We Can’t Police Our Way Out of Social Problems
by Alexa Cicchini
Why are police budgets the single largest expense in every city’s budget? Far more is spent on policing than is spent on public health, housing support, transit, parks, libraries, or social services.
Every year, police budgets increase while wages fall, the cost of living rises, and social supports are defunded. Carolyn Parrish, Mayor of Mississauga, resigned from the Police Services Board after police requested a 23.3 percent budget increase for the coming year. She explained,
The increase of 23.3 percent comes out at $144 million. We operate our entire fire department for $144 million. That’s their whole budget.
Why is policing the go-to option for addressing social problems? Cities pay police to dismantle encampments of unhoused people instead of investing in housing supports. They pay police to arrest drug users and sex workers instead of meeting people’s medical and material needs. And they send police to manage people in crisis instead of offering compassion and social support.
To make sense of all this, we need to examine the origin of policing, why capitalism needs police, and what is the alternative.
A Brief History of Policing
Policing is an historically recent development. There were no police before society divided into social classes. In Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View (1975), Howard Adams explains,
Before the Europeans arrived, Indian society was governed without police, without kings and governors, without judges, and without a ruling class. Disputes were settled by the council, among the people concerned.
We don’t see a standing police force until the rise of the ruling-class State.
The first record of policing dates back to 3000 BCE in Ancient Egypt. Every year, the Nile river would flood, producing surplus crops which were stored and used for trade. As their economy grew, the Pharaohs appointed lower-class people to oversee the safe transport of State property, supervise peasants on work sites, patrol borders, and collect taxes. Police were also used to guard the palaces and temples where the surplus was stored.
Peasants and workers had to pay taxes to the Pharaohs in addition to being taxed on everything they produced, sold, or provided. These taxes were so burdensome that many struggled to feed their families. Temple estates and upper-class people were exempt from paying taxes. The Egyptian police chief was called Sab Heri Seker, meaning “chief of the hitters,” because police would beat to death any who failed to pay their taxes.
Police were similarly used in the Roman Empire and later in Europe. In Canada, the first recorded use of police was in 1651 to recover an enslaved person who had escaped. At the time, police in Canada were called Watchmen, and their role was to patrol slavery settlements and maintain order.
As slavery and colonialism expanded across Canada, State governments formed larger squads of police to secure westward expansion, extend federal authority over the western territories, implement government policies related to land and resources, and guard government buildings.
These police forces became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or RCMP. Similar to Ancient Egypt, if Indigenous communities, enslaved people, or workers resisted the police, ran away, or in any way challenged the State or threatened the upper class, they were killed.
Police Do Not Keep Us Safe
As children, we are taught that police keep us safe. If someone breaks into our house, we call the police. If someone is in crisis, we call the police. If we are in a traffic accident, we call the police.
It’s important to emphasize that police only respond to these problems; they do not prevent them. They don’t prevent people from breaking into houses, suffering a crisis, or being injured in traffic accidents.
If police kept us safe, Canada would be an extremely safe place to live. In 2023, Canada’s police budget was $20 billion. The United States would be even safer with a 2024 police budget of $237 billion. Yet few people feel truly safe in either nation.
Compared with 38 other higher-income countries, the U.S. has the highest rate of relative poverty, the second-highest rate of child poverty and infant mortality, and the second-lowest life expectancy. Over 40 percent of the U.S. population, including nearly half of its children, have a family income that is 200 percent lower than the national poverty line.
What is Crime?
Most people in prison are poor, not only because they can’t afford good lawyers, but because of how crime is defined.
What are legally labeled as ‘crimes’ are mostly individual reactions to oppression and deprivation, for example: petty theft, drug use, inter-personal violence, and sex work.
Most individual crime could be prevented by ensuring everyone has a living wage, decent housing, quality healthcare, nutritious food, and social support. The more difficult it is to make ends meet, the more frustrated and desperate people become. There is more road rage, more domestic violence, more petty theft, more homicides, and more suicides. When people can’t pay their bills, they have little option but to supplement their income by ‘illegal’ means.
