Police Officer Ticketing Cyclists in Park Hits Cyclist in Bike Lane with His SUV
This is one of several incidents of police targeting and abusing Toronto cyclists in recent weeks.
David Shellnutt
- Toronto’s High Park has become a speed trap for cyclists who look for car-free areas to ride.
- Police have also been ticketing cyclists for trespassing, an off-duty officer physically assaulted a cyclist, and on-duty officer blew a stop sign and hit a cyclist.
- David Shellnutt of The Biking Lawyer LLP calls on Toronto’s mayor to take action to protect cyclists and urges cyclists who are fined to fight the tickets rather than pay up.
In recent weeks, Toronto’s High Park has become a battleground as cyclists try to ride in the car-free area safely and police target and ticket them. But beyond simple speeding tickets, there’s a darker side: Police have also been ticketing cyclists for trespassing, an off-duty officer physically assaulted a cyclist, and an on-duty officer blew a stop sign and hit a cyclist.
Lawyer and cycling advocate David Shellnutt of The Biking Lawyer LLP has been vocal about these incidents, calling on Toronto’s mayor to take action and protect cyclists by hosting pop-up rides in the park and taking legal actions against the police who have been terrorizing the city’s cyclists.
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Shellnutt wrote an open letter to Toronto’s mayor, John Tory, earlier this week, detailing the most recent incident. A police officer who was driving his SUV in High Park while ticketing cyclists actually hit one just outside of the park, while the rider was cycling in a bike lane. He was at a four-way stop with the officer and stopped. The officer turned right into him, failing to yield the right of way. The officer claimed that the sun was in his eyes. A supervisor came down to the scene, but it is still unclear if the officer was charged for the collision or effectively running a stop sign.
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When asked about the incident, a spokesperson for the Toronto Police Department said: “We can confirm that on August 2, 2022, at approximately 6:30 p.m., a minor collision took place between a police vehicle and a cyclist at the intersection of Colborne Lodge Drive and Centre Road in the High Park area. There were no injuries reported. Traffic Services is continuing their investigation.”
While the cyclist was uninjured, his bike sustained significant damage—$2,067.90 worth of damage, according to Shellnutt. “This represents the only collision we have heard of in the park for weeks, caused by the very people alleged to be there preventing collisions and dangerous driving,” he adds.
“In no other incident would ‘the sun being in his eyes’ be an acceptable excuse for any traffic violation,” Shellnutt says. “It makes no sense that it could be an excuse in this situation.” (And from a vision perspective, sun in one’s eyes shouldn’t have made a cyclist only feet in front of a car invisible.)
One of several incidents
Shellnutt describes another worrisome incident that happened last week: “We received a call from a woman who was chased down on her bike by some man just outside of the park, who said he wanted to teach cyclists a lesson. He grabbed her bike and tossed her to the ground, essentially assault. She called the police. They showed up and let the guy go. We were curious as to why… Later, it turns out, that he’s actually an off-duty police officer. It’s wild.”
When asked about the incident, a spokesperson for the Toronto Police Department said: “We can confirm police attended the High Park Avenue and Bloor Street area on August 1 at approximately 5 p.m. for an unknown trouble call. The incident was investigated and there were no injuries reported and no charges laid.”
The week prior, a BIPOC cyclist riding in High Park reported another incident to Shellnutt, saying: “A police officer was driving his SUV in the bike lane, so I tried to get around him from the left. He gave me a warning for speeding. I asked him not to drive in the bike lane and squeeze people in. He proceeded to speed up pull up in front of me in an aggressive way and make me stop. I asked the officer if he was detaining me. He then gave me a $65-ticket for ‘engaging in prohibited activity.’”David Shellnutt
Toronto police vehicles in the bike lane near Bloor Street, one of many dangerous intersections for cyclists in the city.
Speeding tickets
And in the background, there are the speeding tickets we’ve written about previously: Police officers patrol the park, citing cyclists who are going even a kilometer per hour above the posted limit, while just outside of the park, cyclists are in danger even while riding in the bike lanes. Shellnutt recalls that last August, he retained three clients who had all been struck at intersections surrounding High Park while riding in the bike lanes, all suffering serious injuries as a result. “And that issue isn’t being dealt with,” he says. “Instead, cops are ticketing riders.”
