Welcome back! Thanks to everyone who has signed up so far and congratulations to the 20 winners of George Manuel’s biography, generously donated by Between the Lines Books! This week we have another proposed increase to Regina’s police budget (which will hopefully result in a victory for those organizing against it) and a look at the way the media has responded to Terry Murphy’s queerphobic sermon at Victory Church. As always, we love feedback and suggestions, so if there’s anything you want to read about or any comments you have, send them to sara@briarpatchmagazine.com!
Defund the Police (Refund the City)
Nicholas Vigier via Flickr
Regina residents are organizing around the city’s proposed budget, which includes a $4 million increase to the police budget. RPS has seen their budget increase by around 5 per cent - or 3 million odd dollars, give or take - every year for the past 16 years. The truly magical thing about these budget increases is that they’re not one-time boosters. The RPS budget increases, and then it piles new increases on top of that, until somehow the police budget more than doubles in a decade and a half. In 2005, the RPS budget was $45,328,700. This year, the proposed budget increase will bring the total amount allocated to RPS to $100 million.
One of the justifications for this most recent increase, which will be largely devoted to hiring eight new officers, two new dispatchers, and a new HR person (who are presumably needed to dispatch and humanly resource the eight new officers), is to get the size of Regina’s police force up to national levels. This is a wildly inadequate reason to hand over $4 million more dollars to the squad, which already eats up 20 per cent of the city budget (a similar proportion as in Saskatoon). It says nothing about the goals that might be achieved by putting more cops on the streets and offers no bold vision for the future of the city. It’s a numbers game, and if the police win, the city loses. It’s particularly egregious given a few facts. One is that the City of Regina already spends a larger proportion of its budget on policing than other, larger cities like Edmonton and Montreal. It’s also a problem given that there’s no shortage of community organizations that desperately need that money and would use it to make far more significant and lasting improvements to the lives of Reginans than a few more cops in SUVs ever could. The chief of police has said as much in interviews, noting that Regina will never “arrest [its] way out” of the social problems it faces. In 2019, Bray told the Sask Dispatch, “We need to ensure as a society that [social] supports, instead of police, are going to be funded and resourced to a point where they can deal with them. Because the absence of instant access to those types of intervention resources and recovery supports would be a recipe for disaster.” Ensuring that unarmed, culturally-competent, anti-oppressive people are responding to social problems in the community is a laudable goal, but of course Bray doesn’t think that funding should come out of his budget and neither, it seems, does the city.
Elsie Beechie
But this year Regina residents, many of whom have been tirelessly organizing for a more vibrant, inclusive, and less oppressive city for years, were prepared that such an increase was likely to be tabled. The Making Peace Vigil is currently circulating information for residents, encouraging them to appear as delegates at the meeting where the budget will be considered and people have been contacting their councilors to let them know that they’d rather see that money invested in improving the lives of residents, rather than policing them. A Facebook group called Tell City Council NOT To Increase The Policing Budget, & Invest In Community Supports Instead! has also laid out instructions for residents who wish to appear as delegates at council’s March 24 budget meeting and many other individuals and organizations are working to hold as much ground as possible. The deadline to submit a request to present is noon on Monday, March 21.
Victory Church
The recent “controversy” (read: queerphobic terribleness) coming from the Victory Church in Regina shows how much further the province has to go when it comes to ensuring that Saskatchewan is safe for queer people, and in particular queer youth. And one step forward would be for media to become more comfortable with naming homophobia and transphobia for what they are, without qualification.
Michael Kazarnowicz via Flickr
The media discourse around Pastor Terry Murphy, who compared 2SLGBTQ people to pedophiles and said sex should only be between one (1) cisgender man and one (1) cisgender woman, has been decidedly disconcerting. Although members of both the queer and faith communities (which absolutely intersect) have done good work in drowning out Murphy’s messages with messages of love and acceptance, as well as filing a human rights complaint against Murphy, the media has done what it’s always done, which is confuse stating a fact with journalistic bias. Much of the reporting around Murphy’s gross sermon has avoided explicitly saying that his remarks were homophobic, even though that is exactly what they are. Comparing queer people to pedophiles is homophobic. Saying queer sex is wrong is homophobic. There’s no ambiguity there, and yet CBC, CTV, and the Post Media one have all hedged, saying that people have “called” Murphy’s remarks homophobic and transphobic or “described them as hateful.” While there’s been some progress with media outlets (after having been rightfully mocked and ridiculed) moving away from describing racism as “racially-charged actions” or using other watery, ambiguous phrases, journalists still struggle to call hate, hate, and that’s what we see in the Murphy story.
Part of this reluctance likely stems from the feeling that describing racism as racism or queerphobia as queerphobia is subjective, and reporters want more than anything to pretend that they are not subjective. They want to Present Both Sides, even if that means entertaining the possibility that there are explanations besides homophobia, misogyny, or racism, for things that are homophobic, misogynistic, or racist. But racism and queerphobia and misogyny aren’t subjective, and struggling to call them by their names allows them to do irreparable harm to individuals and the community. These are concrete, objective terms that can and should be used when referring to hateful speech and hateful action. Although your mom not being able to remember the exact time of your birth for your star chart is (probably) not objectively homophobic, creating an environment where queer people are not safe, not affirmed, and not respected, is. Journalists can say that out loud, and so can the rest of us.