Better funding for schools, not more police
Re: “Education ministry should intervene on police issue,” editorial, May 17.
Surprise! Once again a Times Colonist editorial is taking the side of police departments, this time barely trying to understand why our school board doesn’t want cops in schools.
Do Times Colonist editors really know
what’s right for our kids, even better than teachers do?
Fact is, some students and staff are right to feel unsafe around police.
B.C. cops kill more than six citizens a year.
That’s more than all the U.K.’s cops kill — and the U.K. has 13 times more people. Worse, our cops’ kill rate keeps going up, more than doubling over the past decade. And way too many of their victims are Black or Indigenous.
Another fact: Gang activity in and around schools is not on the increase.
The editorial quoted Public Safety Canada’s 22-year-old numbers as if they were current. That report actually says, “a precise measure of youth gang involvement and the occurrence of youth gang activity in Canada is not currently available.”
Our own B.C. Public Safety Ministry says fewer than one in 200 kids may be in a youth gang, and stresses that “Groups of youth are not the same as youth gangs.” Statistics Canada data show that B.C.’s youth crime, both violent and nonviolent, has dropped dramatically over the past quarter-century.
The school board is right about cops in schools. The editorial claims that police liaison programs reduce crime in schools “beyond any dispute” but show us that evidence.
Especially when StatCan says youth crime keeps going down, not up.
One last truth: B.C. needs to fund our schools better. Police liaison officers make about $50 an hour, public school counsellors just $26. It is neither prudent nor cost-effective to take officers away from where crimes are really happening.
Bill Johnstone Victoria