How Political Opportunism Is Eviscerating the Critical Conversation on Transforming Policing and Building Equitable Societies

By Alok Mukherjee, Former Chair, Toronto Police Services Board; Author, with Tim Harper, of Excessive Force: Toronto’s Fight to Reform City Policing

1. The ‘Woke 1.0’ Recantation

Multi-racial solidarity during the 2020 defund police demonstrations. Source: Erik McGregor / LightRocket via Getty Images

Every few years, political elites declare the end of an era to justify an ideological retreat. In recent days, we have watched high-profile progressive figures in the United States—most notably Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani—publicly distance themselves from 2020-era calls to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Ocasio-Cortez went so far as to claim that “Woke 1 was crazy.” This is how she characterized the pivotal moment of racial justice organizing following the murder of George Floyd, an African American man killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Media commentators swiftly codified the phrase, framing the post-George Floyd reckoning as a temporary, hysterical aberration that serious politicians must now recant to remain electorally viable.

This narrative pivot functions as political cover. As Nesrine Malik observes in The Guardian, when blamed for right-wing backlashes, mainstream progressives routinely throw grassroots movements under the bus to signal moderation. Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra of BreakThrough News argue that this retreat is the result of a calculated effort by the political establishment to discipline progressive figures and reassure power centers that structural changes in response to state violence are permanently off the table. By reducing the 2020 uprising to a “crazy” phase, politicians wipe their hands of uncomfortable commitments, pivoting seamlessly back to party orthodoxy to appease institutional donors and suburban voter blocs ahead of upcoming elections.

This backflip by supposedly progressive politicians in the United States occurs within the context of a broader assault on gains made by racialized, marginalized, and oppressed communities dating back to the struggle against slavery. This assault spans numerous fronts, but two primary battlegrounds stand out: the transformation of policing and the promotion of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) across all sectors of society.

2. Deconstructing the “Woke” Taxonomy

To understand this retreat, one must interrogate the term “Woke” itself and how its numerical taxonomies are weaponized. Conceding the framing of “Woke 1.0” versus “Woke 2.0” accepts a false premise designed to discredit reform. If “Woke 1” refers to the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement for police accountability, and “Woke 2” describes the conservative panic over “cancel culture” and trans rights, then the label has been intentionally expanded until it is completely devoid of meaning.

We now even hear of a “Woke Right”—a label applied to anti-Zionist conservatives like Tucker Carlson. When a single term is stretched to encompass police budget oversight, campus speech disputes, and foreign policy debates, it ceases to function as a meaningful policy descriptor. It becomes an imprecise insult. Politicians who adopt phrases like “Woke 1.0 was crazy” are trading in this vagueness. It allows them to dismiss substantive structural critiques of state power without ever having to engage with the actual bases and merits of those critiques.

3. Reclaiming the Substantive Debate

This cynical retreat erases the actual policy substance of the 2020 moment. In a sharp critique in Defector, Mychal Denzel Smith notes that the truly “crazy” aspect of the era was not the demand for structural change, but how rapidly those demands were exploited by political actors who performed radical empathy while preparing an immediate return to carceral spending.

This performative collapse erases what was actually at stake. The depth and import of that moment was captured in a December 2020 Toronto Star feature gathering eight Canadian voices across law, sociology, and grassroots activism. As sociologist Akwasi Owusu-Bempah noted, the debate was fundamentally about ending the “policification of social policy”—the decades-long trend of making police responsible for non-criminal social problems. Scholar Robyn Maynard and activist-journalist Desmond Cole pointed out that defunding was a practical framework to reduce the scope, power, and militarization of policing while building true safety through housing and healthcare. Even establishment critics like legal scholar Kent Roach recognized that the movement trained a necessary political searchlight on municipal budget allocations, while community leaders like Sam Tecle highlighted it as a total reimagining of a society that stops locking away social problems.

As I argued in my own 2020 op-ed for the Toronto Star, the fundamental value of the “defund the police” movement was never found in the literal merits of a three-word slogan. Whether one embraced the phrase literally or rejected its framing, its vital contribution was the critical space it opened to explore long-overdue options for transforming public safety:

• Unbundling Police Duties: De-tasking police forces and removing armed officers as primary responders to non-violent mental health crises, homelessness, and social distress.
• Reallocating Resources: Directing municipal funds toward root causes of harm—such as affordable housing, youth programs, and community health.
• Democratic Oversight: Asserting genuine civilian governance over ever-expanding police budgets rather than rubber-stamping automatic yearly increases.

