Canada, Common Cause, MORTAR #3 - Canadian Bacon: Opposing Police and State Power by One Toronto Member, One Hamilton

The past year has witnessed the emergence of a popular movement whose scale and intensity 
has surprised radicals and social conservatives alike, and which has provoked shock waves 
of reaction in the ranks of police agencies across North America. In the wake of the 
protests that erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, and subsequently spread to dozens of major 
American cities, there has been a corresponding increase in public awareness of police 
violence and its relationship to racial dynamics in Canada. Anti-police sentiment is on 
the rise. ---- When flagship liberal publications like Rolling Stone are publishing 
articles envisioning a world without cops, and tens of thousands of first-time 
demonstrators are taking to the streets across the continent to protest police violence 
and demand racial equality, something is definitely in the air. These are exciting times 
for anarchists, and all those who have long viewed the police as the violent goon squad of 
a white supremacist, capitalist state. But public perceptions are a fickle thing, and 
mobilizations themselves will not address systemic racism or police violence any more than 
much larger demonstrations were able to stop the Iraq War. While it is important for 
anarchists and other anti-authoritarian revolutionaries to actively participate in this 
developing movement for police accountability, we also need to consistently and 
emphatically push for a long-term organizing strategy with abolition as its goal.

Significant numbers of anarchists in Canada tend to either pay lip service to community 
organizing, or else dismiss it as an inherently liberal, reformist, or even authoritarian 
affair. This latter sentiment often dovetails with a counterposing tendency towards 
building an insular "anarchist community," often conceived of as an island of radical 
politics separate from the rest of the working class. Anarchists such as Lorenzo Kom'boa 
Ervin and Joel Olson have cited similar dynamics in the United States, and have noted that 
despite anarchists' ostensible, yet often rhetorical solidarity with racialized victims of 
police terror, this is a big reason why our ranks tend to be filled with white, 
middle-class twenty-somethings. This inward focus also reinforces a delusional 
understanding of our relative significance, both as agents of social ruptures and as 
primary targets of state repression.

The 2008 Canadian Forces field manual on Counterinsurgency Operations lists five possible 
forms that an insurgency can take, noting that "[t]he most potentially dangerous... is 
that of an anarchist group which sets out to eliminate all political structures and the 
social fabric associated with them." Yet while it is oddly validating to be appraised in 
such terms by the military tacticians of the Canadian state, a subsequent comment pointing 
to anarchism's current lack of public support should clarify that it is the potential of 
anarchist ideas, strategies, and tactics becoming the leading force behind a popular 
uprising that they find threatening. The truth is that despite significant advances made 
over the past decade, materially and organizationally, anarchists remain a marginal 
political force in North America, outside of pockets of Québec and Mexico. If we are 
serious about taking on capitalism and the state, more anarchists need to start seeking 
out and making strategic alliances with groups and individuals already organizing against 
their most visible excesses, in order to help push these struggles to their logical 
conclusions.

Any effective organizing strategy depends on a sober assessment of local material 
conditions. In Canada, public perceptions about police are heavily influenced by their 
institutional equivalents in the United States. While there exist numerous social, 
cultural, economic, and geopolitical similarities between the two countries, and while it 
could be argued that police forces ultimately fulfill the same role everywhere, 
understanding national distinctions is nonetheless an important task for revolutionaries 
here in Canada. Even within the United States itself, militants in Ferguson reacting to 
the murder of Michael Brown operated within a radically different context than those who 
took to the streets in New York to protest the murder of Eric Garner; the same could be 
said, to a lesser extent, about the protesters in Oakland and Los Angeles. These 
distinctions are based on a host of local factors, such as a specific region's history, 
culture, class composition, urban geography, political terrain, and of course, the 
brutality and tactical competence of its local police force. With this in mind, this 
article seeks to make a modest contribution to understanding our context here in Canada, 
particularly in the areas of southern Ontario in which our members live and organize.

I. Understanding the Canadian Context

On November 24, 2014, a grand jury in Ferguson ruled against indicting Darren Wilson, a 
white police officer, for the murder of Michael Brown, an eighteen year old Black youth. 
In the weeks and months that followed, a flood of articles were published comparing racial 
dynamics in the United States and Canada. While many were sanctimonious fluff pieces, 
mindlessly praising Canada as a bastion of cultural diversity and racial tolerance, a 
number of more progressive commentators used the opportunity to point to systemic 
anti-Indigenous racism as a national corollary to anti-Black racism in the United States. 
Others used the spotlight cast on racial divisions in Missouri to note that Black people 
are harassed and killed by police at disproportionate rates in Toronto, as well. While 
these efforts to shed light on the existence of structural inequality and deep-seated 
racism in Canada were often well-intentioned and factual, they also tended to reinforce 
the myth of multiculturalism that lies at the heart of the modern Canadian national 
identity, while obscuring the specific manner in which the Canadian state has been shaped 
by white supremacy in the interests of its ruling class.

If we conceive of the state, using Max Weber's popular definition, as a monopoly on the 
legitimate use of physical force, then deepening our understanding of the Canadian state 
means looking at the historical process by which this monopoly was established. Central to 
this history is, of course, the development of the police as a primary institution endowed 
with the responsibility for effecting state-consolidating violence. But also of crucial 
importance is the manner in which this legitimacy was established, and how it's 
maintained. With this in mind, we will begin by examining the historical development of 
the Canadian state, before moving onto a more detailed examination of its police.

Building on Different Foundations: Primitive Accumulation [1] in the US and Canada

Everywhere that capitalism has developed, it has done so by violently imposing a national 
system of gendered, class, and race-based social relations, sanctified by a legal regime 
of private land ownership and property rights. The specific character of these social 
relationships is dynamic, and shaped by a history of struggle. In the United States, 
capitalism was built on the stolen labour of millions of enslaved Africans, violently 
subjugated into the nation's vast southern plantation system of forced agricultural 
production. The roots of Canada's particular brand of resource extraction-based 
capitalism, on the other hand, are to be found in the transatlantic fur trade, which was 
based on the mass exploitation of Indigenous knowledge and labour. This Canadian system of 
primitive accumulation was first instituted in the early seventeenth century by French 
merchant-traders operating out of early settlements along the St. Lawrence river, in 
modern-day Québec and New Brunswick. Following the arrival of the British, this trade 
gradually came to be dominated by the monolithic Hudson's Bay Company (HBC).

Both groups of European settlers were largely dependent on Indigenous trappers and hunters 
for animal pelts, and so they formed relationships and alliances with various opposing 
tribes in order to maintain their share of this lucrative market. Each had an interest in 
limiting the size of their respective settlements, in order to maintain the surrounding 
territories as a sort of expansive hunting/trapping grounds. This policy caused 
significant tensions between the European colonial powers and their respective settler 
populations, particularly the British colonists, who were constantly seeking to expand 
their settlements, often sparking conflict with surrounding Indigenous nations. In 1676, 
this tension was a leading cause of Bacon's Rebellion, an uprising in the Virginia 
colonies carried out by a combined force of European settlers, indentured servants, and 
enslaved Africans. In the aftermath of this failed rebellion, slavery was officially 
codified into a racially-based caste system; from then on, even the poorest European 
descendents were granted a privileged legal and social status over their African 
counterparts, in order to help ensure that the two races would never join forces again.

In 1763, following its victory in the globe-spanning Seven Years War, Britain acquired the 
colonies of New France, in exchange for agreeing to return France's more lucrative 
Caribbean colonies, Martinique and Guadeloupe. After this treatise was concluded, 
England's King George III issued a Royal Proclamation aimed at consolidating Britain's 
North American colonies, and putting a halt on their rapid westward expansion. This 
proclamation, which recognized Indigenous title over all lands not yet ceded via a formal 
treaty process, laid the legal basis for future Indigenous land claims in Canada, and set 
the clock ticking on the American Revolution.

