9  The Colour of Policing in Lethbridge

The Arrival of the Modern Police

The term police first emerged from the French-Burgundian policie in the fifteenth century and referred to “a condition of order in the community” or “statute aimed at the institution and/or maintenance of order in the community” (Neocleous 2000, 1). With the emergence of the “science of police” (Polizeiwissenchaft) in the seventeenth century, the content of the order as well as the ways to achieve this order were related to the raison d’état (reason of the state) and the new mode of production it perpetuates. Thus, the science of police in the seventeenth century linked the state to the economy. The main interest of those writing on the police in the eighteenth century was the development of commerce and the production of wealth. According to Adam Smith (1763), one of the tasks of the police was to maintain plenty and cheapness—a task of establishing and maintaining exchange and property relations on the national level where civil society (the market), families, and individuals are not reliable. They designed policing mechanisms to facilitate the growth of the money supply, population, foreign trade, and mining.

The source of wealth was, as police scientists defined it, labour. This “precious commodity,” Patrick Colquhoun (1795, 366) has suggested, “could only be appropriated from the poor.” In order to get more from the poor, the states had to take good care of the poor. In England, Colquhoun played the most important role as the “architect” or “inventor” of modern police (Linebaugh 2003, 426). He was the London agent for the planters of St Vincent, Nevis, Dominica, and the Virgin Islands and worked for the West India Merchants’ Committee in London. He worked on police schemes and the reformation of the London dockyards. He initiated the Thames River Police in 1800 to regulate the work conducted at the dockyards. The aim was to end customary takings and subject the dock workers to wages, and wages only. The products brought to London shores from the colonies, specifically those from what they then called West Indies—that is, North America—were of utmost importance to Colquhoun and his fellow merchants to build up their capital. We can say that the notion of police connects the state, wage labour, capital holders, and colonialism. Colquhoun’s plans were put into practice with the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, and a centralized and unified system of police, or a “police force,” was established in London. The aim was to create a professional, bureaucratically organized lever of urban discipline, to permanently introduce the police into the hearth of working-class communities, and to create a bureaucracy of official morality (Storch 1976).

From the very beginning, the aim of the police has rarely been to protect citizens. The coming of the modern police force was not a response to the increase in crime rates in the nineteenth century either. We do not know the crime statistics of the nineteenth century in comparison to the previous centuries, which could prove this argument. However, what we do know is that in the nineteenth century, crime was being redefined with the new mode of production, and the police had become the active agents of this redefinition. For example, as Emsley (1999, 8) describes, “Business fraud, for which the economic changes of the nineteenth century provided massive new opportunities, and various forms of corruption by members of the respectable classes, did not figure among the ‘crimes’” the new police were concerned about. The crimes the police dealt with were related to “disorder” (also newly defined) among lower classes—that is, “plebeians, particularly those who were thought to prefer idleness and an easy life to honest labour” (Emsley 1999, 8). The police function is then inherent in class structure; the state “employed the police methods to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labor” (Marx [1867] 1990, 905). The exploitation of labour is only possible through wage labour. As Foucault (1965, 46) clarifies, police can be defined as “the totality of measures which make work possible and necessary for all those who could not live without it.” In this sense, the aim of the police has been to establish a new order (Ericson 1982; Neocleous 2000) and to make those lower classes fit into that order serving in the best interest of the state and the capital holders. The ongoing dispossession on which capitalism relies heavily cannot exist without a combination of benevolent and violent police powers.

Similarly, the role of police in creating societies built on the premises of white supremacy is crucial. Policing is “modelled on existing racial hierarchies” (Crosby and Monaghan 2018, 193). As Comack (2012, 57) clarifies, “The ‘order’ that the police are charged with reproducing is decidedly ‘raced’ (as well as gendered and classed).” Racialized frames of reference, or stocks of knowledge, inform police work. Thinking about policing in Canada in this sense requires attention to settler colonialism. Settler colonialism as a structure (Wolfe 2006) enables us to see colonialism as an ongoing process penetrating social as well as state formations. Settler colonialism is not about replacing, or substituting, a society but about the construction of a new one. It is instead about establishing a new society on expropriated land and thereby brought forth the need for policing (Dafnos 2013). Policing in settler-colonial societies was built on existing structural inequalities and survives by constantly reproducing them. The issue of racism in policing is institutional and systemic. This is why Comack (2012, 15) calls this “racialized policing.” All policing has been racialized since the inception of the idea of the police, and Canadian society is no exception. As Jiwani (2002, 69) describes, “The emphasis on policing certain groups of people and certain types of crimes is reflective of the social stratification system underpinning Canadian society. Those at the bottom are considered to be the most prone to crime, are seen as less credible and deserving, and are often perceived by the dominant society as dispossessed and disposable.” In Canada, this is also achieved based on settler-colonial motives. In a sense, “it is law and the police powers that made and makes settler colonialism possible” (Patricia Monture-Angus cited in Correia and Wall 2018, 6). Nowhere is this more evident than in the arrival of the police in Canada.

