Toronto and the ‘Paris problem’: community policing in ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’

Rethinking urban policing

Hitherto, the few critical studies on policing in Toronto have only focused on the coercive dimension of policing, as linked to neoliberalism and its punitive law-and-order strategy in Canada. ³ Yet, a sole focus on policing as a coercive state apparatus gives us a narrow perspective on the state’s police power. What is lost in such analyses is how urban policing is related to and embedded in other state strategies that generally appear to be progressive, separate from coercive policing. But, examining holistically policing strategies that target low-income, majority non-White neighbourhoods in Toronto exposes and underlines three interrelated phenomena. ⁴ These are the multi-faceted relationship between urban social development and policing; the complementary nature of the coercive and the apparently benign dimensions of productive, community-style policing; and, third, the racialised and territorialised security ideology inherent in the way the figure of ‘the immigrant’ has been fabricated and ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’ have been conceived. By embedding policing in social development and co-opting various agencies in housing, education and the arts, productive policing, which is about moderating violence and ‘humanising’ the social order, functions similarly to neo-colonial pacification, and has become central to both the war on poverty and the recomposition of colonial relations of domination in Toronto. What policing and pacification have in common is a form of political administration of ‘problem’ populations and spaces. ⁵

With the new round of stigmatising ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’ as local bastions of ‘radicalisation’ and ‘terrorism’ in Europe and North America, questions of racism, policing and security are more important than ever. Yet, before going into detailed analysis, it is important to differentiate between the immigrant as an official status in Canada (as defined by Statistics Canada) ⁶ and the figure of ‘the immigrant’, which is my focus here; an ideological construct produced by state and public discourses. It is not a reference to all those with immigrant status; rather it is a historically specific articulation of the racist and class-based structures of Canadian society and economy. ‘The immigrant’ signifies non-White populations and increasingly non-White working-class populations, regardless of their official status in Canada. It is a construct that has erased the realities of immigration, racism and class relations, along with the uneven nature of working-class reality in Toronto. ⁷

From ‘White-settler’ to ‘most diverse’ city

By the mid-2000s two different features formed Toronto’s social geography. With more than half of its population born outside Canada, Toronto gained the status of the most diverse western metropolitan centre. Meanwhile, non-White poverty was increasingly concentrated in pockets of the city’s postwar suburbs where rental high-rise buildings still provided relatively affordable housing for families. ⁸ This complex social geography made it easier for media pundits, City officials, policy-makers, the Toronto Police, and academics to blame concentrated (non-White) poverty as the main force behind gun violence in 2005. Yet, neither the production of non-White poverty, nor its increasing concentration in particular localities, was accidental. They were the concrete results of neoliberal urbanisation boosted by an economy that functions on deeply rooted racist structures – a point absolutely missed, or rather erased, in policy discussions and analyses.

The liberalisation of Canadian immigration policy in the postwar era was fundamental to the demographic transformation of Toronto from a White-settler city known as the Belfast of the North in the early twentieth century to its current status as most diverse western city. By the late 1960s, Canada had adopted a seemingly colour-blind immigration policy to address its ongoing labour shortage by attracting labour from outside the United States and Europe. Meanwhile, the political fear of Quebec separatism, coupled with other European ethnic-recognition demands, culminated in 1971 in the federal policy of multiculturalism. Since then the Canadian state has used its recognition of (non-White) immigrants – albeit as second-class citizens – as part of Canada’s multicultural identity to showcase its assumed tolerance and peaceful diversity. It was in reference to this liberal multicultural identity that in 1998 the newly amalgamated City of Toronto chose its current municipal motto: Diversity Our Strength!

Yet alongside this flowery, culturalised image of Toronto (and Canada), an image essential to Canadian identity since the late twentieth century and celebrated by all political forces (including many on the Left), there is a dark side to liberal multiculturalism. The lack of political will to unsettle systemic racism in the labour market and beyond, combined with neoliberalisation and uneven development has only reinforced economic apartheid, spatio-racial fragmentation, and the geographical concentration of non-White poverty in the country’s major cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver). As the demographic composition of cities has become more diverse, the figure of ‘the immigrant’ and their everyday spaces, have been demonised, with varying intensities, for being a ‘threat’ to Canadian ‘values’, ‘way of life’, social cohesion and democracy and for causing the ‘threats’ of concentrated poverty, ‘gangs and guns’, ‘radicalisation’, ‘terrorism’, and even the recent rise of hard-right populism in electoral politics in Toronto. ⁹