Confederation and its Discontents

The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate 
the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily 
as they are fit to change.
John A. MacDonald (1887)

A century later, alarmed by developments in the American Civil War and repeated incursions 
into its remaining North American colonies by Irish Republicans, Britain hastily granted 
Canada its independence through the British North American Act of 1867. The new Canadian 
state was structured as a federated parliamentary democracy, initially composed of four 
provinces: Ontario, Québec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. In order to stave off the 
prospects of annexation by the United States, Canada's political elite turned their 
immediate attention to consolidating those North American territories still under the 
nominal jurisdiction of the British Crown and its commercial agent, the HBC.

However, legal issues soon arose following the establishment of the province of Manitoba 
in 1870, as it was determined that there was no legal basis for land ownership under 
existing British common law; in fact, the individual practice of buying or selling land 
outside of the previously-established colonial borders had been explicitly outlawed by the 
Royal Proclamation of 1763. In an attempt to close this legal loophole, and to facilitate 
increased European settlement of what is now central and western Canada, the federal 
government began renewed treaty negotiations with local Indigenous nations, even as it 
continued to incorporate new provinces, such as British Columbia, into its nationalist 
project.

The result was eleven numbered treaties, outlining the legal rationale for the territorial 
integration of the modern Canadian state. Signed over a period of six years, the first 
seven of these treaties revoked Indigenous title over massive swathes of land in 
modern-day Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. The remaining four treaties, 
signed over the years 1899-1921, covered pockets of British Columbia, northern Ontario and 
Alberta, and the majority of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. These treaties also 
identify, through their absence, large tracts of land that were never legally ceded by 
their original inhabitants -- including much of modern-day British Columbia.

These numbered treaties, beyond being simple land-grabs, were part of a broader genocidal 
campaign of assimilation that sought to "civilize" Indigenous populations and transform 
them into proper British subjects. This practice of forced civilization, officially in 
place since 1830, was inherited by the federal government at confederation. The 1857 Act 
to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in the Province had been an 
earlier attempt by the colonial government of Upper and Lower Canada to enfranchise 
Indigenous adults by offering them a Christian, or European name and their own plot of 
land. To the frustration of colonial administrators and Christian missionaries alike, by 
1863 not a single individual had been voluntarily enfranchised under this legislation.

The new Canadian government's solution to the failed policy of voluntary assimilation was 
swift and brutal. First came the Indian Act of 1869, which established a national system 
of Indian Reserves and replaced traditional systems of Indigenous self-governance with an 
elected Band Council system; second came a campaign of mass starvation, aimed at weakening 
the wills of those tribes who refused to cede title over their lands and move onto a 
system of reserves; third came the national Residential Schools system, a horrific 
institution of mass religious and cultural indoctrination that set out to "kill the Indian 
in the child."

The Canadian Residential Schools system operated for over a century, from 1884 until the 
last school was closed, in 1996. During this period, generations of Indigenous children 
faced rampant and severe physical, psychological, and sexual abuse at the hands of 
Catholic and Anglican priests. Thousands of others died, as a result of poor conditions 
and lack of proper medical attention. The resulting intergenerational trauma has 
contributed to disproportionate levels of horizontal and domestic violence, increased 
economic and social marginalization, and significantly higher rates of substance abuse and 
suicide among Indigenous communities. These factors, in turn, reinforce a racist narrative 
that places Indigenous lives at increased risk of dehumanizing violence from police, and 
contributes to a climate of official indifference towards the unresolved murders of 
Indigenous women.

Racialization of Immigration: Business as Usual

There are continual attempts by undesirables of alien and impoverished nationalities to 
enter Canada, but these attempts will be checked as much as possible at their source.
Canadian Immigration Official (1923)

In 1971, Pierre Elliot Trudeau announced multiculturalism as an official policy of the 
Canadian federal government. This decision emerged out of recommendations made by the 
Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, a commission tasked with helping to 
ease tensions between Canada's "two founding races" (French and British) in the wake of 
Québec's Silent Revolution. Trudeau's decisions to move beyond biculturalism towards an 
embrace of multiculturalism effectively placed the rights of all Canadians to speak their 
own language, and to practice religious and cultural customs of their choosing under the 
paternalistic protection of an officially bilingual, English/French state. This principle 
was enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ten years later, and further 
cemented into law by the Multiculturalism Act of 1988.

For decades now, multiculturalism has been both a steadily-increasing demographic reality, 
and a defining political characteristic of Canada's national identity. Toronto, Canada's 
most populous metropolis, is regularly cited as one of the most multicultural cities in 
the world. According to Statistics Canada's 2011 National Household Survey, 48.6 per cent 
of the city's 2.6 million residents are immigrants (71.7 per cent of whom immigrated from 
Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean [2]), while Canada's national figure sits at 
22 per cent - the highest among G8 countries. The widely-accepted perception of Canada as 
a welcoming home for immigrants and refugees is a contributing factor in its own 
particular brand of nationalism, and a smug, largely unfounded point of distinction from 
the United States. So-called "Canadian values" rest on a bedrock of progressive 
secularism, universal health care, and a grossly inflated sense of moral superiority on 
the world stage. This latter sentiment persists, despite the destructive role that 
Canadian corporations play in the Global South, the government's persistent efforts to 
sabotage international conventions aimed at reducing global carbon emissions, and its 
traditional position as a junior partner of Anglo-American imperialism - all of which are 
major factors fueling global patterns of displacement and migration.

Canada's ostensible celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity also functions as an 
ideological cover for its long history of exclusionary immigration policies. Understanding 
the implications of this racist legacy is crucial for understanding the structural 
operation of white supremacy in contemporary Canadian society, which is intimately linked 
to notions of citizenship and the more precarious, racialized "Other."

In the United States, slavery provided the grotesque scaffolding upon which an entire 
system of racialized class relations was built. The lack of a Canadian equivalent to the 
southern plantation system doesn't reflect a more enlightened attitude towards the 
inherent equality of Europeans and Africans on the part of Canada's colonial forebearers, 
so much as it points to different histories of economic and political development. While 
state-funded television spots proudly play up Canada's role as the final destination of 
slaves escaping the United States via the Underground Railroad, there are no similar 
television spots celebrating the collusion between Canada's colonial masters and 
Confederate forces during the American Civil War, the sordid history of racial segregation 
and neglect experienced by residents of Africville, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, or the 
disproportionate levels of police violence that continue to afflict Black residents of 
suburban Toronto neighbourhoods such as Jane and Finch, Malvern, and Jamestown.

The absence of a large population of enslaved Africans meant that the early development of 
race in Canada, as a social construction based on material power relations, was rooted in 
other social divisions, such as those found between the country's Indigenous population 
and European settlers, French and English colonists, Catholics and Protestants, and 
"Aryans" and "Asiatics." As the most heavily racialized ethnic group to settle in Canada 
in significant numbers prior to the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants were viewed with 
hostility and suspicion, refused the right to vote, and systematically denied the 
opportunity for cultural assimilation. Chinese Canadians were forced to live in segregated 
neighbourhoods and encampments, and ruthlessly exploited by mining and railroad companies, 
who forced them to do the most dangerous and physically demanding jobs, for the least pay. 
They also faced racist violence from their white working-class counterparts, who accused 
them of stealing white jobs and undercutting wages. Following the completion of the 
Canadian Pacific Railroad, in 1885, federal politicians began to curb Chinese immigration 
through an escalating series of head taxes, before all but banning it through the Chinese 
Immigration Act of 1923.