The Police in Canada: North West Mounted Police and Treaty 7

Needless to say, the First Nations living on the territories we now call Canada had a systematic, organized, complex, and sustained use of their resources learned from generations of living in these territories. They each had successful economic strategies, reliable political structures, legitimate leadership and authority, protected borders, legal systems, and controlled access to resources. Police as producers of order in the colonies had the missionary task of imposing European values and norms on Indigenous populations (Emsley 2014). In this sense, the emergence of the NWMP was crucial for Canada’s nation-building process, part of which included asserting claims to the newly acquired western territories between Manitoba and the Rocky Mountains, keeping the borders between Canada the US in order, and extracting capital on newly expropriated land.

Before the arrival of the NWMP, Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of the Dominion of Canada, contacted London for information about the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC; Emsley 2014). His explanation for requiring this information was rooted in creating a police force: “I propose to organize a Mounted Police Force, under the Command of Captain Cameron, for Red River purpose” (Horrall 1972, 182). In December 1869, Macdonald wrote in a letter to Captain Cameron, an officer of the Royal Artillery,

It seems to me that the best Force would be Mounted Rifflemen, trained to act as cavalry, but also instructed in the Rifle exercises. They should also be instructed, as certain of the Line are, in the use of artillery, this body should not be expressly Military but should be styled Police, and have the military bearing of the Irish Constabulary. (Macdonald cited in Horrall 1972, 181)

In England, police forces often followed the model of the London Metropolitan Police that was established through Colquhoun’s initiatives in 1829. The London Metropolitan Police were unarmed and non-military in character whereas the RIC, founded in 1822 to control social unrest in Ireland, resembled a semi-military force. Its members were armed and under the central control of the Irish authorities in Dublin (Horrall 1972). When their mission of acquiring political control in the West and disciplining Indigenous populations is considered, it becomes clear why the more militarized RIC was Macdonald’s preferred model (Brown and Brown 1973). The NWMP were an essential part of Macdonald’s national policies.

While the substantive reason for initiating the NWMP was to build a white settler order in the newly acquired land, sending armed forces northwest at the time was justified with the intention to intervene and stop the whisky trade (Brown and Brown 1973). Settlers from the US had established this trade in Native communities, causing significant chaos at a number of trading forts. In 1874, the NWMP arrived after a long march west under Colonel James Macleod and tried to put an end to the whisky trade. Their first target was Fort Whoop-Up in today’s Lethbridge. Nevertheless, when they arrived at Fort Whoop-Up, the traders they were looking for had already left—most likely because of fears that the police were coming (Longstreth 1927, 48; Luckhurst 1974, 19). One of the earliest members of the force explains their intent in his memoirs:

In 1874, three hundred green men, some very young without any experience of prairie life and few with the experience of discipline, were launched into this unknown country, told to put an end to the sale of whiskey to the Indians and to instill in the latter, some of the most savage tribes [sic] in North America, respect for law and order. This they accomplished well. (Kelly 1996, 24)

Smith (2009, 59) argues that “the primary role of the Mounted police was to facilitate the peaceful occupation of the west by Anglo-Canadians and to allay their fears of Indigenous people once they arrived.” Macdonald also confirmed that “the business of the Mounted Police is principally to keep peace between White men and Indians” (cited in Smith 2009, 59). Peace here should be read as “pacification” (see Özcan and Rigakos 2014). In his critical reading of contemporary security studies, Neocleous (2010) refers to security and police jobs as a way of making war through peace. Peace in colonial contexts almost always connotes war. In this sense, the role of the NWMP was expanded at times, contested, and negotiated, as is the case in each project. But this main function has never changed: encouraging future white settlement in the region while keeping Indigenous populations under control and making the land conducive to capitalist exploitation. As Smith (2009, 145) concludes, the aim was to “reconstruct the prairie west from a domain of fur traders to a space in which other economic potential, more hospitable to colonial expansion, might be exploited.”

