Community Safety and Well-being - The Strategy (Part II)

Back in the summer of 2020, a critical discussion happened following the death of George Floyd about law enforcement, systemic racism and the disproportionate inequities facing Black and Indigenous People of Colour, and the most vulnerable Edmontonians living rough on the margins of our City. The result of this discussion led to the creation of the Community Safety and Well-being Taskforce, a group of Edmontonians of diverse backgrounds who later brought forward a set of recommendations in 2021 about how we can create a city that is truly safer for all.

The debates, both online and offline, and the recommendations were emotional and contentious, as they tapped into our deepest values and lived experiences. The Community Safety and Well-being Strategy, presented to City Council in May 2022, is in response to this thread of vital conversations, and the growing need for better support to ensure the safety of all Edmontonians wherever they live. 

The Strategy is a seven-pillar framework that forms the foundation for advancing community safety and well-being in Edmonton, with an audacious goal of becoming the “safest city in Canada by 2030.” The 7 pillars include:

• Anti-racism

• Reconciliation

• Safe and Inclusive Spaces

• Equitable Policies, Procedures, Standards and Guidelines 

• Pathways In and Out of Poverty

• Crime Prevention and Crisis Intervention

• Well-being

An overview of the Community Safety and Well-being Framework, including the 7 pillars.

According to the Strategy, community safety and well-being is achieved when: “Each person making Edmonton home feels a sense of purpose, safety, and stability, curated through connectedness to self, land, culture and each other and rooted in reconciliation, anti-racism, removal of systemic barriers and transformation of thinking, interacting, and being.” And we have a lot of work to do to get us there. 

Creating this Strategy was no easy task - taking a systems approach to look at all the factors that make us feel safe and well, no matter who we are, and taking into consideration the role that many sectors and institutions play. I commend the City staff and our partners who put in a lot of their time, energy, effort and passion into developing this strategy. 

Keren in the library of Grace Martin School for a meeting about community safety in the neighbourhood. She was joined by School Board Trustee Saadiq Sumar, Principle Randy Witte, and Sgt. Reimer from the Community Engagement team.

For the longest time, we have pointed to “systems coordination” as a key driver for improving service delivery. While I don’t believe this is the sole solution, I do think we can’t coordinate the system without seeing the system as a whole - and for the first time, I feel like we have the start of that, a key step to finding impactful and effective solutions to community well-being and safety. (If you want to learn more about why systems coordination can at times be detrimental to progress, I highly recommend the book “The Trampoline Effect.”)

The first of its kind in the country, this Community Safety and Well-being framework is comprehensive and serves as a guide to determine our policy direction, and funding recommendations. The latter includes how we choose to reallocate the funds diverted from policing in the past couple of years when past and current Councils made the decision to freeze police funding. Back in the fall, I even put forward a motion to ensure that whatever decisions we ultimately make should come back to alleviate pressure on policing. 

While each of the 7 pillars had near, medium and long-term outcomes that we want to achieve, the piece I think is missing in this framework is a clear definition of timelines for ACTIONS that will affect our safety and well-being. 

• Some examples of immediate-term actions include ensuring those in need have a safe shelter to sleep in for the night and to access during the day. City Council recently funded $1.8M to sustain Bissell Centre’s day centre operation. 

• Examples of medium-term safety and wellbeing actions include building well-designed streetscapes and landscapes, which will take some time to demonstrate impact. 

• Long-term actions are investing in the social infrastructures that affect our wellbeing, beginning as early as childhood, that can contribute towards social cohesion and can serve as preventative measures against crime. These can include early literacy, neighbourhood hubs like community leagues, libraries, and youth recreation. 

 All of this makes for a robust strategy that has great potential to guide decision-making when it comes to community safety and well-being issues.

A Community Outreach Transit Team vehicle in downtown Edmonton. COTT is a partnership between the City and Bent Arrow Traditional Healthy Society.

This brings me to the recommendations stemming from this strategy for the diverted police funding accumulated over the last couple of years. For me, given the pressures of the pandemic, the multiple crises in well-being and safety such as mental health and addiction, housing, the increased social disorder downtown and in our transit system, we should be laser-focused on supporting immediate needs with targeted outcomes. For social infrastructure programs that can benefit safety and well-being in the long-term such as libraries, community leagues, youth recreation, and more we will need sustained, larger-scale funding. And I believe there is a time and place for these kinds of discussions at the fall budget deliberation.

Instead, we received a smorgasbord of suggestions that spanned from an Indigenous shelter, to extreme weather protocol, to early literacy programs at the library. By taking this approach, we risk spreading limited resources too thin, and it could result in little impact. Moreover, the report that sought to respond to my question about how we are justifying these investments to alleviate the pressure on policing (especially as this is coming from diverted police funding) didn’t provide a clear answer. It focused more on the logic for the 7 pillar framework.

Photo from a recent forum hosted by the Chinatown community on actions to address the concerns and challenges around safety in the area.

Ultimately, we had a robust discussion on this topic at Council, which carried over several meetings, and culminated in a highly emotional public hearing that came in the immediate wake of the senseless deaths in Chinatown, shaking an entire community and the city to its core. As we move forward from this tragedy, we will look towards solutions that make a tangible impact in the immediate term, as well as long-term investments to these systemic issues that can demonstrate strong outcomes.

This is the 2nd part in a blog series sharing my reflections on community safety and well-being. I will be sharing more of my thoughts in the coming weeks on:

• The policing funding mechanism

• Tackling root causes - the role of other levels of government 

Read the first part in this series on Community Safety and Well-being - the Landscape.