It wasn't until 1967, one hundred years after Confederation, and less than five years 
before adopting an official policy of multiculturalism, that Canada finally opened its 
borders to large-scale immigration from the Global South. The so-called "Points System" 
was motivated by the need to expand Canada's domestic workforce in the face of a 
precipitous decline in European immigration. Amidst the changing geopolitical landscape of 
the 1960s, Canada's immigration policy had also begun to come under fire from increasing 
numbers of newly-independent states, many of whose governments had taken power following 
the success of formal decolonization struggles. Since the establishment of the Points 
System, immigration from countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean has been a leading 
factor in Canada's overall population growth. Accordingly, most racialized Canadians are 
first or second generation immigrants, the vast majority of whom live in the suburbs of 
Greater Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Racialized, working-class youth from these 
neighbourhoods are much more likely to live in substandard housing, attend underfunded 
schools, be discriminated against by prospective landlords and employers, and face the 
highest rates of horizontal violence--all while being harassed, beaten, murdered, and 
imprisoned by police at grossly disproportionate rates.

As Canada's national security interests have become further integrated with those of the 
United States, both through the increased globalization of capitalism and the broader 
security framework of the War on Terror, this has led to increased scrutiny and harassment 
of immigrant communities from regions of the world targeted by western imperialism. Under 
the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, recent years have seen a tightening of 
Canadian immigration guidelines, a sharp rise in immigrant detention, a militarization of 
immigration enforcement agents, and sweeping increases to the federal government's ability 
to deport permanent residents, and even immigrants with Canadian citizenship. This 
restructuring of Canada's immigration regime has been accompanied by a corresponding 
increase in Temporary Foreign Workers programs, which provide corporations, agribusinesses 
and individual wealthy households with a seemingly endless pool of hyper-precarious 
workers, who are required to pay taxes that fund public services that they are not 
permitted to use.

II. To Serve and Protect Whom?: The Development of the Police

The history of policing, as it exists in its modern institutional form, is intrinsically 
linked to the development of industrial capitalism and the consolidation of state power 
that began to occur in the late eighteenth, and early nineteenth century. The spread of 
capitalist social relations, and the rapid growth of urbanization required that one 
segment of the working class be tasked with maintaining the compliance of the whole. Just 
as the development of capitalism faced unique obstacles and local conditions in different 
parts of the world, so too was the development of police shaped by local conditions.

The job of the police has always been to maintain the "rule of law" through the targeted 
application of violence. The laws that they are tasked with enforcing are drafted by 
politicians to secure the political interests of the ruling class, who are able to 
influence the structural operation of power in society through their financial control 
over, and direct representation within the political class, and through the skillful 
manipulation of social divisions to manage public opinion. For years, successive waves of 
class struggle have dramatically altered the political framework tied to the maintenance 
of social control. From the city watch and mounted riflemen of yesteryear, to today's 
community liaison officers and militarized tactical squads, the police have adapted 
accordingly.

Slavery and the Genesis of American Policing

If we insist on viewing the police as crime-fighters, profiling can only be seen as a 
mistake, a persistent disaster. But if we suspend or surrender this noble view of police 
work, and look instead at the actual consequences of what the cops do, profiling makes a 
certain kind of sense; it follows a sinister logic. Racial profiling is not about crime at 
all; it's about controlling people of colour.
Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue

The history of policing in the United States is one of the assertion and maintenance of a 
regime of social control anchored in the cross-class alliance of white supremacy. During 
its early colonial period, the United States inherited an informal system of sheriffs and 
town watches from England, and within the colonies, this system developed in a manner that 
was adaptively contextual. In his excellent account of the history of American policing, 
Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, author Kristian Williams argues that the 
earliest iteration of the police, as an institution characterized by internal cohesion and 
popular legitimacy, developed in southern states in order to defend slavery. From the 
seventeenth to the nineteenth century, slave patrols represented the security arm of 
property owners and eventually the state, by capturing runaways and preventing gatherings, 
and revolts by both free and enslaved Blacks.

Increased urbanization in the late eighteenth century presented new challenges for the 
local political elite, which led to the creation of a more cohesive system of city guards. 
Unlike individualized watchmen, city guards patrolled as a unit, and were granted 
increased authority. These measures were aimed both at imposing Protestant moral values on 
newly proletarianized whites, as well as maintaining control over higher concentrations of 
slaves and freed Black labourers. In 1785, in Charleston, South Carolina, the longstanding 
town watch, which had "defended" the town against fires, Indians, Black gatherings, and 
vagrants, amalgamated with a volunteer slave patrol organized by the local militia, 
thereby creating the Charleston Guard and Watch. Williams argues that this point 
represents the first example of a modern police force, which he characterizes as an 
institution that is publicly controlled, authorized to use force, possesses an internal 
chain of command, and whose members wear identifiable uniforms.

The suppression and control of Black populations has remained a lodestar of the policing 
project in the United States ever since. Following the American Civil War, the economic 
necessity of such a strategy developed more of a political character, as the state sought 
to control Black communities that, despite being granted formal emancipation, were 
nonetheless denied equal social and legal standing with their white counterparts. From the 
post-Civil War Reconstruction period until the political reforms of the Civil Rights era, 
southern white supremacist militias such as the Ku Klux Klan operated with the passive 
support, and often active participation, of local and state police. This tidy arrangement 
represented a continuation of the slave patrol function of policing, and ensured police 
forces could perform "racially neutral" law enforcement duties, while leaving the more 
overtly violent terrorism of white supremacy to the Klan.

Police partnerships with extremist white supremacist organizations such as the Klan 
persevere, but have become intentionally obscured over the years, as overt racism has 
become less publicly acceptable. The largely cosmetic nature of this shift is most starkly 
evidenced by the shocking number of Black citizens who continue to be murdered at the 
hands of white police officers, who then seek to justify their use of lethal force as a 
necessary and defensive measure, despite its often clearly aggressive and racist character.

Engines of Oppression: The Toronto Police Services

The authority legally invested in these men, their habitual intercourse with the lower 
classes, the impression that they possess the ear of their employers, the favouritism they 
may be enabled to suggest, the petty and indirect tyranny they may be permitted to 
exercise, all combine to degrade a force of this nature into formidable engines of oppression.
United Province of Canada Commission Report (1841)

Canada's municipal police forces, like their counterparts in the United States, grew out 
of an informal system of citizen patrols imported from England. These civilian watch 
services performed basic duties during evening hours, often limited to keeping an eye out 
for trouble, and informing others of any crimes or attacks that they witnessed taking place.

In 1834, Toronto became the first major city in North America to adopt a modern police 
force. At its founding, the Toronto Police Services (TPS) was composed of five paid 
constables, appointed by the city's mayor and aldermen. For the first decades of its 
existence, the TPS functioned as a notoriously corrupt appendage of the local political 
establishment, upon whose patronage they depended for their jobs. Its ranks were largely 
drawn from the Orange Order, a not-so-secret society of conservative Irish Protestants 
that made no effort to hide its sectarian rivalry with the city's Catholic residents. This 
unapologetic sectarianism was an aggravating factor in the Circus Riots of 1855, in which 
members of the TPS refused to intervene to break up a massive brawl between a travelling 
troupe of circus clowns and a local brigade of firefighters and their supporters--many of 
whom also happened to be Orangemen. The resulting public outcry led the incoming mayor to 
fire the entire police force and introduce a new regulatory oversight body. After a study 
of other North American police forces, the Boston Police Department was chosen as the 
model for implementing a series of structural reforms.

As part of this shake-up, former British Army Captain William Stratton Prince was 
appointed as Toronto's new Chief Constable. Prince immediately began to impose a strict 
military discipline on his men, and sought to stamp out the force's culture of endemic 
corruption, which he saw as an undue hindrance to its public legitimacy. Under Prince's 
fourteen year tenure as Chief, the TPS became Canada's first intelligence security agency, 
operating a network of spies that monitored the activities of Fenian cells operating out 
of Buffalo, New York City, Detroit, and Chicago.