A spokesperson from the Toronto Police department says that the ticketing is in response to concerns from other park users about cyclists, and says that their approach has been to “educate and caution cyclists who are speeding or committing offenses such as failing to stop at stop signs, and on some occasions, to issue Highway Traffic Act tickets, when necessary.”
“Overall, this is a small part of the traffic enforcement that occurs in the city each day,” the spokesperson noted. “The City of Toronto’s parks bylaw includes a 20 km/h speed limit and officers can use their discretion when deciding to ticket. Cyclists, like all road users, have a responsibility to obey the rules of the road to ensure the safety of pedestrians, motorists and other cyclists.”
But Shellnutt argues that the enforcement feels targeted, compared to other road users—including the officer who struck the cyclist with his SUV. “The officer issuing HTA tickets to cyclists failing to stop himself failed to stop but has not been charged, and that seems like inconsistent enforcement,” he says. “That inconsistent enforcement is at the crux of cyclists concerns: We see cars and delivery trucks parked in bike lanes across the city and in 2018 roughly 140,000 fewer speeding tickets were issued than a decade earlier; 44 per cent fewer careless driving charges; a 7,000-ticket drop in charges for making an unsafe left turn at an intersection, a 93 per cent decline.”
So, what are Shellnutt’s next steps?
Currently, he’s arming cyclists with information on how to fight speeding tickets while also rallying public support for cyclists and calling on the mayor to lay off riders. He’s also taken on the case of the rider who was struck by the police SUV pro bono, while filing a complaint against the off-duty officer who assaulted the female cyclist. And he’s urging cyclists who are fined to fight the tickets rather than quietly paying up.
Regardless of where you live, if you receive a ticket on your bike and don’t think it’s fair, Shellnutt recommends fighting it. Thanks to more virtual/remote options, you’ll likely never have to actually physically appear in court.
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“Financially, it’s hard to say that fighting these tickets is worth people’s time, especially those with busy jobs and families,” he says. “But we do think it’s worth it. In Toronto, you have three options when you get one of these tickets: pay, bring it to trial, or speak to a prosecutor. We recommend that everybody opts to speak to the prosecutor. It’s depressing, but we know that in every one of our cases where cyclists are seriously injured and there are charges brought against the driver, those are most often talked down. If motorists who cause serious injury can talk tickets down, then then surely people who didn’t stop at a stop sign in a park or were going a few kilometers over the speed limit will be able to talk their tickets down as well.”
Ultimately, Shellnutt is worried about what this recent onslaught of anti-cyclist sentiment means. “Seeing this targeted enforcement blitz against cyclists strikes us and in the cycling community as a real affront,” he adds. “Every day, we report dangerous drivers parked in bike lanes, and we see scant resources dedicated to solving any of those problems, which cause real harm. We feel like it’s indicative of a mayor and a police force who are either completely out of touch with what’s happening on the on the streets of Toronto, or willfully blind to the carnage being caused out there. Because if you actually cared about safe streets, you would dedicate the resources to where, where people are actually getting injured.”
Defund the Police
Should Police Departments Be Defunded, if Not Abolished?Ask the Chatbot a Question
The Editors of ProCon
Amid the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, 2020, calls to “defund the police” began to populate protest signs and social media posts.
Although there are multiple interpretations of “defund the police,” the basic definition is “to move funding away from police departments and into community resources, such as mental health experts, housing, and social workers.” Some advocates would reallocate some police funding while keeping police departments, whereas others would combine defunding with other police reforms, such as body cameras and bias training, and others see defunding as a small step toward ultimately abolishing police departments and the prison system entirely. [1][2][3][4][5][6]
What do you think?
