I spoke to City Council today about the proposed Regina Police Service budget

The Regina Police Service has requested 5%+ increases to their budget for each of the next two years. Meanwhile, the social safety net in our city is unable to keep up with the growing number of people who are suffering from economic hardship and/or mental illness. I could not sit idly by watching these injustices go effectively unaddressed, so I decided to speak to City Council about it today at the budget debate. The proposed budget was predictably passed but the fight for justice and a more effective allocation of taxpayers' funds continue.

You can watch my speech at City Council here, or read the transcript further below.

Hi, my name is Dillon Forsberg. I am a senior software developer here in the city and I live in Lakeview. I grew up in a single parent household, moving many times throughout my childhood, with many of those homes being public housing. My family and I once stayed at Transition House for a short period. There is a history of both mental illness and addiction in both sides of my family.

As a software developer, the success of the systems I build is not judged on the planning that went into them or from the intentions in coding them. They are judged on the final product and the outcomes they create for the end user. When we analyze and judge the system of life that we all live in and the outcomes it creates for its end users, it is clear that it is not working well for many of us.

If I create bad software, I am not going to send someone to watch over each user to make sure they use it properly to avoid bugs or to reprimand them for finding their own unsanctioned workarounds. So why do we think that the police are going to be effective in making up for a real-world system that is clearly full of bugs? Instead of spending money to make sure people avoid these bugs, how about we make the appropriate investment in fixing the bugs?

Fixing bugs is costly, especially deep-rooted ones, but the cost of not dealing with bugs is usually far greater. Untreated poverty and mental illness costs all of us in emergency and chronic healthcare costs, lost economic productivity, and costs on the justice system. Like good software designers, it is our democratic government’s responsibility to make those tough decisions that will effectively avoid future costly bugs, instead of kicking the can down the road.

So, instead of putting more money into a police force which can only react to bugs in the system, how about we make the appropriate investments into fixing the bugs in the system so that we lower the dependence on the police all together? Instead of spending more money on reacting to the deficiencies created from a buggy system, why don’t we allocate funding to areas where we can make a real difference in the lives of our most vulnerable, like in housing, and avoid those systemic bugs from popping up?

Some have said recently that the city is not into building affordable housing. Why is that? It makes no sense at all outside of a market fundamentalist ideology that cruelly requires every single aspect of our lives to be profited from. The police are under the purview of the city and thus it is the city’s responsibility to keep their costs as low as possible.

I often hear politicians say, “government doesn’t know how to be effective”. Well, that’s like a quarterback saying the passing game isn’t an effective way to win football games.

As author and activist Naomi Klein wrote in her book, Shock Doctrine, neoliberal free market policies have risen to prominence not because the so-called “welfare state” was itself a failure. They rose to prominence because of a deliberate strategy of “shock therapy” that exploits crises to establish otherwise controversial and questionable free market policies, while ordinary citizens are too distracted or made too apathetic to effectively respond. Meanwhile, all aspects of our society become sold off and privatized. We are witnessing this right now as communities continue to suffer from the economic and social devastation of a global pandemic, the inflation that followed, and an ongoing war in Ukraine that is making it worse. Meanwhile, healthcare privatization is being pushed on us while hordes of single-family houses are being scooped up by wealthy investors. Rent is up 10% year over year in Regina. Hundreds of Regina and Sask housing rentals sit empty while homelessness rises. Many of them being in undesirable neighbourhoods is no excuse. It is the job of city council to make them desirable.

It always seems like despite economic booms, despite population growth, despite the execution of efficiency reviews, there is never money or resources available for real policy that would keep people from falling into poverty to which crime often becomes the next step in the pipeline of desperation. So, we end up offloading the responsibility of our most vulnerable women, men, and children to private interests and when that fails, it’s then offloaded to the police, which like I already pointed out, can only react to crime and the other consequences of poverty.

So, I ask the mayor and council, to please open your eyes. Understand who you are here to serve. Find the courage to do what might be the hard thing to do, but what is absolutely the right thing to do. Deny the Regina Police Service its request for a budget increase, and instead use that money to fulfill the promises you all have already made to work towards ending homeless in our great city. Thank you.