As the city of Toronto continued to grow over the following decades, so too did the size 
of its police force, and the scale of their responsibilities. The swelling ranks of the 
"dangerous classes" necessitated an increased focus on what Helen Boritch has described as 
"class control" policing. This meant breaking strikes, when necessary, but also a heavy 
emphasis on offences carried out against the "public order," such as vagrancy, public 
drunkenness, and prostitution, which were (and are) almost exclusively committed by poorer 
sections of the working class. As part of a more expansive understanding of "public order" 
that foreshadowed later advancements in community policing, during these years the TPS was 
also tasked with running a variety of social services, such as ambulances, homeless 
shelters, and even a child protection service, which served as an early forerunner to 
today's Children's Aid Society. The TPS also enforced Sabbath and Public Order Bylaws, and 
were responsible for regulating a host of small businesses, such as taxi drivers, 
laundry-operators and street vendors. In order to help ensure their upstanding moral 
character and loyalty to their bourgeois pay-masters, officers were forbidden from living 
in working-class neighbourhoods, or consorting with poor people during their off hours.

During the interwar period, fears of anarchist and communist subversion, stoked by the 
Russian Revolution abroad and increased labour unrest at home, provided the impetus for a 
renewed focus on domestic intelligence gathering and a more targeted system of political 
repression. Toronto's "Red Squads" kept a particularly close watch on organizing efforts 
taking place within immigrant communities from Central and Eastern Europe, and on 
well-known anarchists such as Emma Goldman, an intermittent resident of the city from 
1927, until her death in 1940.

Successive waves of amalgamation to the city of Toronto have swallowed up other smaller 
municipal police forces, and today the TPS is the third largest police force in Canada, 
with 5,800 officers spread across seventeen numbered divisions and a range of specialized 
departments and task forces. They are supported by 2,500 civilian employees, an untold 
number of volunteers, and a bloated annual operating budget of over $1 billion.

The RCMP

One of the most enduring Canadian cultural stereotypes is the red-clad, mild-mannered 
"Mountie," popularized by fictional characters such as Dudley Do-Right, of Rocky and 
Bullwinkle fame, and Benton Fraser of Due South. It should come as no surprise that the 
actual history of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is considerably more brutal 
than these pop culture depictions might suggest, as it is intimately linked with the 
colonial expansion of the Canadian state.

The RCMP's roots lie in the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP), a paramilitary police force 
modelled after the Royal Irish Constabulary, and staffed by horse-mounted riflemen drawn 
from cavalry divisions of the British Army. The NWMP was created by parliamentary decree 
in 1873, for the explicit purpose of extending the rule of law to Canada's restive 
Northwest Territories (a huge expanse of land that included the northern regions of 
modern-day Ontario and Québec, as well the entirety of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and 
Alberta), which the federal government had recently purchased from the HBC.

As part of its mandate to tame Canada's wild west, in 1885 the NWMP assisted in putting 
down the North-Western Rebellion, launched by a Métis force led by Louis Riel, and a 
parallel force of insurgent Cree and Assiniboine warriors. The resulting victory paved the 
way for the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, which consolidated Canada's 
territorial continuity, linking the country's eastern and western population centres and 
facilitating the further settlement of the Prairies. The NWMP was deployed to the Yukon in 
1895, to establish order and collect customs duties from prospectors drawn to the region 
by the Klondike Gold Rush. In 1905 it was granted jurisdiction over the new provinces of 
Alberta and Saskatchewan, and in 1912 over the territories annexed into the province of 
Manitoba.

Though its formative role in Canadian history was its contribution to colonial 
nation-building, the NWMP also served more traditional policing functions, a notable 
example being when it was called in to violently suppress the 1919 Winnipeg General 
Strike. In 1920, it was merged with the Dominion Police, a federal agency tasked with 
maintaining Canada's earliest forensic and criminal databases, and with protecting 
sensitive public works, such as government buildings, crucial national infrastructure, and 
royal navy yards. The result of this merger was the RCMP.

As Canada's primary federal policing agency, the RCMP is sometimes roughly understood as a 
national equivalent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States. A 
more accurate description, however, would be to say that it has served, at various times 
in its history, as a combination of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Bureau 
of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the 
Secret Service, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and various state, highway, and 
local police departments. Today, the RCMP operates a national network of nearly 30,000 
officers and civilian employees, and serves as the primary police force for 180 
municipalities, 184 Indigenous communities, all three northern territories, and eight of 
Canada's ten provinces (with the notable exception of Ontario and Québec).

The OPP/SQ

Rounding things off, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) are 
the provincial police departments for Ontario and Québec, two provinces that contain a 
combined 62 per cent of Canada's total population. Both police forces have jurisdiction 
over hundreds of small towns and municipalities, and thousands of kilometres of highway. 
The OPP, through the Aboriginal Policing Bureau, serves as the primary police force in 
nineteen Indigenous communities, and provides logistical support and training to First 
Nations Police Services in eleven Indigenous reserves. Both provincial departments are 
often the first responders to highway blockades, and as such have been responsible for 
escalating tense standoffs with Mohawk warriors in Oka, Québec, in 1990, and members of 
the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Confederacy in Caledonia, Ontario in 2006.

The Shift to Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency is those military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and 
civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency.
US Army Field Manual - Counterinsurgency Operations (FMI 3-07-21)

Near the end of the 1970s, after a decade of industrial turmoil, capitalism began to 
restructure itself, both economically and socially. Neoliberalism, with its attendant 
relocation of formerly high-paying manufacturing jobs to low-wage regions, and steady 
erosion of social welfare provisions, has severely diminished working-class living 
standards in North America. As they have retreated from their traditional role as service 
providers, governments have steadily reoriented their focus towards managing domestic 
unrest. By trading the carrot for the stick, the social welfare state has redefined itself 
as the modern security state.

The institution of policing has always been an evolving experiment, and under 
neoliberalism it has taken on a new dimension. Faced with an influx of popular and often 
militant social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, western elites began to come up with new 
strategies aimed at containing political dissent and ensuring sustained social stability. 
Domestic counterinsurgency models were developed, drawing heavily upon the British Army's 
experiences in Northern Ireland, and British, American, and French efforts to quell 
anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist insurgencies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. 
These new strategies expanded on some of the more covert and intelligence-driven domestic 
policing methods that had been developed by the now defunct Red Squads in decades prior.

The 1970s were a decade characterized by public distrust in government bodies. This 
tension was exacerbated by the exposure of the fact that illegal tactics were being 
routinely employed by state security forces in their efforts to crush dissent. In 1976, 
the so-called Church Committee, a United States' Senate review of national intelligence 
practices, sought to ease public concerns following the release of a leaked dossier 
related to the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO program. The following year In Canada, the 
McDonald Commission completed a similar investigation into the practices of the RCMP's 
counterintelligence agency, after it was determined that they had illegally spied on 
Québecois separatists, and had gone so far as to burn down a barn intended as a meeting 
place between members of the Black Panthers and the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). 
As a result of the commission's findings, the RCMP's intelligence wing was disbanded, and 
restructured into the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). In the years that 
have followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many of the practices that were 
once considered illegal, and which when exposed, caused legitimate public outrage, have 
been formally adopted into the legal framework of policing, in the name of fighting 
terrorism. Moreover, in the decades since the 1970s a massive shift in the allocation of 
public resources towards state security, technological advancements and resulting 
strategic and tactical innovations in counterinsurgency have dramatically refined the face 
of modern policing.