Accordingly, the NWMP became essential to controlling, eliminating, dispossessing, and displacing First Nations to construct the transcontinental railway. The First Nations’ title to the land had to be extinguished to rapidly build the railway that was promised to British Columbia as a condition of their joining the Canadian Confederacy in 1871 (Tesar 2016). This required acquisition of the land from the First Nations with as little resistance as possible—that is, through a treaty making—which would also be in line with the 1876 Indian Act. The NWMP became “a major force in laying the ground work for the acceptance of Treaty 7 and were a presence, along with their cannon, at the negotiations for the treaty” (Smith 2009, 59). Treaty 7 was signed in 1877 by five First Nations: the Siksika (Blackfoot), Kainai (Blood), Piikani (Peigan), Stoney Nakoda, and Tsuut’ina (Sarcee). Negotiations lasted only three days, with significant cultural and linguistic barriers present and most likely deliberate attempts of government representatives to mislead the Nations’ perception of the deal. The First Nations may not have dealt with the government of Canada before, but they were used to treaties, as they constantly made peace treaties among themselves. They wanted, and understood, how to make peace between themselves, the government, and incoming settlers, while the government needed to extinguish Aboriginal title to the land (Tesar 2016). Treaty 7 confined each nation on their assigned reserved lands. Only two years after signing the treaty, a local Catholic priest described the First Nations’ extreme poverty: “I have never seen them so depressed as they are now; I have never seen them before in want of food. [. . .] They have suffered fearfully from hunger” (cited in Tesar 2016).

After the signing of the treaty and the First Nations’ move onto their respective reserves, the task of the NWMP was to keep track of Indigenous people that left their reserves for certain periods of time. Large gatherings of Indigenous people practicing their customs and traditions were threatening to white settlers. Although the NWMP used vagrancy laws to keep Indigenous people away from the white settlers, they were not satisfied with the existing measures and asked for more authorities. In addition to the North-West Resistance, the Pass System established in 1885 was part of a response to the constant requests of the NWMP. The NWMP had already been asking for such measures describing the details of such a system to restrict Indigenous people to their reserves. They were particularly concerned about the Kainai. According to Superintendent Deane, “The Bloods think that they are the cream of creation, and it is time for them to begin to imbibe some modification of the idea” (cited in Smith 2009, 65). As such, the Pass System was part of coercive colonial practice in the interest of white settlers. The system itself and comments like Superintendent Deane’s also demonstrate how racial hierarchies are shaped by settler colonialism. The NWMP in this sense not only aimed to wean Indigenous people from their customs and beliefs by enforcing laws but was also a mechanism through which to teach them their place in newly fabricated social order and hierarchy—namely, their inferiority to the white settlers. Crosby and Monaghan (2018, 193) argue that “most explicit in the policing of Indigenous movements are the normative beliefs that Canadian authorities have a duty to develop resources on Indigenous land, and that Indigenous Peoples are incapable of or hostile to economic development.” The so-called superiority of the new order was described by one of the first members of the NWMP, ex–sub constable Maunsell on the fiftieth anniversary of the NWMP:

Few people have seen our vast country change from a wilderness into what it is now. When I visit Calgary and stay at the Palliser Hotel I feel like a second Rip Van Winkle. To one who has not had my experience, it would require a vivid imagination to see Indian tepees on the ground now occupied by the hotel and envisage large herds of buffalo grazing on the town site of Calgary. This vast change could never have taken place if the Mounted Police, or some similar force, had not first established law and order. (Kelly 1996, 11)

Racial Profiling in Lethbridge: Carding Practices

The concept of “racial profiling” was not regarded as a problem in Canada until a public inquiry into the Toronto Police’s biased treatment toward racialized populations was initiated through findings outlined in the Toronto Star that found that Black people across Toronto are three times more likely to be stopped and documented by police than white people (Rankin 2010; Meng, Giwa, and Anucha 2015). The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC 2003, 6) defines racial profiling as “any action undertaken for reasons of safety, security, or public protection that relies on stereotypes about race, colour, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, or place of origin, or a combination of these, rather than on a reasonable suspicion, to single out an individual for greater scrutiny or different treatment.” Racial profiling is a system of control and surveillance, and more importantly, it denies racialized people privacy, identity, place, security, and control over their daily life (OHRC 2019). In that sense, it is similar to other systems of control like slavery and segregation that made capitalist accumulation and colonialism possible. In Canada, studies focusing on racial profiling are increasing and expanding beyond Ontario (see chapter 10 in this book). Canada’s first policy on racial profiling was released on September 20, 2019, by the OHRC. Until this detailed and extensive policy following on the preceding reports on racial profiling in Ontario (OHRC 2003), the issue was denied or attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” employed in the police force. However, as Tator and Henry (2006, 17) argue, inscribed in the “a few bad apples” thesis is “the denial of racism as a set of institutional practices and patterned cultural behaviours that collectively support and reinforce racially different systemic outcomes.” It is also important to note Comack’s (2012, 57) warning that “the use of the term [racial profiling] has a decidedly individualized focus; specifically, on the exercise of discretion by individual police officers. [. . .] ‘Racialized policing’ implicates broader context.”

