Refund the Community – No more Police Budget surpluses

In April, 2023, The Record published an expose revealing that the Waterloo Regional Police Service had run budget surpluses of $2.1M in 2019, $4.9M in 2020, and $2.3M in 2021. The consistent overfunding of the police has meant that funds that could have been used to provide preventive services have been sitting unused. For decades, police have received increased funding, robbing social services of the necessary dollars to support healthy, safe, and caring communities.

The Region of Waterloo Council is currently setting its budget for 2024, and will need to approve or reject the police budget. Attempts by members of Council to introduce policies to refund future police budget surpluses have failed, meaning that the only way to stop overfunding the police is to proactively reduce the police budget to avoid future surpluses. You can use this site to generate a letter to Regional Council calling on them reduce the police budget so that past and future police budget surpluses are used more effectively by redirecting them toward preventive services.

We strongly recommend that you customize the letter below to help it get more attention from Regional Councillors. We suggest that you add some text to the first paragraph to introduce yourself, and that in the second paragraph you add some sentences highlighting a specific Region of Waterloo service that is important to you, and explain why. Here are some examples of services that could make use of the police surpluses:

Refunding to provide better housing options NOW!
Refunding to increase access to mental health and wellbeing supports for children and youth
Refunding to increase access to harm reduction services
Refunding to public health to provide improved access to community health clinics and preventative healthcare strategies
Refunding gender-based and sexual assault support services to tackle the crisis of initiate partner violence in Waterloo Region
Refunding to provide free transit for children, youth, and seniors
Refunding to provide food subsidies and close the food insecurity gap

To: (17 recipients)

Subject
Your message
We encourage you to edit this message with a story from your personal life. Why does this issue matter to you?

I am writing you to provide feedback on the Region of Waterloo budget, which is being considered for final approval on December 13. Specifically, I would like to express my concern over the fact that Waterloo Regional Police Services has had surpluses totalling $9.3M in just three years, while community organizations are starved of funding. By consistently overfunding the police, Regional Council has missed opportunities to use that funding to provide more people in our region with access to life-affirming supports and services, while also reducing the number of calls for service to police.

There are numerous opportunities for Council to use these surpluses to improve quality of life in the Region by increasing housing, mental health supports, access to harm reduction services, public health and preventative healthcare strategies, gender-based and sexual assault support services, transit, and food subsidies. Because services are more cost-effective than the police, this is the only fiscally responsible approach.

On November 7, Regional Council defeated Councillor Huinink’s motion to refund half of future police budget surpluses to fund community services. Without a mechanism to reclaim future police budget surpluses, Council’s only way to prevent overfunding the police is to avoid surpluses by proactively reducing the size of future police budgets. I call on you to reduce the size of the 2024 police budget to retroactively recoup the past $9.3M in overfunding, and to prevent further overfunding in 2024, and to redirect those funds toward preventive services.

Sincerely,

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