Bringing the War Home: The Militarization of Police

Responding to the intense social and political upheaval of the 1960s, the Los Angeles 
Police Department introduced a new, heavily militarized task force known as Special 
Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team, the first of many subsequent tactical paramilitary police 
forces, collectively classified as Police Paramilitary Units (PPU). These units blur the 
lines between policing and traditional warfare, by allowing the state to bring military 
equipment and tactics to bear on domestic law enforcement situations. The application of 
paramilitary techniques to situations that have previously been handled by traditional 
policing practices signifies an important component of the normalization of militarized 
law enforcement. As one component of a broader counterinsurgency framework, the role of 
these agencies is to crush armed, or otherwise dangerous combatants through the targeted 
application of overwhelming force.

Although they are not nearly as normalized into the framework of traditional policing as 
their American counterparts, most Canadian police forces have developed their own PPUs, 
and deploy them in response to situations that pose a high risk to officer safety, or when 
a strong show of force is required to crush a challenge to state authority, or to the 
smooth functioning of capitalism. These units are embedded within municipal police 
departments, such as the TPS's Emergency Task Force (ETF) or the Hamilton Police Service's 
Emergency Response Unit (ERU), as as well as in their provincial and federal equivalents 
such as the OPP and RCMP, which are each outfitted with Emergency Response Teams (ERT). 
These elite units are composed of small teams of heavily trained officers, comprised of a 
squad leader, several sharpshooters, and agents trained in a combination of surveillance, 
hostage negotiation, tactical entry and frontal assault techniques. In October 2013, the 
RCMP deployed an ERT in a pre-dawn raid aimed at dismantling a Mi'kmaq-led anti-fracking 
blockade in Elsipogtog First Nation, located near the town of Rexton, New Brunswick. A 
leaked copy of an RCMP report on the raid indicated that the operation was planned using 
intelligence gathered through the use of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), equipped with 
infrared and thermal recognition systems.

Front-line municipal police officers are also finding themselves increasingly equipped 
with military grade hardware. In 2013, as part of a "pilot project," three divisions of 
the TPS were issued C8 carbines, which are compact assault rifles designed for urban 
combat. These included 51 Division, located in the city's downtown east, where long-time 
residents are contending with intense and ongoing gentrification efforts; 43 Division, 
which covers an area of south-eastern Scarborough associated with several recent 
high-profile, gang-related shootings; and 31 Division, a notoriously brutal department 
that occupies the heavily racialized working-class neighbourhood of Jane and Finch. In 
addition to new guns, municipal police departments are also being equipped with armored 
military vehicles, either acquired second-hand from the Canadian Forces, or purchased 
directly from private military contractors. This practice has not yet assumed the scale 
seen in recent years in the United States, where seemingly every small town police 
department has acquired its own second-hand armored personnel carrier, left over from the 
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, it is a growing trend, with police forces from 
Vancouver, British Columbia to New Glasgow, Nova Scotia unveiling their own Tactical 
Armored Vehicles (TAVs) in recent years. Many of them have never been used, and it is 
uncertain what practical purpose they would even serve, outside the context of a 
full-fledged civil war.

And military hardware isn't all that is being imported from the War on Terror. In February 
2015, news broke of a warehouse in Chicago's west side that has been repurposed into a 
domestic black site, where suspected criminals are denied recourse to legal representation 
and subjected to "enhanced" interrogation techniques. Unlike a precinct, suspects in this 
facility aren't booked, and face a militaristic environment said to house military-style 
vehicles, interrogation cells, and cages. It can be assumed that sites like these will 
become a normalized destination for those eventually charged under Illinois' amped up 
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which has been enhanced to give 
police the legal authority to round up Chicago's gang members en masse. The principles of 
the RICO Act, originally implemented in 1970 to help fight organized crime, provide an 
effective political tool to criminalize and break down any organization or group that 
poses a serious organized threat to the stability of the state. In Canada, the RCMP 
enforces regulations that are cumulatively similar to the RICO Act, but which tend to fall 
under the classification of criminal conspiracy charges.

In January, 2015, following widespread and sustained protests against the police murder of 
Eric Garner, and the apparent revenge killing of two police officers, New York Police 
Commissioner William Bratton unveiled a new Strategic Response Group (SRG), a 
specially-trained unit of officers tasked with counterterrorism and the policing of 
large-scale protests -- a practice he termed "disorder policing." While Bratton's casual 
conflation of anti-police demonstrations with terrorism, and his announcement that these 
officers would be equipped with automatic weapons represent a particularly chilling 
development, specialized crowd control units such as this are not uncommon in North 
America, and this trajectory towards militarization is only poised to continue.

In Canada, the police departments of every sizeable city are equipped with riot gear, and 
often contain crowd control and public order units with specialized training in crowd 
psychology, martial arts, pain compliance, and the use of non-lethal weapons. The Service 
de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM), Montreal's municipal police force, has 
developed, over the years, into a North American leader in protest policing. It has 
acquired this unique expertise, in part, through its relatively frequent exposure to 
militant black bloc tactics, and its willingness to experiment with different forms of 
crowd dispersal and mass arrests. The SPVM has been known to use the city's annual March 
15th protests (held each year on the International Day Against Police Brutality) as an 
opportunity to train other Canadian municipal police forces in riot suppression tactics.

Community Policing: To Protect and Sever

As we've noted, one of the ways that the state maintains its legitimacy is by crushing 
threats to its rule through the targeted application of overwhelming force. Yet a far more 
insidious, and arguably more effective application of these principles can be found in the 
spread of community policing, a complementary strategy focused on developing stronger ties 
between police and the communities that they occupy. This approach offers a contrast to 
aggressive paramilitary style policing, yet remains part of the same project.

In Toronto, a focus on "community mobilization" has been a core principle of the Toronto 
Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) program, unveiled in 2006, after residents of 
the city were shaken by a spate of gun-related violence that killed fifty-two people over 
a one year period. This program was expanded, in 2007, into the Provincial Anti-Violence 
Integration Strategy (PAVIS), which provides provincial funding to seventeen regional 
community policing initiatives, such as the Addressing Crime Trends In Our Neighbourhoods 
(ACTION) Team in Hamilton, and the Taking Action on Guns and Gangs (TAGG) project in 
Greater Sudbury. While these initiatives have often been championed for their success in 
decreasing rates of violent crime, there is little evidence to back up such claims. What 
is beyond dispute, is the fact that they represent a new level of police penetration into 
the everyday lives of racialized youth, specifically, and "priority neighbourhoods" more 
generally.

Bogus community meetings, citizen surveys, after-school basketball programs for "at-risk" 
youth, and quaint "Coffee with a Cop" programs designed to portray police as good-natured 
neighbours make it feasible to gather useful intelligence on a targeted community, while 
establishing and maintaining relationships with its individual members. Sympathetic 
citizens and community organizations can then be more relied upon to share information 
with police, and to turn to them to resolve conflicts. This sophisticated approach to 
repression enhances police power by allowing them to work through community agencies, as 
well as over them, with the ultimate aim of maintaining social control.

In a February, 2015 article published in the Intercept, investigative journalists Murtaza 
Hussain, Coan Courrier, and Jana Winter broke a story on a program being run by the United 
States National Counterterrorism Centre, which aims to spot early warning signs of youth 
radicalization. A leaked thirty-six-page report, entitled Countering Violent Extremism: A 
Guide for Practitioners and Analysts included a survey and accompanying rating system that 
police, teachers and social workers can use in order to help determine an individual 
child's "susceptibility to engage in violent extremism." The report also included 
suggested interventions that parents could be encouraged to take in order to halt their 
children's path towards further radicalization. In Canada, the state broadcaster CBC has 
run a number of programs and articles on youth radicalization, citing the spectre of young 
Muslim men travelling to Syria to fight with the so-called Islamic State as a 
justification for calls for a more invasive regime of community policing. As with other 
calls to expand state powers, these appeals are currently aimed at exploiting Canadians' 
racist fears of Islamic terrorism. Once adopted, these tactics will be applied to any 
group of so-called "extremists" that the state deems a threat.