The recession and urban governance

With the forceful implementation of neoliberalisation in the 1980s and 1990s, intense anti-immigrant debates about the nature of Canada’s multiculturalism and immigration policies flourished and eventually resulted in the tightening of the immigration system with the start of the ‘war on terror’. This is the immediate context in which the figure of ‘the immigrant/migrant’ has become a security threat in the West, but the groundwork had already been laid in the broader anti-immigrant turn in western Europe and international politics from the 1970s on. ¹⁰ While the dismantling of the welfare state progressively diminished state responsibility for facilitating migrant settlement, concepts such as integration and social cohesion popped up as solutions to the contradictions of neoliberalisation, liberal multiculturalism, and the racist structures of labour market in Canada’s metropolitan centres, particularly Toronto.

In 1989 Canada entered into its most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The impacts were felt severely in the Toronto region where the automobile industry and the real-estate capital were hit hard. As today, the recession provided fodder for the public outburst of racist, anti-immigrant debates. ¹¹ The result was that (non-White) immigrants were increasingly represented as potential security threats in and to Canada, rather than potential citizens. ¹² With the collapse of its real-estate market in 1989, Toronto underwent a deep recession that continued into the early 1990s. The recession turned into a justification for accelerating the restructuring of the local state and consolidating the neoliberal competitive city model of urban governance by the end of the 1990s. ¹³ It took almost a decade for the real-estate market to recover and the systematic gentrification of downtown Toronto, facilitated by the local state, was a major force in this recovery. ¹⁴ Given the already existing systemic racism in the labour market, ¹⁵ non-White working-class populations, and particularly non-White women, were severely affected by these changes. ¹⁶

At the same time, the question of racism (particularly anti-Black racism) and crime became hot topics in public discourse. In 1992, following the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles, a solidarity march on Toronto’s downtown Yonge Street turned into a confrontation with the police and became known as the ‘Yonge street riot’ – Toronto’s version of ‘race riots’. The racial and class tensions of the early 1990s were followed by a series of popular protests against neoliberalisation in Ontario (Days of Action protests, 1997) and against the neoliberal-inspired municipal amalgamating of the then old City of Toronto with its five postwar suburbs into the current City of Toronto, the municipal government, by the Conservative provincial government of Mike Harris in 1998.

It was in this context that non-White poverty was ‘discovered’ and gradually formulated as a policy issue in Toronto. From 1997 to 2004, major socio-political forces in local politics published more than fifteen influential reports warning about the geographical concentration of non-White poverty that was assumed to be associated with ‘immigrants’ living in postwar suburbs. ¹⁷ They included United Way (the major philanthropic-capitalist body in local politics and urban policy-making), the Toronto Board of Trade and the City of Toronto. Parallel with the trends in the UK (New Deal for Communities) and the US (Empowerment Zones; HOPE VI), these forces advocated spatially targeted state intervention (commonly known as area-based or place-based policy) in low-income neighbourhoods. Three central interrelated tenets were built into their reports.

The move to community policing

These reports were fundamental in making ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’ and their non-White working-class populations into objects and subjects of area-based urban policy and policing. The racialised and territorialised ideology at the heart of the threat of the ‘American ghetto’ (understood as an essentially Black locality of poverty and crime, separated from the rest of urban America) was reinforced and normalised in Toronto not just through urban policy and state-supported urban research on poverty, but also through community policing strategies.

Since 1982, the Metropolitan Toronto Police (which became the Toronto Police Service after the 1998 amalgamation) has carried out community policing in targeted localities. ²² In the 1990s, alongside the aggressive gentrification of pockets of downtown Toronto, the Toronto Police started experimenting with area-specific policing. In the autumn of 1993, the year of the ‘Yonge street riot’, the Toronto Police introduced area-based policing (Project 35) into low-income public housing neighbourhoods of the downtown core. Working closely with business associations and local residents’ associations (homeowners) to locate problem populations, uniformed officers in the evenings flooded the targeted poor neighbourhoods that had been identified as having a high crime rate, mainly relating to drugs and prostitution, in this two-month long project. By the summer of 1994, Project 35 had become the precursor of systematic area-based policing in Toronto. ²³ In 1999, the City Council introduced Community Action Policing (CAP) and mandated police officers to target specific ‘hot spots’ to prevent ‘uncommitted crimes’. ²⁴ By the end of 2004, a series of events in Toronto and later in Paris, France transformed the political fear of the ‘American ghetto’ into that of the ‘Paris problem’.

