myAIPMWhat Would it Mean to Defund the Police?
Vernon White | Asia & the Pacific Policy Society
AIPM 2017 Visiting Fellow Vernon White is presently a sitting Senator in the Senate of Canada and Visiting Fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
George Floyd’s death may be the tipping point for many jurisdictions to take aggressive action against racism in police departments in the United States. It has also meant calls for change to social services and policing in the rest of the world, Vernon White writes.
As the world watches the spiraling impact in the United States of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it has seen a monumental public show of outrage against racism, particularly in relation to policing.
The public outcry that has reverberated around the United States in recent months is a chance for many governments and police systems to try to correct procedures and practices that continue to see over-representation of specific groups in the criminal justice system, but what does it all mean for Australia?
In Australia, and many other countries that were settled by Europeans, the very people that welcomed the settlers centuries ago, Indigenous people, are the most likely to be incarcerated. In a report from the Australian Human Rights Law Centre in 2017, it was identified that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, while making up about two per cent of the Australian population, make up around 27 per cent of the adult prison population.
Even mortality rates see Indigenous Australians dying a full 10 years earlier than their non-Indigenous counterparts, and they are far less likely to graduate from year 12 schooling. Clearly, something must be done to improve the lives of Indigenous people in light of these statistics.
Although many solutions have been floated, in the United States, and to a lesser degree in countries like Canada and Australia, it is the concept of defunding the police that has soared to popularity.
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What Would it Mean to Defund the Police? Vernon White, Asia & the Pacific Policy Society, 2020