Community policing initiatives often work alongside efforts by municipal politicians and 
developers to gentrify neighbourhoods, by effectively seizing on fears over crime and 
safety. In Toronto, Police Community Liaison Committees regularly issue recommendations to 
evict undesirable tenants, as the "community stakeholders" chosen to sit on these 
committees are almost exclusively drawn from the ranks of local business and property 
owners. These committees also regularly champion policing initiatives and community 
partnerships aimed at cracking down on "quality of life" crimes, such as graffiti, 
trespassing, vagrancy, prostitution, and drug dealing, which in turn provides a mandate 
for an increasingly heavy-handed police presence. The Toronto Community Housing 
Corporation (TCHC), which manages the city's diminishing public housing stock, often works 
directly with the TPS to evict tenants. In 2005, following a series of raids in the 
heavily racialized neighbourhood of Jamestown-Rexdale, TCHC punitively evicted the 
families of many of the arrested youth before their trials even began. While this is a 
specific example, the process is quite commonplace.

In 2008, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) began assigning full-time, armed police 
officers, or "school resource officers" as they are euphemistically called, to dozens of 
Toronto high schools. This initiative was inspired by a report on school violence prepared 
by Toronto lawyer Julian Falconer, who has since then, ironically, built himself a career 
representing the families of individuals killed by police. The following year, a sixteen 
year old student at Northern Secondary School, located in the neighbourhood of Jane and 
Finch, was approached and questioned by the school resource officer, who had seen him 
lingering in the hallway and thought that he looked suspicious. The teen responded by 
mockingly referring to the cop as "Bacon." The officer then proceeded to physically 
assault the teen, after his demands for identification went unheeded. To top things off, 
the student was charged with assaulting a police officer while resisting arrest. Programs 
similar to this one have been implemented in other major Canadian cities, such as 
Edmonton, Vancouver, and Winnipeg. While these programs often attempt to justify 
themselves with rhetoric about crime prevention, and the social worth of building positive 
relationships between police and at-risk youth, the reality is that they represent yet 
another violent incursion of the state into racialized working-class communities.

With the rise in already high transit fare prices and a new proof of payment system being 
rolled out this year, the TPS have restored special constable powers to the enforcement 
agents of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). TTC Special Constables have more policing 
authority than regular fare inspection officers, and come equipped with handcuffs, batons, 
and pepper foam. A rather violent altercation recorded in January of 2015 between a 
passenger and constable at Union Station, and subsequently uploaded to YouTube, is already 
under investigation by the TPS, and is sure to be one of many, as simple disputes get 
blown out of proportion by volatile transit security enforcement agents.

The development of community policing is not confined to the neighbourhood, but has 
extended throughout the broader economy, as well. According to a 2007 report by economists 
Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev, a whopping 25 per cent of the American workforce is 
employed in "guard labor," meaning that their primary economic function isn't to produce 
value, but rather to help protect wealth, manage other workers, or otherwise smooth the 
process of capital accumulation. When describing exactly what jobs constitute guard 
labour, Bowles and Jayadev include obvious examples such as police officers, soldiers, 
prison guards, private security, and court staff, as well as all those employed in other 
positions within the military and prison-industrial-complexes, secret shoppers, quality 
assurance monitors, supervisors, and managers. They also include unemployed and imprisoned 
members of the working class, whose primary economic function, they reason, is to maintain 
worker discipline by way of offering a negative incentive. When the somewhat dubious 
inclusion of the latter two categories is factored out, the rate falls from one in four 
workers to one in five, which is still a staggering figure. Furthermore, this percentage 
would be significantly increased if the category was expanded to include other workers who 
may be compelled to work with the police as part of their job description, such as nurses, 
cab drivers, retail workers, and teachers. While no similar figures exist for Canada, the 
point remains that under late capitalism, the responsibility for policing the working 
class is increasingly falling on its own members.

Anticipating Resistance: Intelligence-led Policing

The never-ending crisis of the War on Terror has presented western governments with a 
self-perpetuating justification for increasing the state's domestic security capacities. 
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Liberal government of Jean 
Chrétien passed the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act, which massively expanded the Canadian 
state's powers of surveillance and detention and legally sanctified the practice of 
extraordinary rendition and the use of secret trials. This was followed by a vast overhaul 
of Canada's immigration and border security framework, including the creation of the 
Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) in 2003.

If anything, the pace of these reforms has only sped up under the Conservative government 
of Stephen Harper. Ever the opportunist, Harper has repeatedly exploited public shock and 
outrage over terrorist acts to cynically pursue his agenda of speeding along Canada's 
transformation into a heavily militarized petro-state. On April 19, 2013, in the wake of 
the Boston Marathon bombing, Conservative lawmakers put forward a motion to fast-track the 
Combating Terrorism Act, which was then hurriedly approved and passed into law. On October 
23, 2014 the day after the murder of Canadian Forces Corporal Nathan Cirillo by a lone 
gunman in Ottawa, Harper gave a speech pledging to further expand Canadian intelligence 
agencies' power of surveillance and detention. In January 2015, he made good on this 
pledge by introducing the Anti-terrorism Act, more commonly known as Bill C-51. The 
current vague phrasing of this bill will, if and when it is passed, grant CSIS, Canada's 
federal intelligence agency, the legal authority to "enter any place or open or obtain 
access to any thing... to copy or obtain any document... to install, maintain or remove 
any thing.... [and] do any other thing that is reasonably necessary to take those 
measures." This incredibly broad language essentially gives CSIS agents unlimited legal 
authority to do anything they want, to any and all individuals who they remotely suspect 
may cause "interference with the capability of the Government of Canada in relation 
to...the economic or financial stability of Canada...[or] interference with critical 
infrastructure." The language in this proposed bill echoes that found in a RCMP report 
leaked in February of 2015, warning that "violent anti-petroleum extremists" pose a 
"criminal threat" to Canada's national oil and gas sector. It is clear that Bill C-51 is 
less about protecting Canada from Islamic terrorism than it is about giving the state more 
power to crush resistance to planned pipeline projects, such as the ecologically 
disastrous Trans-Pacific Pipeline, which is currently on a collision course with the 
dug-in Indigenous land defenders of the Unist'ot'en Camp, located on unceded Wet'sewet'en 
territory, in central British Columbia.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know that signals intelligence agencies like the National 
Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, and the Communications Security Establishment 
(CSE) in Canada intercept and store absolutely all electronic communications that travel 
across the Internet and cellphone towers, and that this massive, endlessly growing pile of 
data is stored and accessible from centralized databases for years after it's been 
collected. The implications of this fact are staggering, and frankly, difficult to wrap 
one's head around.

And federal agencies are not the only entities collecting intelligence on us. Facebook and 
Google are both multi-billion dollar companies, precisely because they collect obscene 
amounts of data from millions of users every day, which they then sell to advertising 
firms and routinely hand over to law enforcement agencies upon request. A June 2014 
transparency report released by telecommunications giant Rogers Canada revealed that 
during the previous year, approximately 175,000 warrantless requests for customer data had 
been made by Canadian federal agencies, such as the RCMP, CSIS, and CBSA.