The ‘Paris problem’, policing and urban development

In 2004, a police-induced spike in gun violence among non-White youth in Toronto brought the territorialised and racialised geography of poverty to public attention. ²⁵ By February 2004, then (social democrat) mayor David Miller proposed his Community Safety Plan (CSP). Designed by the City of Toronto and the Toronto Police Services, the Plan was based on a mix of enforcement and prevention measures to target violence and crime in four low-income neighbourhoods.

In 2005, the Strong Neighbourhood Taskforce (composed of United Way and the City of Toronto, with the support of the Government of Canada, the Province of Ontario and the private sector) put forward the first and most explicit call for ‘targeted intervention in specific neighbourhoods’ to de-concentrate poverty. ²⁶ The report was a reiteration of previous reports and Miller’s Community Safety Plan. ²⁷

As these debates were happening, the number of gun-related homicides among non-White youth spiked in the summer of 2005, with most of the shootings and deaths in the postwar suburbs. By October 2005, the City had adopted its first area-based urban policy to target thirteen ‘priority neighbourhoods’ (essentially low-income neighbourhoods) in postwar suburbs. Deriving from the CSP, the policy came to be known as Priority Neighbourhoods Strategy and was implemented from 2006 to 2012. It was then replaced with an expanded area-based urban policy: Toronto Strong Neighbourhoods 2020. The phrase ‘priority neighbourhoods’, similar to ‘at risk’, soon became code for Toronto’s ‘ungoverned’ spaces, characterised by the geographical concentration of non-White poverty and violence.

While the City Council was debating Toronto’s Priority Neighbourhoods Strategy, on 27 October 2005 Zyed Benn and Bouna Traroe, two French youths of, respectively, Malian and Tunisian descent, were electrocuted while being chased by the police in the Parisian banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois. Their deaths sparked the largest uprising of non-White youth in France in history. As the blazing uprising of the French banlieues was televised across the world, a new security discourse came to dominate how concentrated non-White poverty in Toronto was framed. The fear of the ‘American ghetto’ was replaced with that of the ‘Paris problem’. Major national newspapers like The Globe and Mail quoted youths in Jane and Finch (one of the most stigmatised ‘priority neighbourhoods’) saying: ‘There’s a possibility of it happening here … That’s how we feel about it.’ Margaret Parson, then executive director of the African-Canadian Legal Clinic, stated that Jane and Finch ‘is a tinderbox that could explode in violence, just like the Paris suburbs did over the past few weeks’. ²⁸

Media pundits were quick to conjure up a moral panic with comparisons between Toronto’s ‘growing immigrant “underclass”’ and the ‘ethnic uprising’ of the Parisian banlieues. ²⁹ While the timing of the two events helped justify this moral panic, in reality, it was the territorialised and racialised security ideology focused on marginalised urban spaces and their non-White populations that brought Toronto and Paris together in 2005. This became more evident when, on 26 December 2005, a White female bystander was accidentally killed in a gang-related shooting in downtown Toronto. The event was portrayed as a security threat to Toronto’s peace and tolerance. Politicians of all levels were quick to share their compassion – and security concerns. ‘Yesterday’s shootings in Toronto’, then Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin warned, ‘serve as a painful reminder that we cannot take our peace or our understanding of it for granted.’ ³⁰

Reactions to the Boxing Day shooting reconfirmed the relative value of different levels of humanity in multicultural Toronto. Suddenly a colonial discourse of them-the-savages against us-the-civilised fixed public attention on the marginalised, highrise neighbourhoods inhabited by non-White working-class people. While the lives of fifty-one non-White youths, who had also been killed that year, were rendered of little worth, ‘our’ life, as embodied in the figure of a White female bystander, turned into the ultimate unjust human casualty of ‘ungoverned’ violence. Among the media pundits, no one articulated this colonial discourse with the clarity of influential Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno:

Toronto has taken a boot in the gut the last year. While most of us, in fact, have little to fear from the callous disregard for life exhibited by urban savages … we certainly should worry for distant neighbours, who cannot just shut the door to keep out violence. … And there is always, as was proven on the Boxing Day, the chance – however slim – the gunfire will come to us, in our shared communal spaces to our innocent children. ³¹

