Saskatoon group marching to ‘Disarm, De-fund, and Abolish the Police’ met with counterprotesters

A protest calling to “Disarm, De-fund and Abolish the Police” got off to a heated start in Saskatoon on Sunday.

As protesters gathered at Pleasant Hill Park before marching downtown, a couple vocal opponents of their cause began questioning their goal of defunding police services to spark a heated debate in the park.

“You think we all get treated the same?” Sonny Caron said to one of the counter protesters acknowledging unfair treatment towards Indigenous people.

“So there’s the problem, because she feels that I’m doing something wrong when I walk down the street. She just said it, didn’t she?”

Caron again reiterated to the counter-protesters the purpose of why he attended the rally.

“You somehow think that because of the colour of my skin that I’m not law abiding. So it’s people like you that we have a problem with,” Caron said.

Prior to the argument, Eileen Bear, member of the organizing group Saskatoon Co-ordinating Committee Against Police Violence, said the rally’s purpose is to rethink what police mean to our communities.

“Defunding can start at any measure,” she said. “They don’t need tasers, they don’t need batons, they don’t need rubber bullets.”

“They could open up things that we need in the community here.”

Both mayors and police chiefs in Saskatoon and Regina said they do not believe that defunding the police is the proper approach to changing police enforcement.

Many of the issues Bear is advocating – mental health, affordable housing and social services – fall under provincial jurisdiction.

“He works for us – we all pay taxes,” Bear said, directing her attention to Mayor Charlie Clark.

“The money that’s going to the police – change it up. It’s time the police had a shakeup and it’s time the mayor and council had a shakeup. Let’s start thinking outside the box or you can all be replaced.”

The City of Saskatoon is spending roughly $109-million – or 20.6 per cent – of it’s overall operating budget on the Saskatoon Police Service in 2020.

Bear pointed to Minneapolis city council unanimously voting to replace its police service with a community-led initiative as a form of change she would like to see.

“There’s no point in us trying to reinvent the wheel,” she said.

As far as his interaction with counter-protesters, Caron hopes there was a takeaway amid the shouting. He doesn’t want to see police disappear overnight. He wants to see the police change its model of enforcement and be more representative of the communities it serves.

“I just hope that they realize we’re not against the police. In everywhere there’s good police and there’s bad police, it’s just that there’s a problem and the issues aren’t being dealt with, so we need to figure out something different,” he said.

“Right now the police are holding themselves accountable and it’s not working.”

Caron said he’s previously tried to organize interaction between police and at-risk youth but was only met with refusal.

“We just got to take a stand – enough is enough,” he said.

“We could change lives here.”