Municipal police forces also readily admit to using publicly available digital data, such 
as social media activity, and internet traffic, as part of their intelligence gathering 
efforts. This practice is a small part of a strategy known as "predictive policing," which 
has, over the past several years, quietly revolutionized the way that many police 
departments make strategic decisions, such as planning the allocation and deployment of 
staff and resources, and drafting neighbourhood-specific crime reduction strategies. 
Predictive Policing techniques focus on the identification of potential criminal activity, 
in a practice foreseen by a sadly prescient Philip K Dick, over a half century ago. At the 
first Predictive Policing Conference, held in Los Angeles in 2009, spokespeople from 
various private security tech firms preached to assembled representatives of police 
departments from across North America on the benefits of integrating "business 
intelligence and business analytics" into their traditional policing framework. Special 
emphasis was placed on the crime fighting potential of implementing cutting edge practices 
such as advanced data mining, geospatial prediction and social media analysis. For a 
price, police departments can purchase a wide variety of software solutions, ranging from 
basic number crunching and analytics programs, to sophisticated crime forecasting models 
based on complicated mathematical algorithms that can help organize and interpret 
intelligence as it's gathered in real time.

IV. Fighting Back

The state's capacity to spy on, disrupt, discredit, arrest, and if need be, murder anyone 
that it wants is absolutely terrifying. If you consider yourself a revolutionary and the 
police don't scare you, then you're either posturing or deluding yourself. We may laugh at 
the idea of the hapless, bumbling cop, but what many officers lack in critical thought, 
they more than make up for in discipline. This also happens to be a trait that many 
anarchists in this part of the world severely lack.

Aside from the vast array of military hardware at their disposal, paid for and supplied by 
the fruits of our labour, police carry a promise of protection that legitimizes their 
entire institution, no matter how abusive its individual members may sometimes act. Police 
promise to protect the working class from itself. To protect those who have little, from 
those who have even less. And the fact that, sometimes, they do just that, serves as an 
effective cover for their ultimate political function, which is to protect those who have 
a lot.

It's true that the police are incredibly powerful. But our communities are also a great 
source of power, which when collectively grasped and wielded, can be even stronger than 
theirs. This power is evidenced by their relentless efforts to harness and redirect it to 
their own ends. The role of revolutionaries should be to help spread an awareness of the 
potential of working-class dual power, and to participate in building it. As the military 
strategists of social peace are well aware, class struggle is not a zero sum game, but a 
gruelling war of position. Waging this war effectively requires a serious commitment to 
organizing that strengthens the social fabric of our communities, and which seeks to 
popularize a reflective, common sense understanding that the police are our enemies.

Countering Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency strategies were developed in conflict zones, in which occupying armies 
were called upon to police a restive, foreign population. During the post-WWII era of 
formal decolonization, and in the more recent military campaigns of the War on Terror, the 
practice of counterinsurgency has been premised around imposing and then propping up a 
government that, while often unpopular, can ultimately be counted on to act in the 
interests of imperialist, transnational capital. Practically, this means simultaneously 
helping to establish the popular legitimacy of a client regime, while suppressing armed 
opposition through the use of overwhelming firepower, and withdrawing military forces as 
soon as they are no longer needed. History has shown that this process often doesn't work 
very well. People generally don't take kindly to the idea of being ruled by a puppet whose 
legitimacy stems from the presence of a foreign army that bombs and kills their friends, 
families and neighbours. The longer an occupation goes on, the more people are willing to 
drop everything and sacrifice their lives to fight against it.

These troublesome dynamics apply far less to domestic counterinsurgency operations. By and 
large, police officers are not seen by most people as the footsoldiers of an occupying 
army, but as fellow community members, and as the real-world versions of characters from 
their favourite television shows. As representatives of the state, police are imbued with 
all the legitimacy of a democratically elected government, and a political and cultural 
tradition that goes back hundreds of years. The truth of the matter, however, is that 
nations aren't real, and the cop on your block isn't McNulty from the Wire, but an armed 
agent of a class that sees national borders as barriers to investment.

As this article has attempted to demonstrate, contemporary policing is a 
mutually-reinforcing balance of overwhelming force, on the one hand, and an insidious 
fostering of misguided community trust, on the other. Decisions on exactly which approach 
to take in a given situation are informed by intelligence gathered by an invisible, yet 
omnipresent web of surveillance, with capacities heretofore undreamed of at any other time 
in human history. This situation is similar to the tried and tested "good cop/bad cop" 
routine, where agents take turns interrogating a suspect before retreating behind a 
one-sided mirror to collectively discuss how they want to proceed. Those organizing 
against police should be aware of this dynamic, and should seek to engage situations 
strategically.

Community policing is an attempt to build and maintain popular legitimacy. It follows, 
then, that anti-police organizing should aim to disrupt and discredit community policing 
efforts, and help reframe police forces as an occupying army, which, particularly in 
Indigenous and racialized communities, they are. White revolutionaries, in particular, 
have a responsibility to confront community policing initiatives, as they are often 
tacitly or explicitly rooted in the unspoken or coded language of white supremacy. A 
refusal to make strategic use of the unearned privileges and social capital granted by 
skin colour is not only a squandered opportunity, but a betrayal to one's class.

Precisely because they hold the advantage of overwhelming force, it is important to avoid 
giving police the opportunity to use that force without consequence. Militancy is a 
collective phenomenon, and so while organizing, it's important to avoid tactics that will 
unduly injure or alienate large groups of people who might otherwise be supportive of your 
aims. This is not to say that violence has no role in struggle, or that anarchists should 
only act in accordance with the moral norms of dominant society, but that there's a 
difference between violence that increases collective militancy, and violence that makes 
it easier for the state to isolate us. An asymmetrical response to state violence, which 
takes a measured approach to escalation is often the most effective way of increasing the 
level of militancy of all participants.

Lastly, we should cultivate and spread a collective practice of security culture, not just 
among insular anarchist circles, but as a part of all our organizing efforts. Mass 
surveillance is premised on the universal expectation of constant convenience and 
instant-gratification fostered by living in a touch-button society. It's unnervingly 
common for people who consider themselves serious revolutionaries to fall victim to this 
trap. It's not that we shouldn't use facebook, or shouldn't own cellphones, but that we 
should at least try to understand how the state gathers intelligence, and attempt to make 
this process more difficult for them. Despite a vague understanding that the government 
runs mass surveillance programs, people who openly self-identify as an ideological enemy 
of that very same government, somehow seem to be constantly unsure as to whether or not 
they are being surveilled. You are. We all are. The state "taps" our phones, because they 
"tap" all phones, all the time. Operate under the assumption that every email you send 
will be read by a signals intelligence analyst at the CSE, or the NSA, or any other number 
of foreign intelligence services, because if you're actively involved in organizing, or if 
you become active at any point in the future, it will be. There is no way to completely 
avoid the watchful eye of the state and do effective organizing at the same time, but 
there are certainly practical steps that can be taken to make their job more difficult, 
and they should be followed in a systematic and disciplined manner by anarchists, 
integrated into the culture of organizations, and spread throughout the working class more 
generally.

Organizing Towards Dual Power

Whenever anarchists talk about a world without police, we are immediately and inevitably 
confronted by questions about how we propose to resolve conflicts without them. These 
concerns are as prevalent as they are valid. They point to the need to further 
delegitimize the police as an institution, on the one hand, and empower communities on the 
other. This is not simply a matter of theory, but of theory being put into practice. The 
continuing appeal of police, even among the communities that they brutalize, arises from 
entirely legitimate demands for justice and security. People want to live in communities 
that aren't plagued by rampant horizontal violence, with parks that we can let our kids 
play in without fear of hypodermic needles, and where mutually agreed-upon standards of 
basic decency are enforced.

It is not enough to simply advocate for the abolition of police and prisons, and then 
point vaguely to historical examples where cops have been replaced by armed self defense 
committees. The suggestion that we leave the dispensing of justice to groups of armed 
individuals is, to put it mildly, not exactly an appealing proposition to people who 
already deal with the reality of gang warfare in their neighbourhood. Besides, history has 
shown that when an armed faction of a popular movement, such as the Black Panther Party 
(BPP) or the Irish Republican Army (IRA), have decided to take it upon themselves to 
resolve interpersonal conflicts without the broader participation of the community, the 
results have been disastrous.

