Running head: POLICING AND SURVEILLANCE 1

Policing and Surveillance

Student’s Name

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POLICING AND SURVEILLANCE 2

Policing and Surveillance

Canada's past reflects the brutal reality of racists systems stemming from slavery to jails,

schools, and well beyond the socioeconomic paradigms, despite the country's facade of

multiculturalism and diversity. A detailed account of almost 400 years of state-sanctioned

censorship, criminalization, and punishment of Black and Indigenous lives in Canada has

blemished Canada's heritage. Black activism has been relatively ubiquitous throughout history.

However, the state's involvement in entrenching widespread wealth disparity, institutional

racism, police brutality, mass incarceration, immigrant abuse, deportation, predatory immigrant

labor practices, unfair child removal, as well as low educational attainment is notable. Therefore,

it is has become increasingly important to make a call-to-action towards dismantling structures

of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society. This paper takes a social

disorganization approach to anti-Black racism, based on the critical conflict theory perspective

that argues that the racism is a product of integrated White supremacy since the colonial era. It

examines the specific and underreported effects of state brutality, racial inequality, and White

domination as they are experienced by Black populations. As it stands, the current practices of

policing and surveillance are causing social disorganization because they are targeted

disproportionately at Black communities, have become tools of state violence against

communities of color, and have led to overcriminalization of Black and indigenous communities

to the effect of reproducing White supremacy and colonialism.

Background

Conflict theory is perhaps the most widely applied analytical paradigm for explaining

ethnicity and criminality, especially in terms of social disorganization. The hypothesis has its

roots in Germany. The writings of German theorists Karl Marx, George Simmel, and Max Weber,
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in particular, have been recognized for presenting the concept's impetus. Conflict theories,

according to Gabbidon and Greene (2013), concentrate on tensions between groups and/or

classes as a factor of power differences and come within the broad framework of sociological

theories. In general, by extending conflict theory to racial discrimination, one would examine

how rules are enforced and justice is distributed in a biased manner. While social status and

ethnicity would be interesting to explore, conflict theorists would be more interested in how the

White power complex administers justice.

Hawkins (1995) advances the conflict paradigm further by looking at it in terms of

ethnicity, criminality, and retribution. In conflict theory, he stressed the importance of taking

racial discrimination into account. Other factors missing in conflict theory presently, according to

Hawkins, include victim traits, location, and consideration of race-appropriate attitudes. While

the first two factors are self-evident, Hawkins pointed out that variations observed in certain

reports fail to account for actions that are often performed by one race but result in an

outrageously different penalty when perpetrated by another. Notably, the criminal justice system

in Canada punishes the Whites differently from members of the Black and Indigenous

communities. This apparent differential treatment of various communities stands as an anomaly

in the policing and surveillance practices in Canada.

The anomalies in policing have contributed, in part, to the social disorganization of the

Blacks and indigenous communities in Canada. The other partial factors, as explained by

Sampson and Laub (1993), include unemployment, economic deprivation, and crime patterns.

However, the determinants described by Sampson and Laub (1993) are inextricably linked to

policing and surveillance policies. For instance, these factors contribute to residential inequity

that shapes the policing and surveillance practices implemented within various neighborhoods.
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The central argument is that structural social dynamics of residential deprivation contribute to

social alienation and spatial fragmentation among the extremely poor, which contributes to

socioeconomic limitations as well as cultural adaptations that disrupt social organization and, as

a result, policing and surveillance practices. This argument is based on an old criminology

concept that has been ignored in the ethnicity and criminality discourse: the significance of

communities. The next section illustrates the manifestation of the conflict theory and, by

extension, social disorganization, as they relate to policing and surveillance practices.

Analysis

Firstly, policing and surveillance practices have been used as a means of

disproportionately targeting the Black and indigenous communities in Canada. Maynard explores

this targeted racism of the Canadian criminal justice system in Policing Black Lives, explaining

how policing has become affected by stigmatizing Black identity (Maynard, 2017). Police

activities that are unsettling, including police officers being taught to equate crime with

dreadlocks and Montreal police utilizing photos of young Black males as target practice in their

firing ranges instead of conventional police targets in the 1980s, are striking (p. 9). Maynard

expands her focus to include other state-sanctioned punishments that overwhelmingly affect

Black people. Maynard claims that black women are assumed to be prostitutes, cocaine mules,

welfare offenders, and inferior parents, and as a result, they are exposed to allegedly justified

heightened surveillance and associated repressive state policies and institutional harassment.

Maynard, for instance, reminds the reader that the classification of women of color as "welfare

frauds" coincided with the welfare state's consolidation (p. 132). Maynard points out major

inconsistencies in the avowed defense of individual liberty thus demonstrating the systematic

vilification of African Canadian women. While assistance is reduced, correctional institutions

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and procedures are vastly extended, as shown by teenagers, tenants, and neighbors being

interrogated for the intent of finding "welfare frauds." Crime becomes racialized as a result of

this method, and Black women become the scapegoat for ineffective government policies. These

examples subtly illustrate the many aspects in which seemingly ordinary policing practices are

involved in the marginalization of Black and Indigenous communities. More importantly, these

examples show how the state uses the policies as an instrument of facilitating the oppression of

minority groups.