The “a few bad apples” approach leaves the very structure and the core ideology of policing unchanged while trying to solve the problem by offering officers more training in race relations. Training is of course important and necessary, but not enough to address the issue of racism in any police force. More structural and substantial work needed to be done to eliminate institutional, systemic, and official racism inherent in criminalization practices. For instance, the Criminal Intelligence Service Alberta (CISA) facilitates the exchange of criminal intelligence between intelligence units, enforcement units, and the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada Provincial Bureau. CISA and its Alberta regular member police agencies (including the Lethbridge Police Service [LPS]) are also responsible for implementing the Provincial Organized and Serious Crime strategy (CISA, n.d.). Yet as Tanovich (2006, 16) observes, the official racialization of street crime takes place in the 2004/5 report itself. This is done through the naming of criminal groups like “Jamaican Organized Crime” and “Asian Criminal Groups” and the lists it provides under headings such as “Self-Identified Criminal Groups” and “Aboriginal Males Carrying Out Criminal Activities Relating to Drug Trafficking and Violence at the Street Level.” The report also links poverty among Indigenous populations to the listed organized crime groups by emphasizing how “Aboriginal youth are feeding organized crime groups in Alberta.” These stereotypes impact the way individual officers interpret their environment and how they conclude that there is objectively suspicious behaviour to suspect racialized individuals.

The practice of racial profiling by the Lethbridge Police is most manifest in the technology of carding. Carding refers to a police practice in which the police stop and ask “suspicious” subjects for identification and record their personal information in a database. It enables the police to “catalogue, commodify, discipline, imprison, manage, surveil and, ultimately kill disvalued populations” (Kitossa 2020, 7). The Supreme Court has found that carding is in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in multiple cases (Progress Alberta 2018); nevertheless, it is still practiced widely and makes all citizens “legible” for social control (Kitossa 2020). Lethbridge lawyer Miranda Hlady filed a freedom of information request with the LPS after a University of Lethbridge student complained that they had been stopped by local police and questioned for no apparent reason (Battochio 2017). The data Hlady obtained shows that Black people are nine times more likely to be stopped and asked by the police to provide identification and other personal information. It also shows that Indigenous people are five times more likely to be carded. In his response to Lethbridge Police Chief Davis, who was discouraging public scrutiny into police work after Hlady’s inquiry, Laurendeau (2018) emphasizes histories behind current racial profiling practices in Lethbridge, pointing to the hundreds of years of violent systems of colonization that resulted and continue to result in the dispossession, marginalization, and impoverishment of Indigenous peoples, mostly Blackfoot people in Treaty 7 territory.

Police work involves the policing of spaces as much as the policing of individuals. The policing of Treaty 7 territory, in conjunction with the history provided in the first section, reveals that what constitute “problem” spaces are those spaces occupied by Indigenous bodies in the city’s downtown core. As Comack (2012, 64) argues,

Inner-city communities populated by impoverished Aboriginal people and new immigrants are more likely to be seen as “disordered” and “dangerous” places, whereas suburban White middle-class neighborhoods—with their tree-lined streets, manicured lawns, and spacious homes—become spaces of “civility” and “respectability.” In carrying out their task as reproducers of order, then, police concentrate their attention and activity on the former and not on the latter racialized spaces. In the process, they help to constitute and normalize particular spaces—and the people found within them—as “disorderly” and “dangerous.”

This is also true for Lethbridge. When one wants to see the police in action, one should look at downtown Lethbridge, in particular Galt Gardens and vicinities of surrounding businesses. In her analysis of homelessness in Lethbridge, Kingfisher (2007, 95) reveals that the problem with Indigenous street people in Lethbridge was construed as “a failure on the part of the Native community to practice kimmapiiyipitssini (habitual kindness, taking care of oneself and one’s family).” Blaming Indigenous people for their own impoverishment is also reflected in explanations of homelessness “focused on the structure of Native culture in isolation from the wider context of European colonialization and racism to invoke an essentialized Aboriginal culture that produces inherently lazy, addicted, parasitic, violent men” (102).

