Imagine you are a police officer who has been called to an incident in a convenience store. You arrive and it feels like Kim’s Convenience: the middle-aged owner of the shop has been hit in the face after he tried to stop someone who was putting items inside his coat. He describes the suspect to you: not shaven, a red ball cap, a long messy coat, maybe 30 or 35 years old and not too clean. He took off down the street, probably to the shelter a few blocks away. It’s a classic case of an incident that makes you feel unsafe in the community.

You get in your police car and sure enough you find him without much trouble. You take him to the station and get all the details: he’s living in a shelter, he’s been homeless for eight months after losing his job and then his place to live. He had a half bottle of rye in his pocket, he’d stolen a package of wieners and some chips, and he admits he hit the other guy in the nose. It seems to you he’s dealing with a lot of anger issues and he’s not too realistic about his future. You charge him.

The suspect can’t be released on bail because he doesn’t have a place to live where he can be found if he doesn’t show up for trial. So he is put in jail awaiting trial at a cost of about $250 a day for at least a month, maybe more. He’ll be represented by duty council and will probably get a sentence of some kind — maybe just time served awaiting trial — then he’ll be released, so he can again live on the street or, if he’s lucky, find a place in a shelter.

People in crisis are not criminals. People who are unhoused, some 10,000 individuals in Toronto, and do not have access to the proper social services to get back on track are being left behind by the city. Policing won’t fix that.

Mayor John Tory says we need another 200 police officers to deal with these kinds of challenges but it is expensive — the $30 million for new officers, more for the jail time and the criminal justice system. Once all that money has been spent, how have things changed? I’m not suggesting everyone on the street faces mental challenges or turns to crime, but there’s no question that living on the street can make you very ill.

Simply arresting the suspect hasn’t reduced the problem.

Better to spend the money providing affordable places to live and provide the services needed to repair these lives. It’s not a policing problem. The mayor has got it wrong.
Sure, the city is not able on its own to create 10,000 units of housing affordable to the homeless or to provide the expensive social supports needed to start to heal those lives. The impact of being homeless is enormous. A 2008 study found that the life expectancy of a homeless person in Canada was 39 years — half that of the rest of us.

But diverting the $50 million a year from expanding the police service to affordable housing is a start. The rest of the money has to come from the provincial and federal governments that are both awash in money.

The province has been so confident in its financial position that it has changed laws and regulations to reduce its annual income by more than $8 billion annually. It can hardly claim it is short of money. The federal government is no better. It has an annual multibillion-dollar plan for housing, but almost none of it goes to those who have serious affordability problems.

Tory’s budget plan to hire more police officers is a diversion so the pressure is not on those other two governments to deliver. Since the Strong Mayors Act says that the mayor creates a budget that can only be changed with the support of two thirds of council, the mayor will have his deluded way. Democracy Ontario style needs a serious challenge.

John Sewell is a former mayor of Toronto. His most recent books are How We Changed Toronto and Crisis in Canada’s Policing.

Lead image: © Flickr Creative Commons/accozzaglia dot ca