Explore the ProCon debate
Police departments received about $129 billion nationwide in 2020 from state and local governments, up from $42.3 billion in 1977. Police budgets have made up about 4% of total state and local budgets since 1977. According to the Urban Institute, “From 1977 to 2020, in 2020 inflation-adjusted dollars, state and local government spending on the police increased from $45 billion to $129 billion, an increase of 189 percent.” Individual cities or counties may allocate more (or fewer) funds to police departments. The 2017 Los Angeles city budget, for example, provided 23% of the budget to police, while 9% of Los Angeles county’s budget went to policing. About 97% of police budgets go toward operational costs, such as salaries and benefits. [7][8][9][61]
In June 2020, 64% of Americans opposed the abstract idea of defunding the police, whereas 34% supported the movement; 60% were against reallocating police budget funds to other public health and social programs, whereas 39% were in favor. [10]
In Oct. 2021, 21% of American adults wanted police budgets “increased a lot,” and 26% wanted budgets “increased a little,” whereas 9% wanted police budgets “decreased a little” and 6% “decreased a lot”; 37% said budgets should “stay about the same.” [58]
In his March 1, 2022, State of the Union address, President Joe Biden declared, “We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training.” By Aug. 31, 2022, the movement had largely gone quiet; indeed, opinion articles declared, “‘Defund the Police’ Is Dead.” [65][62]
A March 2023 criminology study found that, although police departments have not been widely defunded, the departments are experiencing a 2.2%–16% loss of full-time police officers. The loss has prompted some departments, including the New Orleans Police Department, to use third-party organizations to respond to some 911 calls, including minor traffic accidents. As explained by Ethan Cheramie, founder of On Scene Services (OSS), which hires former police officers as unarmed responders, “Citizens still call 911; their call is still dispatched. However, it is dispatched to our agents….You’re going to continue to see alternative police response be divested from guys with guns over to civilians to respond to these nonviolent calls for service.” [59][60]
Pros and Cons at a Glance
| PROS | CONS |
|---|---|
| Pro 1: Police departments are oppressive and violent; defunding them would reduce violence against people of color and overall crime. Read More. | Con 1: When police department budgets are cut, violence and civilian injuries increase, and departments turn to “taxation by citation” to raise money. Read More. |
| Pro 2: Police department reforms have failed; police departments cannot be reformed, only curtailed. Read More. | Con 2: The level of police misconduct is overstated, more (not fewer) police are being called for in crime-ridden areas, and reforms are both possible and supported by a majority of Americans. Read More. |
| Pro 3: Police were not intended to do many of the jobs they perform; defunding the police would allow experts to step in. Read More. | Con 3: Police departments should not be disbanded but held to standardized national regulations, which should comply with international human rights laws. Read More. |
Pro Arguments
Pro 1: Police departments are oppressive and violent; defunding them would reduce violence against people of color and overall crime.
Paige Fernandez, policing policy adviser for the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), noted, “American policing has never been a neutral institution. The first U.S. city police department was a slave patrol, and modern police forces have directed oppression and violence at Black people to enforce Jim Crow, wage the War on Drugs, and crack down on protests.” Police departments are also often outfitted with surplus military equipment, increasing police firepower and the attitude that the police are at war with communities, which can escalate situations to violence. [11][12]
Organizations such as MPD150, which surveyed the Minneapolis Police Department’s conduct since its inception in 1867, argue that the police system is actually not broken; it’s working as it always has, because “the police were established to protect the interests of the wealthy, and racialized violence has always been part of the mission.” MPD150 states that the police system puts millions of people of color in prison, which limits or deprives them of voting rights, employment, education, and access to housing, among other privileges given automatically to white people. [13]
According to an Aug. 20, 2019 study, Black American men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men and Black women 1.4 times more likely than white women. A 2018 Bureau of Justice Statistics report showed that police officers were twice as likely to use force against people of color than against white people. In 2019 American police officers killed 1,098 people, 24% of whom were Black, though African Americans represented only 13% of the U.S. population. [14][15][16][17]
The American Public Health Association declared police violence a public health issue in 2018, stating, “Almost 10 percent of all homicides in the US are committed by police. Even if some may be ‘lawful,’ it’s not ok that we kill 1,000–1,200 people a year by police.”[18]
Defunding the police could result in fewer crimes and less violence from police. During several weeks in 2014 and 2015, when New York City police pulled back on “broken windows” policing, which focused on actively patrolling for low-level crimes, about 2,100 fewer major crimes were reported, which represented a 3–6% drop in a matter of weeks. If the police are not actively patrolling for minor crimes and are responding to fewer major crimes, there are fewer opportunities for violence. [19]
Pro 2: Police department reforms have failed; police departments cannot be reformed, only curtailed.
