Q & A: Black Lives Matter Canada co-founder Sandy Hudson on her new book, ‘Defund’

TORONTO — Sandy Hudson’s new book on police abolition comes just ahead of the five-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, and while much has changed since then, the urgency with which many of the activists call for police abolition hasn’t.

With “Defund: Black Lives, Policing, and Safety For All” (HarperCollins Canada), the 39-year-old Toronto-born, Los Angeles-based co-founder of Black Lives Matter Canada says she wants to give other activists the key arguments in favour of defunding the police and boosting investment in community resources and infrastructure.

“Defund,” which was released in April, traces how the movement has rippled across Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom since 2014. It gained support after Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, launching a cultural reckoning about race, power and public safety.

Now, Hudson’s book comes out amid renewed tough-on-crime commitments by the U.S. government — an agenda that was echoed on the recent Canadian campaign trail.

But defund activists maintain that more police presence does not make all people feel safer — one example is intimate partner violence, which 95 municipalities in Ontario and Nova Scotia have recently recognized as an epidemic; another is increased police presence on school campuses and at demonstrations since the protests over the war in Gaza.

Hudson spoke with The Canadian Press about how some of these issues have changed the movement, and her optimism for the future.

CP: Is there anything you want readers to be thinking about while reading the book?

SH: “I started the book talking about how we think about policing altogether and the propaganda that’s around policing. I want people to really try and suspend whatever notions they have about the police when they’re reading the book … I also want people to consider the fact that since the mid-’70s it’s been really popular with politicians and policy makers to promise to be tough on crime (and) promise to put more money in policing in order to solve the safety issue. Not one politician has ever claimed victory and they have not solved the safety issue. Regardless of anything else, what they’re doing right (right now) is inadequate.”

CP: What got you involved in activism?

SH: “I was a student activist at the University of Toronto and I had been doing a lot of work on campus at that time surrounding racial justice and the experiences that Black students in particular were having on campus. Around 2014, Jermaine Carby was killed by a police officer in Brampton (Ontario) after what they called a routine traffic stop, even though that’s not something that is routine so much … It wasn’t huge on the news, and I knew from my own contacts that the family was having a really hard time trying to get the issue of what had happened to Jermaine Carby out in the media and known more publicly. Shortly after that, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri in the United States. That made a lot of news, with lots and lots of coverage in Canada — far more than what happened to Jermaine Carby — and I, myself, and other folks working on anti-Black racism issues were all really frustrated by this because here was this issue in the United States that deserves the coverage it got in Canada, but there was a similar issue here just before that didn’t get the same sort of scrutiny and concern by media here.

CP: You mention in the book that there was a bit of a journey for you to get to the position that defunding policing institutions is necessary. What led you to the position you ultimately hold now?

SH: “I watched police procedural television growing up, I’m not immune to that. What changed my position was having interactions with police through attempts at democratic participation, through rallies and protests, and seeing how (police) attempt to instigate issues and escalate violence … and also interactions with people in my own family and people that I’m close with (weren’t) keeping in line with the myth that we’re told.”

“When we’re calling the police, we’re often trying to deal with some sort of conflict resolution. Are the police solving or resolving this conflict or are they using violence and power on us in a way that just isn’t actually a resolution to this, but in some ways could be even more dangerous? I had to ask myself the question ‘what do the police do well?’ And when I started to do my own study and really investigate it, I struggled to find the answer. I think that a lot of what (the police) accomplish is just being an easy answer for policy-makers who don’t want to do the really difficult work of shifting or creating systems and institutions that will actually be helpful in creating conditions of safety.”

CP: You mention at one point in the book that you have a lot of optimism about an alternative to policing. What’s driving this optimism?

SH: “I do think people take safety very seriously and they want to be safe. People will eventually realize that policing isn’t the thing that’s doing it. I don’t think this status quo can go on forever. I’m also optimistic because there was a time before policing. The one thing we know is, change is constant and I think there will be a time after policing. I’ve seen what it’s like when you’re really on the fringe of an idea, and we’ve been talking about this for quite some time in activist spaces, to see (police abolition) be in a place where it’s being discussed in the mainstream. That gives me a sense of hope as well, like it’s possible to do the education and let people know what police are accomplishing and what they’re not accomplishing such that people might decide it’s time to do something different.”

CP: You talk about intimate partner violence in the book as an area where police have failed to protect people’s safety. (Hudson argues more preventive measures are needed to protect women, and that the police system can sometimes criminalize victims.)

SH: “I write in the book about how policing can actually make it more difficult for people who are trying to escape a hard, domestic violence situation because you simply don’t have the tools to support people who are having that experience. But if we take some of those resources that we’re putting into policing to solve this issue that they have not been able to solve and put it into resourcing and making sure that people have the ability to leave a place, a financial support to leave a place, and that emotional support to leave a place.”

CP: What are some examples of services we need to see more of in order to move away from policing institutions?

SH: “We put a bunch of money into either transit-specific police or the regular police to patrol the transit system to catch people when they evade the fare and make sure they have some sort of punishment, instead of thinking about the problem — (which may be that) that people can’t afford the fare, and maybe we can do away with that being an issue altogether by taking the money we’re spending by trying to surveil and punish people on the transit system and instead put it into the transit system so that it can be cheaper or free.

“Thinking about how we deal with issues of health that the police are being told to deal with (is another area) … For decades we’ve been fine with the police showing up and harming people when what they really need is support and treatment. And so we see the proliferation, especially since 2020, of these programs that are meant to provide support and resources to people that are going through an emergency situation. The same sort of approach can be taken to issues of drugs and addiction. For so long we have criminalized drug use, even though we know that addiction is a physiological issue, it’s a health issue. What is a police officer going to do for someone who has an addiction? What is incarceration going to do for someone who has an addiction? It’s certainly not going to solve the problem or the proliferation of these economies on our streets. In fact, they make these economies go even more underground and even more dangerous. So if we approach this as a public health issue and provide people with the support they need, we will have a better approach and can eliminate certain crimes.”

— This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 2, 2025.

Cassidy McMackon, The Canadian Press