More important than stockpiling arms, a strategy of building community-based systems of 
working-class dual power requires collectively identifying community standards and 
definitions of justice. This is the guiding principle behind restorative justice, a 
framework of conflict resolution that focuses on healing and reconciliation between two or 
more parties through reaching a mutual understanding of what occurred, what contributed to 
it happening, how the community as a whole is impacted, and how, if necessary, restitution 
should be allocated.

Restorative justice differs widely from state judicial systems, not only because of its 
emphasis on collective healing over individual punishment, and restitution over 
retribution, but also because it seeks to resolve conflicts directly within the 
communities where they occur. This contrasts to what radical criminologist Nils Christie 
calls the "theft of conflict" perpetrated by specialists who not only deny the involved 
parties their right to confront one another directly and, if possible, come to some sort 
of resolution, but also deny the community a participatory role in deciding what 
constitutes the "law of the land." This is something that top-down attempts at 
implementing restorative justice frameworks in Canada or the United States can never 
achieve. Whether through the so-called Aboriginal Sentencing provisions established by the 
R v. Gladue Supreme Court ruling, or the John Howard Society working with juvenile 
offenders through a diversion program, the state's primary concern is the management of 
conflict, not its resolution. Although individual judges may choose to apply "alternative 
justice" principles into their sentencing provisions, at no point does the state 
relinquish the authority to define what is just and what is not, what is right and what is 
wrong.

Despite their broad participatory potential, emphasis on collective healing and utility 
for defining social norms and values outside an imposed state framework, community defence 
forces, and restorative justice, as revolutionary alternatives to the police and the court 
system, are still hamstrung by a number of serious shortcomings in common sense. Three 
fundamental misconceptions surrounding conflict resolution, which are particularly 
prevalent among some advocates of restorative justice, are:

All conflicts can be resolved
The voluntary, consensual participation of both parties is a must
Violence, even in extreme situations, is unacceptable
Not all conflicts can be resolved. Some we are forced to live with, and others are dealt 
with as best as imperfect people in a broken society can manage. The process of healing is 
solely the right of the victim(s), and should not be conditioned upon the equal 
participation and continued emotional well-being of perpetrators. Forgive and forget is 
just as much of a backward Judeo-Christian concept as punishment for the sake of 
punishment. Likewise, without either an implicit or explicit threat of ostracization or 
violence, restorative justice simply does not work, because there is nothing to ensure 
that the transgressor will consent to the process. The vast majority of successful 
accounts of restorative justice in North America have occurred by way of court-ordered 
diversion programs, meaning that an assurance of imprisonment was held over the heads of 
perpetrators if they did not comply. Within a community-led restorative justice framework, 
some form of coercive mechanism, imbued with the authority of broader community 
legitimacy, is required.

Autonomous, community-led alternatives to the police and the courts are still a long way 
off. In order to function with any significant level of social legitimacy, systems of dual 
power require a degree of social cohesion and a level of popular distrust in official 
state institutions that is largely foreign to the experiences of those living in modern 
day Canadian cities. Particularly within an urban context, extra-judicial systems for 
conflict resolution and community defence have historically tended to grow out of a power 
vacuum, in which high levels of insecurity exist side-by-side with an absence of state 
authority. With the possible exception of several remote Indigenous communities, these 
conditions don't exist in Canada. On the contrary, the authority of the state is often 
most keenly felt in the very same neighbourhoods that face the highest levels of 
horizontal violence.

These are serious problems, and we shouldn't pretend that we have the answers. Yet it 
stands to reason that our efforts to evict the cops from our communities will only be 
successful to the extent that they are accompanied by a competing framework of community 
self-defence and conflict resolution that regular people choose to participate in. In 
other words, a prefigurative approach to abolishing the police means that we have to 
actually start building alternatives.

Building a Culture of Working-class Resistance

Some of the most iconic and inspiring images of popular resistance come from riots and 
insurrectional moments which, to outside observers, appear on televisions and computer 
screens as spontaneous reactions to a singularly egregious incident of police brutality. 
Yet for every anti-police riot that grabs the media's attention, there are countless daily 
acts of oppression and defiance that may not make the news, but which all play a 
contributing role in kicking things off. Rather than morbidly waiting around for the 
police to kill someone before springing into action, anarchists and anti-authoritarian 
revolutionaries who want to see more anti-police uprisings should seize every opportunity 
to exploit the daily social tensions that produce them. This means actively participating 
in building a culture of opposition and hostility to police that permeates all aspects of 
working-class life.

Organizing against the police can, and should be incorporated into community struggles 
around housing, and against the violent gentrification of our neighbourhoods. Police 
Community Liaison Committees should be systematically infiltrated, and business and 
property owners who zealously collaborate with police to push out poor and racialized 
neighbourhood residents should be made to understand that this practice is unacceptable. 
Community meetings of parents and teachers should be organized, and campaigns should be 
launched demanding that police be removed from public schools. Building committees and 
neighbourhood watch programs should be organized, and militants should make the case that 
neighbours not collaborate with police and immigration enforcement officials. Raising this 
demand should open space for building a more expansive definition of collaboration that 
includes any activity that increases social divisions, and allows the police to justify 
its presence in the community.

Our principled opposition to police should spill into our workplaces, as well. Anarchists 
should be talking to our co-workers about police on smoke breaks, and in the lunch room. 
Retail workers should organize with their co-workers to demand that their store enact a 
"no-chase" policy, or barring that, for an informal agreement among staff that nobody 
calls security on shoplifters, because nobody should have to bear the responsibility of 
someone getting arrested and potentially going to jail, just for stealing from the boss.

Finally, anarchists should also actively participate in organizations that focus 
exclusively on combating police violence in ways that go beyond organizing one-off rallies 
and demonstrations. In Toronto, a number of anarchists, including several members of 
Common Cause, are active within the Network for the Elimination of Police Violence (NEPV), 
an organization that conducts community outreach and education on a variety of topics 
related to policing, and which provides material support and assistance to grassroots 
anti-policing initiatives based in the city's most marginalized neighbourhoods. While its 
methodology for community organizing, and internal political education program is still a 
work in progress, NEPV has witnessed significant growth and development over the past 
year, and its model is one with potential to spread to other cities across southern 
Ontario, and beyond.


1. Primitive accumulation is a Marxist term that refers to an initial phase of capital 
accumulation, whereby the conditions are created for the further spread of capitalist 
social relations. Contemporary Marxist theorist David Harvey (citing Rosa Luxemburg) has 
argued that this process is not simply a historical transitional stage to capitalism, but 
remains a vital component of capital accumulation today (notable examples being the 
privatization of public services and infrastructure, the commodification of natural 
resources, and the patenting of genes), and that a more descriptive term for the 
phenomenon is "accumulation by dispossession."
2. Despite the fact that in Canada, the two concepts often overlap, it is nonetheless 
important to distinguish between immigration and racialization. In 2011, Toronto had 
1,264,395 racialized residents (or "visible minorities"), which works out to approximately 
49% of the population. 1,252,210 of its residents were immigrants (or 48.6% of the total 
population); 897,920 of these immigrants came from Asia, Africa, or the Americas (minus 
the United States). Using these less-than-ideal categories (given that nationality does 
not always correspond with race), it could be projected that racialized immigrants 
comprised approximately 71.7% of total immigrants and 34.8% of the total population. (2011 
National Household Survey, Statistics Canada).

http://linchpin.ca/?q=content/canadian-bacon-opposing-police-and-state-power