As Mariame Kaba, a prison industrial complex abolitionist, has stated, “Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police. There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people.” [20]
Kaba has noted that the first major police misconduct investigation was the Lexow Committee in New York City in 1894, in which more than 100 officers were collectively convicted of 56 charges of third-degree assault, 45 charges of second-degree assault, as well as multiple charges of criminal neglect, oppression, and attempted rape. Only four officers were dismissed as a result, three because they’d assaulted other officers. [20] [21]
Philip V. McHarris, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, and Thenjiwe McHarris, from Movement for Black Lives, have highlighted “the Minneapolis Police Department, which is held up as a model of progressive police reform. The department offers procedural justice as well as trainings for implicit bias, mindfulness and de-escalation. It embraces community policing and officer diversity, bans ‘warrior style’ policing, uses body cameras, implemented an early intervention system to identify problematic officers, receives training around mental health crisis intervention, and practices ‘reconciliation’ efforts in communities of color.” [22]
Still, George Floyd and 51 other Black men, along with 15 Indigenous men and 9 Hispanic men, were killed by Minneapolis Police Department officers between Jan. 2000 and May 31, 2020. Further reforms have been recommended to the Minneapolis Police Department repeatedly to reduce use-of-force violations, but none have been implemented. [23][24]
In July 2014 Eric Garner died from a choke hold performed by a police officer after New York City banned the hold in 1993. Austin, Texas, and Los Angeles police officers were shown firing projectiles at people’s heads, which is prohibited in both jurisdictions. Increased diversity on police forces did little to curb unnecessary police stops of people of color in Ferguson, Missouri, or Baltimore, Maryland. [25]
Two 2016 Harvard University studies found that anti-bias techniques meant to fight stereotypes reduced implicit bias for a few hours to a few days but not longer. Such training has little to no effect on racial bias in traffic stops or marijuana arrests. [26][27]
Some researchers, including Stuart Schrader, an associate director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship at Johns Hopkins University, have argued that reforms are not wholly intended to change the departments for the better but rather are an excuse for the departments to maintain power and acquire a bigger budget. Reform programs come with more money and little accountability for police departments, continuing the historical cycle of oppression. [28]
Pro 3: Police were not intended to do many of the jobs they perform; defunding the police would allow experts to step in.
Police currently deal with calls about mental illness, homelessness, domestic disputes, barking dogs, neighbors playing loud music, and various other noncriminal activities on top of actual violations of the law, ranging from minor shoplifting by kids to speeding to murder.
In a 2016 interview, the former Dallas Police chief David Brown stated, “We’re just asking us to do too much. Every societal failure, we put it off for the cops to solve. That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.” [2]
Alicia Garza, cofounder of Black Lives Matter, stated, “So much of policing right now is generated and directed towards quality-of-life issues, homelessness, drug addiction, domestic violence. What we do need is increased funding for housing, we need increased funding for education, we need increased funding for quality of life of communities who are over-policed and over-surveilled.” [29]
The people who respond to community issues should be those best equipped to deal with the concern, whether that person is a social worker attending a mental health crisis, an emergency medical technician arriving at a domestic dispute, or a housing facilitator helping an unhoused person. The activist Colin Kaepernick explains, “By abolishing policing and prisons, not only can we eliminate white supremacist establishments, but we can create space for budgets to be reinvested directly into communities to address mental health needs, homelessness and houselessness, access to education, and job creation as well as community-based methods of accountability.” [5][63]
Greg Casar, an Austin, Texas, City Council member, stated, “We should be treating homelessness not with policing, but with housing. We should be treating addiction not with policing, but with treatment. We have dedicated so many of our public dollars simply to policing, and that hasn’t made us actually more safe.” [1]
Furthermore, defunding the police would allow more money to go to community programs that prevent the need for the police. Patrick Sharkey, a professor at Princeton University, has noted, “When neighborhood organizations engage young people with well-run after-school activities and summer jobs programs, those young people are dramatically less likely to become involved in violent activities. When street outreach workers intervene, they can be extremely effective in interrupting conflicts before they escalate. When local organizations reclaim abandoned lots and turn them into green spaces, violence falls. When community nonprofits proliferate across a city, that city becomes safer.” [30]
He adds, “If we ask community organizations and leaders to take over primary responsibility for creating a safe community, they should be given equivalent resources.” Defunding the police would free up budget funds to appropriately pay community organizations. [30]
Argues Annie Lowrey, staff writer for The Atlantic, “A more radical option…would mean ending mass incarceration, cash bail, fines-and-fees policing, the war on drugs, and police militarization, as well as getting cops out of schools. It would also mean funding housing-first programs, creating subsidized jobs for the formerly incarcerated, and expanding initiatives to have mental-health professionals and social workers respond to emergency calls.” [3]
According to A World Without Police, an abolitionist group, “Police violence stems not just from bad apples or bad attitudes, but from what police must be and do in America. The only way to stop the violence is to abolish the police, and transform the conditions that gave rise to them.” [57]
Con Arguments
Con 1: When police department budgets are cut, violence and civilian injuries increase, and departments turn to “taxation by citation” to raise money.