In 2020, the Council of Economic Advisers reported,
Raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $12 per hour would decrease crime by 250,000 to 510,000 incidents annually.
Instead of eliminating the deprivation that causes individual crime, those in need are policed so they don’t disturb the system that deprives them.
Of course, there are rich criminals. They’re called capitalists. They profit by taking the full value of what workers produce and paying them less than they need to survive.
It’s not considered a crime to make people work in health-damaging conditions, refuse to provide basic necessities, and destroy the environment. Police do not prevent such crimes. They exist to protect capitalist rule, which is the greatest crime of all.
Policing Deprivation
A University of California study found that “the number one problem fueling the homelessness crisis is the increasing precariousness of the working poor.” Arresting homeless people does nothing to solve the economic conditions driving people onto the streets, but it does serve to increase police budgets and can also generate profit through private rehabilitation facilities, psychiatric institutions, and prisons.
When federal food-assistance programs like SNAP were shut down in the United States, the California National Guard were mobilized to assist food banks across the State. Workers who produce society’s wealth cannot afford basic nutrition, while the State funds troops to distribute food rations.
Such crises are not a temporary failure of funding or administration, but the product of a social system that subordinates every human need to profit.
The State claims it can’t afford to feed the hungry, yet spends trillions of dollars funding the military and police. We see this globally, as well-funded troops invade poverty-stricken nations like Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen to protect corporate profits.
Cops in Schools
Using the pretext of keeping students safe, Ontario’s misnamed, Supporting Children and Students Act (Bill 33) does not fund the services and supports students need. Instead, it requires provincial school boards to
Work with local police services to provide them with access to school premises, permit them to participate in school programs and implement school resource officer programs.
Bill 33 sends the message that young people are criminals-in-the making, and we need a strong State to protect us from them.
Studies of police in schools find that children, particularly Black and Indigenous children, are criminalized, searched, and even arrested at school for behaviours that were formerly managed by school counselors and social workers. But there is no funding for school counselors and social workers.
The surveillance and criminalization of poor and non-white children feeds a lucrative school-to-prison pipeline that is used to justify even more spending on police.
Divide and Rule
Dividing people and stoking fear are essential to maintain capitalist rule. Instead of welcoming newcomers to our communities, Canada spends billions of dollars to keep them out. This waste of public money is justified by falsely blaming immigrants for shortages caused by government under-funding. Attacking migrants does not benefit those already here. It drives down all workers’ wages by creating a super-exploited section of the working class with no rights.
In the United States, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offer new hires a signing bonus of $50,000 for the job of rounding up, imprisoning, and deporting immigrants. Recently, ICE agents dispensed tear gas outside Chicago elementary schools as they detained children and their parents.
Instead of investing in social supports and eradicating poverty — which are known to increase public safety — the State pours millions of dollars into militarizing our cities, schools, and public spaces.
Police do not solve social problems. They safeguard the system that creates these problems.
No Escape From Waged Work
A great deal of policing is to ensure that workers do not escape waged work. If you are sick, injured, in crisis, unemployed, or engaged in sex work you are not making profit for the capitalist class.
People in crisis cannot work. Instead of being treated with compassion and support, they are punished. Under Ontario’s Mental Health Act, a doctor can direct police to take a person in crisis to a psychiatric facility where they can be detained against their will and forcibly drugged. Medical studies report no evidence that people benefit from such policies. On the contrary, they terrify and traumatize vulnerable people.
A punitive approach is also used against those who use unregulated drugs to cope with the pain of life under capitalism. Drug users are generally despised as unproductive members of society and for being “needy and greedy.” Having needs is treated as a crime against capitalism because every penny spent on meeting peoples’ needs is a penny that is not used to make profit and accumulate capital.
