Policing Indigenous Movements

In recent years, Indigenous peoples have lead a number of high profile movements fighting for social and environmental justice in Canada. From land struggles to struggles against resource extraction, pipeline development and fracking, land and water defenders have created a national discussion about these issues and successfully slowed the rate of resource extraction. But their success has also meant an increase in the surveillance and policing of Indigenous peoples and their movements. In Policing Indigenous Movements, Crosby and Monaghan use the Access to Information Act to interrogate how policing and other security agencies have been monitoring, cataloguing and working to silence Indigenous land defenders and other opponents of extractive capitalism. Through an examination of four prominent movements — the long-standing conflict involving the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, the struggle against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the Idle No More movement and the anti-fracking protests surrounding the Elsipogtog First Nation — this important book raises critical questions regarding the expansion of the security apparatus, the normalization of police surveillance targeting social movements, the relationship between police and energy corporations, the criminalization of dissent and threats to civil liberties and collective action in an era of extractive capitalism and hyper surveillance. In one of the most comprehensive accounts of contemporary government surveillance, the authors vividly demonstrate that it is the norms of settler colonialism that allow these movements to be classified as national security threats and the growing network of policing, governmental, and private agencies that comprise what they call the security state.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates. Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities. A call-to-action, Policing Black Lives urges readers to work toward dismantling structures of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society.

Predict and Surveil offers an unprecedented, inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies. Sarah Brayne conducted years of fieldwork with the LAPD--one of the largest and most technically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world-to reveal the unmet promises and very real perils of police use of data--driven surveillance and analytics.

How the rhetoric of terrorism has been used against high-profile movements to justify the oppression and suppression of Indigenous activists. New Indigenous movements are gaining traction in North America: the Missing and Murdered Women and Idle No More movements in Canada, and the Native Lives Matter and NoDAPL movements in the United States. These do not represent new demands for social justice and treaty rights, which Indigenous groups have sought for centuries. But owing to the extraordinary visibility of contemporary activism, Indigenous people have been newly cast as terrorists—a designation that justifies severe measures of policing, exploitation, and violence. Red Scare investigates the intersectional scope of these four movements and the broader context of the treatment of Indigenous social justice movements as threats to neoliberal and imperialist social orders. In Red Scare, Joanne Barker shows how US and Canadian leaders leverage the fear-driven discourses of terrorism to allow for extreme responses to Indigenous activists, framing them as threats to social stability and national security. The alignment of Indigenous movements with broader struggles against sexual, police, and environmental violence puts them at the forefront of new intersectional solidarities in prominent ways. The activist-as-terrorist framing is cropping up everywhere, but the historical and political complexities of Indigenous movements and state responses are unique. Indigenous criticisms of state policy, resource extraction and contamination, intense surveillance, and neoliberal values are met with outsized and shocking measures of militarized policing, environmental harm, and sexual violence. Red Scare provides students and readers with a concise and thorough survey of these movements and their links to broader organizing; the common threads of historical violence against Indigenous people; and the relevant alternatives we can find in Indigenous forms of governance and relationality.

Toward Peace, Harmony, and Well-Being: Policing in Indigenous Communities builds on the CCA’s 2014 policing report, Policing Canada in the 21st Century: New Policing for New Challenges by incorporating the latest research findings and related information available on policing in Indigenous communities. The findings emphasize the diverse considerations that inform Indigenous policing. The approaches to policing considered in this report have broader implications related to well-being in Indigenous communities, and the ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities can form relationships based on mutual respect. The report aims to provide Indigenous community leaders, policy-makers, and service providers with the foundation to build effective and appropriate models for the future of policing in Indigenous communities.

The use of secret police, security agencies and informers to spy on, disrupt and undermine opposition to the dominant political and economic order has a long history. This book reflects on the surveillance, harassment and infiltration that pervades the lives of activists, organizations and movements that are labelled as ‘threats to national security’. Activists and scholars from the UK, South Africa, Canada, the US, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand expose disturbing stories of political policing to question what lies beneath state surveillance. Problematizing the social amnesia that exists within progressive political networks and supposed liberal democracies, Activists and the Surveillance State shows that ultimately, movements can learn from their own repression, developing a critical and complex understanding of the Nature of states, capital and democracy today that can inform the struggles of tomorrow.

In Mexico and across other parts of Latin America local Indigenous peoples have built community policing groups as a means of protection where the state has limited control over, and even complicity in, crime and violence. Luis Hernandez Navarro, a leading Mexican journalist, offers a riveting investigation of these armed self-defense groups that sprang up around the time of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Available in English for the first time, the book spotlights the intense precarity of everyday life in parts of Mexico. Hernandez Navarro shows how the self-defense response, which now includes wealthier rancher and farmer groups, is being transformed by Mexico's expanding role in the multibillion dollar global drug trade, by foreign corporations' extraction of raw minerals in traditionally Indigenous lands, and by the resulting social changes in local communities. But as Hernandez Navarro acknowledges, self-defense is highly controversial. Community policing may provide citizens with increased agency, but for government officials it can be a dangerous threat to the status quo. Leftists and liberals are wary of how the groups may be linked to paramilitary forces and vulnerable to manipulation by drug traffickers and the government alike. This book answers the urgent call to understand the dangerous complexities of government failures and popular solutions.