Police officers in smaller jurisdictions, or those primarily populated by people of color, are frequently paid less. In Hillsdale, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, new officers earn $13.50 an hour after a probationary period—less than hourly workers at Target. Low wages force many officers to take extra jobs, leaving them tired and unprepared to deal with a high-stress police situation. David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, has stated, “We should not assume that the most poorly-paid cops are the worst cops. But the chances increase that you don’t attract the best officers.” [31][32][33]
During the 2008 recession many police departments were forced to cut officers as federal funding decreased. In Memphis, Tennessee, use-of-force complaints almost doubled as officers in an understaffed department were required to work overtime. [34]
In England and Wales 2010 police budgets were cut, resulting in 20,592 (14%) fewer officers in 2017 and 20% more gun, knife, and other serious violent crimes. Moreover, the homicide rate rose 39% from Mar. 2015 to 2019. In Mar. 2020 the British Home Office acknowledged a correlation and committed to hiring 20,000 officers. [35][36]
The Illinois State Police director Jonathon Monken reported an increase in fatal car accidents due to a decrease in motorcycle traffic officers after 2010 budget cuts. In order to raise funds for the department, Monken implemented a policy wherein $15 for each citation (such as a speeding ticket) written goes to the state police. [37]
Called “citation taxation,” taking a cut of each citation written is a common police department fund-raising strategy. Such tickets often cost residents more than expected: a $100 traffic ticket cost a California resident $100 in state assessment fees, $70 in county assessment fees, $50 in court construction fees, $20 for emergency medical fees, among other fees, resulting in an almost $500 ticket for rolling through a red light. Though no one wants to pay a $500 traffic violation ticket, communities of color are especially hard-hit and ill-equipped to pay such tickets. [38]
Officers also write more tickets when department revenue is at stake. In St. Ann, a St. Louis suburb, the number of tickets almost tripled while the suburb’s population decreased. In New Miami Village, Ohio, 45,000 tickets were issued in 15 months to a population of about 2,000 people. If appropriately funded, the police could focus on crime rather than fundraising. [38]
Con 2: The level of police misconduct is overstated, more (not fewer) police are being called for in crime-ridden areas, and reforms are both possible and supported by a majority of Americans.
In Camden, New Jersey, the local police department was disbanded because of police corruption and rising crime rates. The county now runs the department, and it implemented de-escalation training, defined choke holds as deadly force, and required that officers step in if a colleague is using excessive force. Officers were tasked with patrolling on foot, introducing themselves to residents, and hosting community barbecues. Violent crime dropped 42% between 2012 and 2019. In comparison, the FBI estimates that, nationwide, violent crime fell 9% from 2009 to 2018. [39][40]
Sam Sinyangwe, cofounder of We the Protestors, explained, “If you look at the 30 largest cities, police shootings have dropped about 30 percent, and some cities have seen larger drops. In some of these cities, like Chicago and Los Angeles, activists with Black Lives Matter and other groups have done a lot of work to push for de-escalation, stricter use-of-force policies and greater accountability.” [41]
Contrary to the publicly asserted “war” on Black people by white police officers, few are actually murdered by white officers each year. An analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white officers were least likely to shoot an unarmed Black person, with a threat perception failure (TPF) rate of 5.2% with Black suspects. Black officers had an 11.4% rate, and Hispanic officers a 16.7% rate. [42]
According to a June 2020 poll, 82% of Americans agreed that police use of choke holds should be banned; 83% supported racial profiling bans; 92% agreed that the police should wear body cameras; 89% agreed on requiring officers to give their name, badge number, and a reason for the stop during police stops; 91% supported independent investigations of misconduct in departments; and 75% support allowing police misconduct victims to sue departments for damages. [43]
If police departments were reformed to focus on policing Black neighborhoods the same way they police wealthy white neighborhoods, police violence would decrease. Black neighborhoods suffer from underpolicing, as police officers focus on traffic and drug stops. [44]
Jill Leovy, the author of Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, explains that the police focus “on nuisance and vice—the cheap and easy, low-hanging fruit of the trade,” whereas murders in predominantly Black neighborhoods go unsolved: “From 1988 to 2002, the number of unsolved homicides in the L.A. Police Department’s South Bureau was 41 per square mile. Even as many white neighborhoods remained untouched by killings during this period, some predomina[n]tly black ones had three unsolved cases per block—seven at the especially violent intersection of South San Pedro and East 84th streets.” [44]
Amid the George Floyd protests in May 2020, Chicago registered the city’s most deadly weekend in six decades: 110 shootings (85 wounded, 25 killed). Nearly all of the victims and shooters were Black. Michael Pfleger, a Roman Catholic priest and social activist on the South Side of Chicago, stated, “On Saturday and particularly Sunday, I heard people saying all over, ‘Hey, there’s no police anywhere, police ain’t doing nothing.’” [45]
Con 3: Police departments should not be disbanded but held to standardized national regulations, which should comply with international human rights laws.