Contrast these structural demands with the trajectory that followed. In 2020, politicians offered symbolic gestures—taking knees, posting statements, and creating advisory panels. By 2022, those same politicians presided over a complete policy collapse, approving record budget increases for police departments while starving social infrastructure. As I detailed in a recent piece on police boards operating as rubber-stamping entities, this retreat is playing out vividly across Canada today.

4. The Canadian Echo: “Me Too” Political Opportunism

In Canada, politicians across municipal and provincial lines have eagerly joined this American retreat in a “me too” chorus. Rather than tackling the distinct structural realities of Canadian policing—including the systemic violence faced by Indigenous and Black communities—Canadian leaders routinely import US culture-war framing to avoid doing the hard work of police oversight.

Across major Canadian urban centers, elected officials demonstrate an eager alignment with police leadership and unions. Fearing the risk of being labeled “soft on crime,” municipal councils grant multi-million-dollar budget hikes to police services even during periods of severe fiscal austerity. Essential public services—transit, shelter networks, and mental health outreach—are left to deteriorate, while police services remain uniquely insulated from budgetary accountability.

Canadian politicians of all ideological hues have found it safe, if not politically profitable, to jettison the model of community-based, human rights-grounded, equity-driven policing that promotes community safety and well-being. In its place, they have embraced a militaristic, national security-driven system of policing that criminalizes vulnerable people and tramples on Charter-protected rights to free speech and peaceful dissent. In this, they track developments south of the border with alarming fidelity.

5. A Global Illiberal Contagion

This hostility toward equity and systemic accountability is not confined to North America. The tragic case of Professor Jason Arday at the University of Cambridge dramatically showcases how the anti-“Woke” contagion has spread across the Atlantic, carrying devastating human costs.

Professor Arday—a highly respected Black, neurodivergent scholar who rose to become one of Cambridge’s youngest Black professors—was subjected to intense institutional scrutiny and allegations of academic misconduct surrounding his research. The pressures and public controversy culminated in his tragic resignation and subsequent death, sparking global grief and outrage across academic networks.

While many rightly mourned a brilliant scholar, reactionary commentators seized upon the tragedy to frame Professor Arday as an example of unmerited advancement driven by DEI initiatives. This mirrors the rhetoric in the United States, where tens of thousands of women, racialized individuals, and LGBTQ+ professionals—including military personnel—have faced systemic purges and career degradation under the unfounded slander that their achievements owed to DEI rather than merit. In Canada, too, political figures and commentators increasingly subscribe to this despicable calumny.

I am reminded of the case of Ward Churchill, an American scholar and activist, who died at the age of 78 just a few days ago on August 11. Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado who claimed Native American ancestry, was investigated in 2005 on allegations of research misconduct and fired from his job in 2007. His crime? Claiming in his 2001 essay, “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” that the September 11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center were a natural and unavoidable consequence of the unlawful foreign policy of the US.

The disproportionate hostility directed at racialized and Indigenous scholars and leaders when targeted by institutional allegations demands rigorous global scrutiny. Across North America and the UK, how many scholars from dominant groups face such immediate public destruction compared to those from equity-seeking backgrounds? The weaponization of “anti-Wokeness” is not merely a political posture—it is an active weapon used to dismantle equity frameworks and purge marginalized voices from public life. In the face of this dismantling, those who claim to be “left” or “progressive” have to be vigilant that they do not give ground for the sake of short-term political gain.

6. The Illiberal Turn on Right and Left

In this context, the bipartisan capitulation in the US illustrates a core thesis of The Illiberal Turn: both the political right and left are increasingly capitulating to state securitization, unmonitored police power, and an outright rejection of civil rights gains. When progressive leaders dismiss the transformational demands of 2020 as “crazy,” they validate the conservative premise that public safety can only be secured through state coercion and armed oversight.

By treating police transformation and equity frameworks as discarded fashion trends rather than urgent democratic necessities, political elites forfeit their responsibility to govern. The retreat from police accountability and the purge of equity programs are two sides of the same coin: a surrender of democratic governance to unchecked authority. Reclaiming the core of the 2020 debate is not about clinging to past slogans; it is about demanding that true public safety and human dignity be measured by community well-being, equity, and human rights rather than the expansion of police power.