It’s not enough to call out police when they kill people. Police will continue to murder more people every year with impunity, their violence nurtured by powerful allies. If we want to see a significant reversal to the ruthless march of police savagery, we’re going to need to put our money where our mouths are: toward people’s needs, not police’s deadly deeds.

The public entrusts school administrators to safeguard their children. Ideally, the practice of allowing anyone—let alone susceptible children—to socialize with police K-9s in classrooms should end. Nevertheless, an investigation could lead to the development of necessary policies and safety precautions to ensure that no child in a classroom is ever bitten by a police dog.

The administration of leftist Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wants to establish a new Federal Police unit focused on deterring environmental crimes. While such offences are currently addressed by the Federal Police’s organized crime department, creating a new unit would show a sense of priority and a break from the previous government.

As police services continue to adopt and roll-out body-worn cameras, it is inevitable that the public will become more aware of police actions imprinted on the footage they record. What remains unclear is how the police can be held accountable by the use of body-worn cameras when the “official” narrative is manufactured and controlled by police themselves.

Police possess unique and extreme powers, however the only reason they can deploy such powers is because governments consistently award them more and more funding. Despite the real mediating roles of police boards and provinces, city councils retain significant powers to reduce police budgets and reallocate resources to life-sustaining services.

While Ecuadorians rise up in protest of a mercilessly cruel economic system, the Trudeau government has stayed silent while the Canadian embassy degrades them as violent rioters. It should come as no surprise that the leader of a global mining superpower should react this way toward a protest movement demanding social and economic change within Latin America.

When we focus the argument on police incompetence in an active shooter situation, we drag out the weighty implication that even the police force of a small city like Uvalde should be expected to perform what amounts to urban warfare at a moment’s notice. This is not a desirable outcome. Instead we need to see and present the bare fact that we cannot police ourselves out of discord and violence.

As of April 2021, approximately 900 Kansas City officers have worn body cameras at a cost of around $4 million a year. The expectation that outfitting police officers with body cameras was to somehow improve or restore police legitimacy is misguided at best, especially in the context of the long and storied history of outright police lies and dishonesty.

It is well past time to stop thinking of homelessness, drug addiction, and related domestic crises as outgrowths of individualized pathologies or mental illness—they are actually the result of what professor Anthony Zenkus calls “community illness,” which can also be described as the adverse mental health impact of the systemic violence engendered by Canada’s colonial-capitalist culture.

Bystander recordings of use of force, including videos as brazen as the one recorded by Mr. Korchinski Beals, bring immediate attention to police behaviour, offering transparency and accountability in situations where the public cannot expect the police will necessarily share camera footage, let alone activate their body-worn cameras.