James Wilt has spent the last several years researching and writing about the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS), and his book Dogged and Destructive: Essays on the Winnipeg Police gathers both new and previously published essays written from late 2023 to early 2024.
- Dogged and Destructive
- James Wilt
- Arbeiter Ring Publishing Ltd.
- $22.00 Paperback, 136 pages
- ISBN: 978-19-27886-88-5
“It works to bring together many of the facts and themes that I’ve been exploring since I started looking more closely at the WPS as an institution,” he says.
Wilt shares that since 2020 and the summer of protests led by Black and Indigenous people against police violence, there has been a significant uptick of interest in local police forces.
“In that sense, this book builds on this ongoing struggle, and hopefully offers useful resources to continue it into the future,” he says. “More specifically, 2024 is the 150th anniversary of the City of Winnipeg and the creation of the Winnipeg police, offering a timely opportunity to reflect on its history.”
The title Dogged and Destructive derives from a paraphrase of a quote by Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who responded to repeated raids of his Winnipeg abortion clinic throughout the 1980s by describing the WPS as the most “dogged, disruptive, and destructive” of police forces in the country.
“While the objective of the book isn’t necessarily to rank the WPS against other forces in terms of their harms, the phrase seemed to effectively summarize its history and ongoing impacts,” Wilt says.
In the book, Wilt argues that police don’t actually keep people safe. “This is a point that has been made for decades by Black and Indigenous feminist abolitionists, who have been deeply concerned and organizing around the very issues that police use to justify their ever-increasing funding, such as domestic and interpersonal violence,” he says.
“As their work, and this book, demonstrates, policing and criminalization constantly fail to keep the most vulnerable and marginalized people protected from harm, and frequently worsen the risk factors that can contribute to harm.”
The broader “punishment bureaucracy” also causes more harm than good.
“Incarceration is an extremely destructive system that undermines all parts of a person’s life,” says Wilt, “eventually spitting them out with even less access to housing, employment, and resources.”
Wilt has examined WPS functions including its day-to-day activities, history, union, and attempted reforms, and concludes that the solution is not greater investments in policing, but rather a concerted defunding of the system altogether and greater funding of life-affirming care services – like public housing, income supports, and crisis response – that are entirely separate from police.
Wilt is hoping to attract readers ranging from those who may already be on board with the cause of defunding police to those who are curious but perhaps still skeptical about the idea.
“Ideally, the book will serve as a resource that people can draw on as they have conversations and debates about this subject in their homes, workplaces, and community organizations,” he says.
“A big part of this book is to demonstrate that developing real safety for people requires a concerted break from policing and incarceration, towards an entirely different model of collective care.”
