Defund VicPD

Did you know a Victoria police officer can earn over 100K$ a year? I heard it from the mouths of multiple police officers who made it a point to state their salary is all they care about. They love gloating about how they get to pick on us with taxpayer money.

But even that is a drop in the bucket of VicPD’s tentative 63M$ budget for 2022. I say tentative, because that would be an increase of roughly seven percent over last year. Hey, the homeless keep pouring in, after all. Indeed, guess how much of that sum is spent playing pest control with the homeless, and which would be better spent lifting us out of poverty, addressing addiction and mental health issues, and preventing vulnerable renters from being evicted? Way too much, judging from what I witness all the time on the front lines.

So allow me to state the cornerstone of my strategy for ending homelessness here in Victoria: cut VicPD’s current budget in half, to about 29M$, which leaves about as much for rent assistance, easier access to detox and rehab, safe drug supplies, more street outreach workers, more advocates to get people into the system, and so forth. The homeless, disabled, addict, and mentally ill need more help and less predatory policing by militarised sociopaths.

Of course the only way to achieve this goal is to give the City of Victoria a simple choice: cut VicPD’s budget in half and spend it more wisely… or double it just to cope with the nonstop protests and tent cities, plus spike expenses at the provincial level to handle all the trials and incarceration. Likewise, the provincial government will have to choose between spending on more affordable housing or more prisons. If they choose to put us all in prison, that’s just fine; I’ve been to prison, and frankly it’s better than my current arrangements in some respects, to say nothing of overnight shelters or the streets. I just got charged with mischief under 5000$; let’s see if I can jack it up to 60M$.

Let’s show them we’re not afraid of them, and let’s turn economics against them. If they care about nothing but money, that’s where we’ll aim.