President Barack Obama formed the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing after the Aug. 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The May 2015 final report suggested that the Department of Justice should “establish national benchmarks and best practices for federal, state, local, and tribal police departments,” among 58 other nationally standardized requirements. [46][47]
The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has suggested many federal reforms, including ending the transfer of military equipment to police departments, a national comprehensive policy on use of force, a law banning lethal force, a requirement that police departments acknowledge their racial inequalities and injustices, mandatory racial bias training, and eliminating qualified immunity, which protects officers from being sued for wrongful death. EJI has stated that these reforms can help to “change the culture of policing to build trust, legitimacy, and accountability.” [48]
As Ed Pilkington, a chief U.S. reporter for The Guardian has explained, “The need for restrictions on police power has been recognized in international law for 40 years. Two basic human rights are involved: the right to life and personal security, and the right of freedom from discrimination. Those rights have also been enshrined in core United Nations standards. All 193 member nations of the UN, including the US, have signed up to a code of conduct for law enforcement officials adopted in 1979.” [49]
A review of police departments in 20 of the largest American cities in 2017 and 2018 found that “not one met the minimum standards established by human rights law.” No state had a human rights-compliant use-of-force law, only 12 cities had policies restricting use of force to an immediate threat, and only two cities, Los Angeles and Chicago, had the necessary external reporting requirements to meet international human rights standards. [50]
Data compiled by The Guardian found that 59 people in the U.S. were shot and killed by the police in the first 24 days of 2015, compared with 55 people fatally shot by the police in England and Wales in the past 24 years. In all, 97 people in the U.S. were fatally shot by police in Mar. 2015, compared with 94 in Australia between 1992 and 2011. [51]
As the author Will Saletan has summarized, “Across the political spectrum, there’s a consensus for requiring officers to wear body cameras, mandating independent investigations of officer-involved shootings, and creating a national registry of police misconduct records. By 2 to 1, the public supports banning chokeholds and no-knock search warrants. In a survey of more than 1,800 Americans, conducted in April and May by the Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 60 percent of respondents said police supervisors should be penalized for racially biased conduct by their officers; only 15 percent disagreed.”
Police officers in other countries do not routinely carry guns, choke holds are banned, and use-of-force policies are stricter than in the United States. In Finland an officer must get supervisor approval before using deadly force, and in Spain officers must fire a warning shot or shoot a non-vital body part before using lethal force. Officers in Europe train for an average of three years, compared with about 19 months for Americans. These policies have resulted in fewer citizen deaths in those countries. [52]
1-minute Survey
After reading this debate, take our quick survey to see how this information affected your opinion of this topic. We appreciate your feedback.
Discussion Questions
- Should police departments be defunded? Why or why not?
- Are any police reform efforts helpful? What reforms? Explain your answers.
- Do you think that abolishing police departments would resolve, or create, more problems for communities of color? Explain your answer.
- Do you think that defunding or eliminating police departments would lead to greater violence in our cities? Explain your answer.
Take Action
- Explore the resources provided by Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), which promotes defunding the police.
- Examine which states have and have not enacted police reform laws since May 25, 2020, with the National Conference of State Legislatures.
- Consider the con position of the Black former police officer Erroll G. Southers.
- Consider how you felt about the issue before reading this article. After reading the pros and cons on this topic, has your thinking changed? If so, how? List two to three ways. If your thoughts have not changed, list two to three ways your better understanding of the other side of the issue now helps you better argue your position.
- Push for the position and policies you support by writing U.S. senators and representatives.