Safe consumption sites are not closed because they cost too much but because they suggest a social obligation to care for people, and that’s not profitable. The epidemic of drug-poisoning deaths could be eliminated overnight by providing safe drugs to those who need and want them. But that sends a similar message and is also not profitable.
Criminalizing Sex Work
Under the pretext of fighting crime, securing public safety, and protecting women, the State polices and criminalizes sex work. The actual goal is to prevent people from escaping waged work.
Poverty is the main driver of sex work. Immigrants, people with criminal records, those who lack marketable skills, disabled people, and gender rebels are generally excluded from well-paying jobs. For many, sex work is the only way they can survive and support their families.
Laws against the sex-work industry do not stop sex work. They make it more dangerous by driving it underground and by imposing fines and criminal records that keep people working in the sex industry. As sex worker Toni Mac explains,
If you’re caught selling sex outdoors, you pay a fine. How do you pay that fine without going back to the streets? It was the need for money that saw you in the streets in the first place. And so the fines stack up, and you’re caught in a vicious cycle of selling sex to pay the fines you got for selling sex.
The American ‘rescue industry’ operates a web of ‘anti-sex-slavery’ organizations that generate more than a billion dollars a year in public and private funds. Investigative reporter Anne Moore revealed that most of this money is used to lobby for stricter laws against the sex industry. Very little goes to provide legal services, medical assistance, and safe housing for sex workers.
The use of right-wing, anti-sex-work NGOs to support State policing of sex workers parallels how the Canary Mission creates lists of pro-Palestinian activists that it shares with ICE to target pro-Palestinians for attack and possible deportation. Such private-public partnerships expand the ability of the State to police the working class.
If we want to reduce the conditions that push people into sex work, we should fight for full employment rights for all, decent wages, affordable housing, accessible medical care, and free education. However, providing these services would cut into profits, so the ruling class police us instead.
The Crime of Capitalism
Capitalism is the single greatest source of violence, deprivation, and suffering in the world today. The capitalist class extract wealth from human labour then use it to extract more wealth, causing an ever-widening gap between those who have far more than they need and those who don’t have enough.
War is the ultimate capitalist crime. Instead of raising living standards, capitalists invest in weapons of mass destruction so they can defeat their rivals and grow even richer and more powerful.
Canada’s 2025 federal budget aims to spend hundreds of billions of public dollars on the military while cutting billions from public services, including eliminating 40,000 public service jobs by 2028. The massive resources devoted to war and imperialism could easily meet the needs of the global working class and then some.
This is a class conflict. The goal of the working class is to end deprivation by sharing the social wealth. The goal of the capitalist class is to hoard the social wealth and protect their system of hoarding by policing those they deprive. This conflict cannot be resolved under capitalism.
A 1975 report, The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: An Analysis of the U.S. Police, concluded,
Police have primarily served to enforce the class, racial, sexual, and cultural oppression that has been an integral part of the development of capitalism. As long as this function remains, any strengthening of police powers and any move to increase their efficiency must be seen as contrary to the interests and needs of the majority of people.
Conclusion
There would be no need for police if the social wealth were shared. Police are necessary to protect a criminal social system from those on the losing end of its policies.
Efforts to transfer money to social services from the police and the military consistently fail because police exist to prevent such transfers. Their job is to ensure that social wealth remains in the hands of the business class and is not distributed to the working class. That is why police break strikes, criminalize drug users, arrest sex workers, terrorize people in crisis, and harass the unhoused. That is why even verbal disagreement with government policies is grounds for arrest, detention, and possible deportation.
Crimes of deprivation can be eliminated by providing what people need, or people in need can be policed so they don’t disturb the system that deprives them. This is a class conflict, and we must choose which side we’re on.
We cannot end policing until we abolish the system that requires police. Then we can use the vast resources of society to protect and provide for ourselves and our communities.
It is possible for all of us to live in safe supportive communities without police. It’s up to us, as workers, to organize and build our class power so we can defeat the capitalist class and end the need for policing altogether.
Reprinted from SusanRosenthal.com