Editor,

During the Langley City Council meeting of Sept. 21, Mayor Tim Callison abruptly announced that a member of the Langley Police Department was considering leaving the force, attributing his transfer to another police department to a lack of support from council members.

This narrative could not be more baseless. In recent months, the council has engaged on the subject of policing and public safety, but this in no way equates with a lack of support.

Importantly, the way in which Mayor Callison delivered this news was grossly inappropriate and intentionally restricted discussion. After making this announcement, the mayor immediately left the Zoom meeting with no call for questions or further explanation, actively avoiding the circumstances that led to this possible resignation.

Instead, what the council and public received was childish finger-wagging and explicit censorship surrounding a nuanced topic that requires nuanced discussion.

The fact that this officer’s potential resignation is occurring mere weeks before the formation of the Dismantling Systemic Racism Advisory Committee is highly dubious. The fact that this officer is seeking a job in a different police department in which he feels more supported suggests that they fear the hard truths about the racist, violent history of policing and would prefer to avoid conversations and criticisms of the duties and systems in which they have been indoctrinated.

Running away will not make this officer a better member of the police force, a better member of society, nor will it beget a process of unlearning and healing.

Moreover, the mayor’s statement that “Langley will be experiencing what it’s like to live in a city where the police has (sic) been defunded because we will only have two officers” is inaccurate and a misrepresentation of what defunding the police means. There has been significant discussion locally about the term “defund” and what it means in this context.

Let us be clear that any form of defunding the police includes the construction of new networks for public safety. There will still be someone to answer the phone when you call 911, but maybe that call doesn’t have to be directed to an armed responder. While that police officer may be a well-intentioned person on an individual level, that is not what this movement aims to address.

The movement to defund the police is about dismantling an institution that upholds systemic racism, unnecessarily escalates situations time and time again and murders BIPOC with no recourse. Defunding the police does not call for an absence of public safety workers, which is what Langley now faces. Defunding the police does call for a complete re-imagining of public safety and reallocating funds to services that uplift all community members.

The unforeseen situation that Langley now faces — being down an officer during the pandemic — opens up the potential to explore alternatives to policing instead of trying to hire a new officer. This could take the form of nonviolent response and de-escalation workers, social workers trained in radical practices and/or peer support networks. In the timeline of history, police are a relatively recent institution.

Why is it so hard to explore the idea that things could be done differently?

Grace Diliberto and Preston Ossman

Freeland