If the words of Mike Savage, quoting Joe Biden—”Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value”—are true, what does Halifax Regional Council’s approach to police budgeting say? In a year teeming with calls to defund or at least reallocate police money, and in a meeting where […]
Board of Police Commissioners
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Halifax’s board of police commissioners OKs committee to look at reimagining policing
With a proposal that insists on all kinds of community engagement—even from those wholly opposed to the idea— Halifax’s board of police commissioners moved the process for community consultation on defunding the police forward this week. After a messy start, the board’s request for a committee made up of community stakeholders to look at a […]
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Sobering centres are “far more humane than the drunk tank”
Advocates say that HRM needs to make drastic changes to how it cares for people with substance-use problemsin our city. Harry Critchley, vice chair of the East Coast Prison Justice Society, and Leah Genge, a physician with specialty in addiction who works at Mobile Outreach Street Health and Direction 180, urged the Board of Police […]
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Board of Police Comissioner’s last meeting of 2019 gives update on street checks
At a Board of Police Commissioners meeting on Monday, both the HRP and RCMP Chiefs gave updates on how community engagement is going following the Wortley Report. The 186-page report from University of Toronto criminology professor Scot Wortley found that street checks overwhelmingly target people of colour. On average, from 2006 to 2017, Black people […]
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Nova Scotia’s street check moratorium to become permanent ban
Seven months after the release of Scot Wortley’s report on street checks—which found that Black people were five to six times more likely to be street checked than their proportion of the population would predict—the province has made up its mind. Today, justice minister Mark Furey announced a permanent ban on the practice of street […]
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Street checks still dominate Board of Police Commissioners meetings
I t’s been a busy few months for the Halifax board of police commissioners, and its last meeting saw its first ever presentation from members of the public. The Halifax Coalition To Ban Street Checks presented a petition with 3,551—and counting—signatures from the community calling for a ban on street checks. In her address, organizer […]
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Halifax announces Dan Kinsella as next regional police chief
T he long-awaited replacement for retired regional police chief Jean-Michel Blais will be Dan Kinsella. Currently the deputy chief of operations for the Hamilton Police Services, Kinsella doesn’t officially start until July 1. Residents will have to wait and see if he’s the future face of change in the Halifax police force. “He just rose […]
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Police still looking for $8,900 in misplaced cash
Progress is being made tracking down thousands of dollars that went missing from the police department’s evidence control system. Halifax Regional Police has located over 90 percent of the $104,289 in cash evidence that couldn’t be found in last summer’s drug exhibit audit. In an update to the Board of Police Commissioners on Monday, chief […]
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Evidence control problems date back decades
Over a decade since first identifying severe problems in policy and procedures, Halifax Regional Police are making progress in cleaning up the department’s evidence control system. The work is needed now more than ever, as preliminary results from a full evidence inventory review says nearly 3,000 drug and cash exhibits can’t be found. Police chief […]
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Opening up the police department:
Police in our society hold immense power. Police have the power to arrest people and lock people up for an entire weekend without explaining the arrest to a higher authority. Police can charge people with a crime, pulling those charged into a complex legal web that, even if found not guilty, is time-consuming and takes […]