The City of Windsor employs 500 sworn officers and approximately 150 staff. Yet the most pressing need for our region’s safety and well-being are not those kind of inspectors. We need inspectors who are able to inspect farms in person. The federal government has conducted mostly remote inspections of Ontario farms that employ migrant workers during […]
Author archives: Mita Williams
Taking Suggestions Instead of Making Change
Despite the fact that the post curiously doesn’t use the words #blacklivesmatter, I like the text that introduces the Windsor Black Lives Matter Questionnaire from the Mayor’s Facebook post. I also appreciate the fact that it tells us that the questionnaire closes July 10th. I do not like the wording of the introduction from the […]
Law and order vs. Justice and peace
I don’t know whether it is possible to understand the protests of the current moment as a single, country-wide, thing. We know that there are those protesting police brutality, those who are inciting violence to incite more police brutality, those there to loot, and there are those who are just there because they have had […]
Living in a city with no ambition
From this morning’s installment of newsletters in my mailbox, I read a short essay from 2008 called Cities and Ambition that brought up some uncomfortable emotions for me. The premise of the essay is that a great city sends a message of ambition to its residents and this message matters greatly. Now we could take […]
The stories that I would like to see reported on in our community
Today is Day 8 of self-isolation for myself and my family. More than ever, I rely on local journalism to keep me informed about what is happening in my community. Now, I recognize that journalism – like everything else – is under the strain of the presence of COVID19 (and I know it was in […]
No Ring Please
In September of last year, not long after I had shared my concerns that new police cameras could be used with facial recognition software, mayor Drew Dilkens told AM800 that he was in talks with Amazon to make Windsor the first city in Canada to have their police department connect to their Neighbors App which […]
Why have the floodplain maps of Essex Country not been updated since the 1970s?
Over the Winter Break, I found myself with delicious stretches of time in which I had nothing that I had to do. I played board games with my family. I read books. I also carved out a little bit of time to do some civic engagement. From the Detroit River Cleanup The Current newsletter, I […]
With new cameras, are we enabling facial recognition in the City of Windsor?
These are questions that activist Mariame Kaba regularly asks herself when she is outraged about injustice [ht]: What resources exist so I can better educate myself? Who’s already doing work around this injustice? Do I have the capacity to offer concrete support & help to them? How can I be constructive? […]
A communal response to bike theft
According to Facebook, the group Stolen Bikes of Windsor publishes approximately 6 posts a day. Bike theft is rampant in Windsor. And yet these thefts don’t make the news unless the situation is particularly damning. For this post, I’m not going to go into the factors that make bike thievery essentially a risk-free crime, but […]
Addendum: What is the percentage representation of women on Windsor City Council & ABCs
For many years when I walked into a room I instantly counted the women. It told me a lot about what to expect from that room. One day, having lost my best friend over racial politics out of my control, I began to count people of color. That too was for safety, for understanding how […]