War on Drugs and Supervised Consumption Site in Lethbridge

Less obvious policing that directly targets Black, Indigenous peoples and people of colour is the so-called war on drugs—“an established international legal norm, backed by a global system of militarized enforcement, at the centre of a worldwide network of police power and prison systems” (Koram 2019, 2). The concept of “drugs” cannot be separated from the historical law-making processes that first name and categorize certain substances as “drugs” and then prohibit them. When it comes to defining harms caused by drugs, the health impacts versus criminalization divide is a false one (Wohlbold and Moore 2019). Substances are not prohibited based on their physical or mental harms—nicotine, as Gordon (2006, 129) reminds us, is perfectly legal. What is considered a drug and what is not, or what is considered a less harmful drug, depends on white elite biases. The drug laws attempt to protect whiteness by regulating threats to the ongoing colonial project. Therefore, Wohlbold and Moore (2019, 24) argue that the war on drugs is “a response to particular and repeated crises of Whiteness.” Considering the NWMP marching to Fort Whoop-Up in 1874 with the motivation to end the whisky trade among Indigenous people and the 1886 Indian Act banning Indigenous people from buying and selling alcohol, it is safe to say that Canada’s first attempt into criminalizing substance use was clearly linked to colonial tensions. Although there were more substantial reasons for the coming of the NWMP, the aim of regulating alcohol consumption provided colonial government with “an additional opportunity to exercise sovereign control over Indigenous bodies” (Wohlbold and Moore 2019, 27).

In terms of the more recent bans on drugs and police enforcement of these bans, one can observe that the government prohibits drugs selectively based on the substances’ association with immigrant communities (Gordon 2006). As Wohlbold and Moore (2019, 26) explain, “Substances are signifiers and their cultural personas (drugalities) dictate their relative level of danger based not on pharmacological knowledge but rather on the populations with whom they are affiliated.” The criminalization of opium in 1908 was a response to its use by Chinese immigrants, while cocaine, banned in 1911, and cannabis, banned in 1923, were controlled because they were identified with Black immigrants (Gordon 2006, 130–31). The prohibition of “khat” took place in 1997 as a response to increased Somalian migration (primarily as refugees from the civil war) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Somalians brought with them a new language, culture, and customs alien to most Canadians, and furthermore, they were identified with Islam. The prohibition of khat gave the police a “convenient pretext for stopping people and removing them from public spaces, and for entering Somalian homes, restaurants and coffee shops” (Gordon 2006, 142).

Like the examples above, the problematization of drug use in contemporary Lethbridge is a result of moral panic among white settlers. Hall et al. (1978) document how a particular moral panic constructing the Black youth as muggers emerged in the 1970s in England. In much the same way, a particular moral panic is emerging in Lethbridge concerning Indigenous bodies and drug use in public spaces. The discussion around the supervised consumption sites continues in a concerted way including the mainstream media, the police, politicians, and shop owners in downtown Lethbridge to develop the image of “dangerous” drug users, who emerge as a symbol of property crime and other undesired disorders. In their four-year business plan for 2019–22, LPS identifies their policing priorities. Their first five priorities are drug-related issues (LPS 2018b, 10–11). They identify the “social disorder” that they intend to address as “disturbances, panhandling, vagrancy, public intoxication and drug addiction” that are said to “continue to plague primarily the downtown core.” In referring to drug users, a dominant discourse about addicts is prevalent, bringing forward other assumptions about drug users. The safety of “drug users,” for example, does not seem to be an issue for the police. Again, nowhere do these documents mention issues of racism and/or hate crimes despite the fact that, as Granzow (2017, 347) confirms, “Lethbridge has a long history of racism.” Everyday acts of racism such as “the posting of a ‘No Indians Allowed’ sign on the drive-through window of a local Tim Hortons” and many other anecdotal (unreported) cases of racial discrimination that the racialized settlers and their allies are well aware of are absent in the discussion of substance use in Lethbridge.

What is described as an “ongoing drug crisis that leads to an increase in spin-off property crime and social disorder” continues to keep the Lethbridge Police busy according to their annual report (LPS 2018a, 3). In annual reports and Lethbridge Police Council meeting minutes, it is clearly indicated that the areas of focus for the Lethbridge Police are the Public Library, Lethbridge Centre Mall, Park Place Mall, and Centre Village Mall. It is not unusual to read analyses in council meeting minutes that reckon “nicer weather will bring more people into the parks and issues in the malls will likely be reduced” (see LPC 2017). This language indicates that to them, the homeless or the poor translates mostly to mean Indigenous people. And their job is not to find a solution for the “problem bodies” but to push them around—preferably from profit-making places to non-profitable spaces. Despite the fact that borders between the reserves and the city of Lethbridge were opened up in the 1960s, the city of white settlement still clearly remains segregated (Kingfisher 2007). Therefore, the Indigenous bodies occupying public or semi-public spaces in downtown Lethbridge are deemed as not belonging to the city, and the war on drugs works well as a justification that mobilizes settler residents of the city around attempts to push Indigenous populations out.