PACIFIC ASSOCIATION OF ARTIST-RUN CENTRES August 13, 2020 LETTER TO MAYOR AND COUNCIL Re: Police abolition from the perspective of cultural workers  To: the City of Vancouver Mayor and Councillors:  Following a wave of public…

PACIFIC ASSOCIATION OF ARTIST-RUN CENTRES

August 13, 2020

LETTER TO MAYOR AND COUNCIL

Re: Police abolition from the perspective of cultural workers 

To: the City of Vancouver Mayor and Councillors: 

Following a wave of public protest in response to the untimely deaths of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto, Chantel Moore in New Brunswick, and Breonna Taylor (Louisville) and George Floyd (Minneapolis) at the hands of the police, the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres’ (PAARC) community has been vocal and clear about calls for the City of Vancouver to defund the Vancouver Police Department’s astronomically inflated budget.

Year after year, the Vancouver Police Department’s budgetary appropriation balloons, not in response to a city getting SAFER, but to its increasing militarization brought on by the false rationale that social needs are police work. The 2020 Budget amounts to $315,278,281.00 or 21% of the total operational budget for the City of Vancouver. We call upon our elected officials to question the validity of such a civic expense. Several of PAARCs member organizations who operate in and around the Downtown Eastside witness the risks faced by people who are most in need of social care and material support, risks that are often exacerbated by police presence.

The Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres acknowledges the demands of organizations in the Downtown Eastside who have been organizing to protect communities at risk of police confrontations and the ongoing criminalization of poverty. According to their work and experiences of the City’s most vulnerable citizens, the VPD has consistently failed to protect and serve these communities, yet continues to receive exponential annual increases to their budget to enforce an unaccountable and inherently violent system rooted in upholding white supremacy and settler colonialism.

We are forwarding a non-comprehensive list of demands culled from Black Lives Matter Vancouver and the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre’s Red Women Rising Report  that call upon the City to further support the calls to redistribute police budget in order to support policies and actions that will lead to building stronger and safer communities centering lives on the Downtown Eastside.

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The Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres (PAARC) is pleased to announce the adoption of a new set of Membership Principles (listed below) as of May 27, 2020. The new Membership Principles make a long anticipated shift in the overall direction of the 27-member Association driven by extensive Strategic Planning work started mid-2019. PAARC’s new principles respond to a variety of challenges articulated in its Strategic Planning process, including stagnant funding conditions between 1990 and 2015, increasing costs of living and housing insecurity in BC as a result of rampant real estate development, and demands by Black, Indigenous and People of Colour within PAARCs member organizations and across the sector for the dismantling of colonialism and white supremacy. The principles also give new energy to the movement first started in the 1960s, departing from its initial successes of a “parallel gallery system” into an interdisciplinary network of values-based organizations that centres on the role of the Artist.

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