About

Who are we?

  • Winnipeg Police Cause Harm (WPCH) is a grassroots volunteer organization working toward the defunding and abolition of the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) and the reallocation of funds into community-based resources and services to create a safer and healthier city.

  • WPCH started in Fall 2019 in response to a series of murders of Black and Indigenous men in Winnipeg at the hands of the WPS. Our actions include: 
    • organizing rallies, protests, and vigils to denounce the systemic harms, violence, and racism of policing; 
    • presenting to city council and committees to demand police defunding; 
    • organizing political and educational campaigns (e.g. campaigns against the police helicopter and costly reform of body cameras); 
    • contributing to contemporary and unfolding conversations regarding police abolition and refunding communities in person, online on social media, and in new outlets; and,
    • working with other community groups to support existing community safety and justice-seeking initiatives (e.g. solidarity with demands to search the landfills).

Why should we defund and abolish the WPS?

  • The police do not and cannot resolve violence. The vast majority of “criminal” events that the WPS responds to are either property damage or theft. Two-thirds of alleged crimes are not even reported to the police in Canada, and only 6% of sexual assaults are formally reported. Further, only a fraction of these cases will be prosecuted and result in a conviction. 
    • For example, a mere 6% of WPS interactions pertain to “violent crime.” Of these, only half of these reports result in a charge, and even fewer yet result in trials, convictions, and sentences to incarceration. 
    • Between 2009 and 2014, only 7% of physical assaults and 4% of sexual assaults reported to police across Canada ended with a custodial sentence.

  • Criminal punishment does not bring about justice. Prisons are sites of punishment that subject people to violent, unsafe, abusive conditions in the name of “justice.” Prisons cannot “fix” the social, economic, and racial issues that lead to being criminalized—they only make things worse. Incarceration worsens mental health and substance use issues, separates people from their families and necessary community supports, and permanently destroys employment and housing opportunities. Because prisons do not create healthier and safer communities, people released from prison most likely return to prison. We need to prevent people from going to prison in the first place by seeing that their needs are met.

  • Although some may find solace when an individual who has harmed us is arrested and convicted, we have to start thinking about new conceptions of justice that are not based on retribution, punishment, and violence to others. A good place to start is recognizing that those who are criminalized are most commonly those who are surviving extreme poverty, mental health issues, problematic substance use, and intergenerational violence and the legacies of racism and colonization. This explains why more than three-quarters of Manitoba’s prisoner population is Indigenous, despite only making up 15% of the general population in the Province. At the same time, three-quarters of people incarcerated in Manitoba’s prisons are legally innocent but are held in remand, also known as pre-trial detention, until their trial can be heard. If we want safer and healthier communities, we must abandon the idea that prisons make us safe. Instead, we must fund the appropriate services and resources so that everyone has equitable life chances. 

  • The WPS is an inappropriate and over-utilized response to all issues in our city. 70% of the events that the WPS is tasked with are not “criminal” in nature. The single-largest WPS intervention is traffic stops and enforcement of traffic laws, like speeding. The leading causes of interactions with police are family or domestic trouble, public disturbances, suspicious circumstances, and mental health/wellness checks. The WPS is overtasked with addressing a wide range of issues for which it should not be responsible. Community-based initiatives, from traffic law enforcement to wellness checks, should be created and funded in its place.

  • Police are a systemically racist and colonial institution. From its origin in Canada to its contemporary form, policing has only benefited those in power. As a colonial tool, policing aims to advance genocide and land theft against Indigenous peoples and to neutralize Indigenous resistance movements. This plays out today when police terrorize Indigenous activists whose demands contradict with white capitalist interests. For example, the WPS investigating red handprints painted on its headquarter building as a “major crime” is intended to silence and intimidate Indigenous activists, to construct Indigenous peoples as criminals, and to detract from community demands to seek justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit individuals. Funding policing means allocating even more power and resources to a racist system, when instead we could be funding the initiatives and services that our communities want, need, and trust.

  • Police reforms do not work; they only funnel more money into the hands of policing as a performative gesture that positive change is being made. Diversity hires, LGBTQ+ and racial sensitivity training, community policing and community liaison positions do not make the harms of policing any less devastating. Reforms have never prevented police violence and murder. The only type of reforms that will enhance the safety of communities are the reforms that redirect funds, power, and responsibilities from the police into the hands of communities. 

What’s the alternative to police? Where do we start?

  • In 2023, the WPS budget was $330 million, most of which was directly funded from the City of Winnipeg. In addition, the Province of Manitoba spent $240 million on prisons, $85 million on courts, and $60 million on prosecutions. This provincial cost is, in large part, a direct result of policing (i.e. bringing people into the criminal punishment system). 

  • Rather than carrying on by pouring an ever-increasing amount of money - upwards of half a billion dollars a year - into a system that is proven to be ineffective and needlessly punitive, it is necessary to defund police and refund communities. 

  • Three necessary reinvestments and transformations that must occur, in order for police to become unnecessary:
    1. Alternative community safety responses consisting of Indigenous-led street patrols, peer-led harm reduction, violence prevention programs, non-carceral mental health/crisis responders, non-violent crisis response teams, low-barrier 24/7 emergency shelters for survivors and those fleeing violence, and civilian personnel to conduct traffic safety, administration, and survivor support services.
    2. Life-sustaining services including safe and high-quality public housing, a legal and regulated safe supply of drugs along with safe consumption sites and other modes of harm reduction, universal community-based mental health services, food security and distribution programs, and income supports. We must remember that we cannot have safety when people do not have food, shelter, and support. Defunding the police means that more of our municipal spending can go towards services that benefit us directly. 
    3. Ending criminalization via a range of efforts to reduce the scope, power, and funding of policing and prisons. This includes advocating for decriminalization (e.g. decriminalization of sex work, and the sale and purchase of drugs), the decarceration and towards the full release of all incarcerated people, the use of diversions and sentencing alternatives in a meaningful way as to reduce the scope of the current system, increasing the availability of expungement of criminal records, and banning housing and employment discrimination based on past criminalization.

  • We can begin resolving violence by expanding no-barrier shelter services and survivor-centric community supports, funding community-based anti-violence programs, offering consent-based education in schools, and so on.

  • Using the immense funding redirected from policing and prisons, we can mobilize this three-pronged approach to community safety and ensure real reductions in harm and that the most marginalized residents in the city are able to get help when needed.