What the new police services board member says about defunding, Pride 2019 and more
Mel Athulathmudali is the newest member of Hamilton's police board
The newest member of the Hamilton Police Services board is Sri Lankan-born Mel Athulathmudali, a member of the LGBTQ community.
He grew up in Dundas and was appointed last week by the province to the seven-member board, which has been criticized for its lack of diversity. Athulathmudali runs a catering company and spent 25 years as a flight director with Air Transat.
He talked with the CBC's Conrad Collaco about the notion of defunding police, how the service responded to violence at the 2019 Pride festival, racial profiling and more. Read an edited and abridged transcript below or hit play above and watch the entire interview with Athulathmudali.
This police services board has been criticized for its lack of diversity and inclusion. What was that first meeting with your new board mates like?
The administrator of the board, she sent out an email to all the members... from everybody I got a really warm welcome and I was made to feel very, very comfortable, very welcome. The first meeting was exactly the same thing. Everybody offered any kind of help I needed. They were very open and very willing to talk and to communicate. So, I was really grateful for that experience.
What training or education do you have as far as analyzing race and racism, as well as LGBTQ+ issues, especially as they have to do with policing?
Well, to be perfectly honest, I don't have a lot of formal training in that area, but I do have a lifetime of living in those two communities … I'm trying to learn as much as I can and it's sort of a hurry up and learn as you go... I also know that with the Black Lives Matter movement and with the Pride events … that these were two issues that were going to be coming to the forefront of the board very soon. I offered the perspective of a member of both of those communities, and it just felt more important to me to lend my voice to an area that I could actually effect some positive change.
Pride 2019
It was just a few months ago, of course, that a report from Toronto lawyer Scott Bergman said that Hamilton police "failed to protect the public" at that Hamilton Pride event in 2019. That's when a group of protesters bearing homophobic signs and a loudspeaker arrived at the festival, along with protesters in yellow vests. Do you agree Hamilton police failed to protect people at Pride in 2019?
What's your plan for developing stronger ties between the police services board, the service itself and members of the communities which you represent?
I would love to see more people like myself and more people different from myself. I would like to see a lot more people become more active and open. I would love if there was some way we could open up channels of communication so that people have a more direct access to just be able to give their opinions... to be able to contact someone and say, this is my issue, and then to be able to respond to that a little bit more directly... That's my sort of ideal world situation.
If you have this barrier, this emotional and mental barrier, that makes you say, "Oh, I don't feel like I can go and talk to these people," you're not going to, then no information is getting across. Once you take down that barrier, then you have this free and open dialogue and you can actually bring members of the community in to speak exactly to what their needs are.
You are the only member of the board with lived experience as a person of colour and as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. How do you create change among a group of people without those experiences?
My being appointed to the board is just the start, and I'm going to be as vocal as I can be about the issues that are important to me and to members of the greater community. If you look at it as one voice, yes. It looks like it's a small, ineffective thing. But then if you look at it as the tip of the iceberg — I hope that once people see, yes, you can be a member of these community organizations, you can actually make your voice heard, more and more people will start to put their voices forward... lots of stuff can get done.
Are we paying too much for policing?
Hamilton's police budget is one $171.6 million for 2020. That's out of about $924 million overall. That means that about one out of every five dollars the city spends goes to policing. Is that too much?
Well, again, I'm not speaking as a member of the board and speaking as myself. I think as opposed to defunding, reallocation is more the process that you need to do. And I think that there are some programs that are amazing, like the COAST program and the school liaison program, but they need to be, maybe, rethought. Different assets need to be applied differently, I think, in order to actually have a police service that is a little more... approachable. You know, there's a program in Vancouver that they're doing where they pair officers with children of new immigrants from countries where the police were more militaristic, and it sort of puts up a wall. The police do social things. They have all sorts of different experiences with the kids and that lowers the kid's apprehension when dealing with the police.
What message do you have for people in Hamilton who are concerned about how their communities are policed, the communities that you represent and other communities as well?
There's a certain amount of stereotyping that does still go on and profiling that still goes on and we have to, as members of that community, be prepared to force these people to confront those stereotypes and look at them and realize that... it's not the right thing to do. And I think that by working within the community, officers will gain more knowledge of specific communities and be more apt to not jump to those conclusions.
As I said to you before when we were talking, my life is pretty open. And I share a lot of a lot of things. We were talking about how much food I put on my Instagram account and pictures of my dog and things like that. I'm very open and I hope that people will see that and respond to that and bring their concerns to me. And then I can hopefully address a lot of that and help to open those lines of communication.