Additionally, the policing practices have been used in the past and presently as tools of

state oppression against the Blacks and Indigenous communities. Maynard uses realistic

explanations of racial cultural processes to demonstrate the spaces of state repression and to

demonstrate that there has been an unbroken connection between historical and current anti-

Black racism. She demonstrates how social care and child security agencies increasingly monitor

and harass single Black moms, labelling them as destitute mothers and welfare fraudsters. This

criminalizes their suffering without taking into account their legacy of marginalization and loss

of access to educational opportunities enjoyed by White citizens. She further claims that unfairly

selective immigrant surveillance laws criminalize rather than assist Black immigrants who do not

have immigration documents. The law's ability to defend Black Canadians is hampered by police

violence, systemic surveillance, and the racialization of crime. Black Canadians are more

commonly viewed as social risks than as Canadian civilians, hence falsely creating the need for

increased management of this community. Racial mistreatment students at school depicts them as

future predators rather than youngsters who ought to be nurtured. Handcuffing a first-grader

(Maynard, 2017, p. 230) is an example of how infants are criminalized. As a result, children

become defiant and lose interest in education, contributing to the school-to-prison

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sequenced process. According to Maynard, current racist views against Black Canadians can be

traced back to segregation and the formative days of the Canadian union (Maynard, p. 26).

Slavery and the slave trade perceived Black people's lives and bodies as unequal, disposable,

worthless possessions of the Whites that needed to be "managed" and "regulated" (p. 18).

Alexander (2010) explains that since the end of colonialism, free Black Canadians endured racial

discrimination and oppression in a "Jim Crow"-style apartheid making equality impossible. The

characterization of Black men and women as aberrant and hyper-sexual beings (Maynard, 2017,

p. 117), as well as their children as cognitively subverting to White children, became a norm.

These false stereotypes are already fueling anti-Black bigotry today. Similarly, they have created

an atmosphere of White dominance and colonial attitudes towards the Black and Indigenous

communities.

Finally, the overcriminalization of Black and Indigenous communities serves to

reproduce and reinforce white supremacy and colonialism. The criminalization of marginalized

youth in Canada's youth justice system is often overlooked (Meng, 2014). When engaging with

the full spectrum of Canada's criminal justice system, people of color can experience different

treatment (Lake, 2019). If the proportion of people from one ethnic group in the general

community is higher than the percentage of people from other racial classes there is an ethnic

disparity in the criminal justice system (African Canadian Legal Clinic, 2012). This will result in

inequity. Disparity in the judicial system can apply to a scenario in which people of various

ethnic backgrounds have different views regarding such consequences, which may lead to people

of color  becoming overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Unjustified and

unconstitutional manifestations of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system may be

attributed to unequal consideration that certain people face based on their race. Person or
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systemic manifestations of race-based prejudice can result in ethnic imbalances, and can involve

implicit forms of discrimination. The overuse of imprisonment, often known as mass

incarceration, has actually exacerbated socioeconomic disorganization throughout the most

impoverished communities, including Blacks and Indigenous people. This occurs for three

reasons.  For one, mass imprisonment eliminates a significant amount of migrants from

neighborhoods, and has an effect on their social nature. Second, since mass imprisonment results

in individuals fleeing their homes to go to jail and eventually being freed, it increases mobility in

certain populations. Finally, when inmates who serve time in correctional facilities cultivate

different antisocial habits that they carry out to their families, widespread imprisonment raises

the heterogeneity in communities.

Conclusion

 Currently, police and monitoring policies are creating systemic disorganization because

they are overwhelmingly aimed at controlling and managing Black populations, have evolved

into instruments of institutional repression against communities of colour, and have resulted in

overcriminalization of Black and indigenous communities to the extent of perpetuating White

supremacy and colonization. In effect, these policing and surveillance practices act to eliminate

the social buffers that enable the Black and Indigenous communities to thrive. When all of a

community's social defenses are left, the remaining members are in a state of social isolation,

which is described as a loss of connection or continuous engagement with individuals and

organizations that reflect normal culture. The concept of social alienation gives the idea a

cultural dimension. Socially isolated persons establish their own standards within their

marginalized areas when they are not exposed to normal individuals and organizations. The

power of police departments, aided by discrimination's persistence, tends to increase and

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encourage discriminatory policies that facilitate the demonization of minority youth. Due to the

obvious injustices that marginalized groups experience, the result of resentment gradually

becomes overwhelming. In future research, it is important to investigate the role of Canada’s

justice system in perpetuating these racist attitudes among the law enforcement agencies. Since

social discrimination is ignored by the Charter, it is deemed the most negative result of the

Canadian Criminal Justice System. One might wonder why racial profiling has persisted as a

means of policing.