is the one never said aloud.

§07 — The admission, named

Strip it to the structure. A city knows — its police know, its commission knows — that most of what the police are sent to do is not police work; that the people on those calls are in crisis, not in commission of a crime. The figure is true, and it is an indictment. So it is handled the way an institution handles a true indictment it has no intention of acting on: it is admitted, but only in the safe register. It is spoken by an outgoing mayor rather than an incoming one; it is aimed at defending the police rather than reallocating them; it is laid before a board that judicial inquiries have found cannot oversee, and against a union that can end careers. The confession is real. The capture is what makes it free. And so the most damning fact about how a city polices its poor becomes a line in a losing debate, and then nothing.

It is admitted by the leaving, aimed at the wrong end, before a board that cannot move and a union that can. The truth is sayable because nothing follows.

The case keeps its limits. It does not say a police presence is never the right one, or that “defund” named a finished plan; §05 grants both. It does not impugn Mr. Fougere’s motives; it reads his use of the number as the ordinary, revealing thing it was. What it claims is narrow and hard to escape: that the eighty-per-cent figure is the city’s own confession, that its confession has produced no reallocation, and that the reason is not ignorance but a captured oversight that lets the truth be said precisely because it cannot be acted on. So when you next hear an official concede that most of policing isn’t police work, do not mistake the candour for accountability. Ask who is saying it, and when, and toward what end — and then ask the question the admission is shaped to bury: if eighty per cent of these calls should never have been the police’s, what was done to the people on them, and who is moving to stop it.