The penetration of gun violence into downtown Toronto was central to why politicians and media pundits such as DiManno perceived the 26 December shooting as a security threat and non-White youth as part of the ‘enemy within’. The difference in their stances rests mainly on the way each perceives the ‘internal enemy’, hence their proposed solutions. For DiManno and many on the Right, the ‘urban savages’ are not ‘civilisable’. They are a lost cause. Whereas for elite liberal and social-democrat politicians, ‘the immigrant’ has the potential to become ‘civilised’ – all that is needed is tutelage through proper empowerment and policing. In fact, the birth of the ‘Paris problem’ in Toronto speeded up the rolling out of area-based urban policies of social development and policing in ‘priority neighbourhoods’. The rationale was that dealing with the crisis of poverty-violence-security required both prevention and reinforcement in urban ‘hotspots’. ³² (It is this rationale, to civilise ‘the immigrant’ and nullify their ‘threat’ to ‘our’ social cohesion, that links area-based urban policies and policing to imperialist strategies of pacification.)

If in 2005 the ‘Paris problem’ became code for the threat of ‘race riots’ in Toronto almost overnight, the political fear of ‘race riots’ still echoes powerfully within the city’s ruling circles. Almost a decade later, in my interviews with senior City managers, City staff involved with ‘at-risk’ youth, and the United Way personnel involved with crafting area-based urban policy, all pointed to the prospect of ‘race riots’ in Toronto. In the words of one senior manager:

We’ve already seen the riots. We had the Yonge Street riots … given the demographics of our population, we can’t afford not to have those people in the labour market, which otherwise will make us trouble, similar to what we’ve seen as the Paris problem. ³³

Community policing militarised

In January 2006, less than two weeks after the 26 December shooting, the Ontario Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty announced a province-wide $51 million Anti-Gun Strategy. A Guns and Gangs Crown attorney had already been set in place in 2004 and the Guns and Gangs Task Force expanded in October 2005. ³⁴ The additional investment in 2006 was mainly allocated to a Toronto-specific area-based community policing initiative and a $26 million Operation Centre in Toronto to be used for urban military training by the Toronto Police Service and the Department of National Defence. ³⁵ Almost immediately, the then Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair introduced an area-based policing strategy: the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS).

With an initial budget of $7 million for 2006 and $5 million a year until 2016, TAVIS was defined as ‘an intensive community mobilisation strategy’ intended to ‘reduce crime and increase safety in Toronto neighbourhoods’. ³⁶ It had three components. First, Rapid Response Teams composed of four teams of eighteen urban military police officers were responsible for targeting ‘high-risk’ locations and accompanying the Guns and Gang Unit in raids. Second, Divisional TAVIS Callbacks allowed the Toronto Police to call back off-duty officers to perform high-visibility policing in targeted neighbourhoods. Third, the Neighbourhood TAVIS Initiative was a summer programme in two or three targeted ‘priority neighbourhoods’ during which TAVIS officers were responsible for ‘empower[ing] community’, by ‘engag[ing] with community members’ and ‘partner[ing] with other agencies and community organisations’. This involved a variety of activities from planting flowers and cleaning parks to playing basketball with (mostly non-White male) youth. ³⁷

While TAVIS rationalised its targeting based on allegedly scientific police crime statistics, occurrence mapping, and community consultations, ³⁸ the territorialised and racialised ideology concerning non-White poverty was central to its vision. Thus for TAVIS officers, the major issues that affected security were ‘lack of social cohesion’ and urban design, ³⁹ with police characterising these localities as: ‘troubled’, ‘broken’ and ‘high-risk’. Soon TAVIS became (in)famous for its spectacular, military-style raids. The first took place in the early hours of 16 May 2006 in Jamestown, one of the targeted ‘priority neighbourhoods’. Six hundred officers in military gear using rams and stun grenades targeted the Jamestown public housing project in the largest raid in the history of the Toronto Police. While the then Chief Blair applauded the raid for its ‘military precision’, ⁴⁰ residents described the situation as ‘a war zone’ that, in their view, was not dissimilar to the televised scenes of Kandahar under the occupation of the Coalition Forces. ⁴¹ From 2006 to 2016, TAVIS participated in at least one major raid every year. With the introduction of the Provincial Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (PAVIS) in 2007, these militarised raids were increasingly scaled up and intensified. ⁴²

If these raids were the most spectacular aspect of violent policing in Toronto (and gradually beyond), the practice of carding by TAVIS and other police officers was an everyday violation. Carding refers to an increasingly common practice whereby officers, on stopping an individual, fill out contact cards to record personal information for intelligence purposes. Carding is an updated version of the police ‘stop and chats’ of the late 1990s, and is similar to the police practice of stop-and-frisk in the United States. Carding has intensified racial profiling, the criminalisation of non-White youth, and the racialised security ideology around ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’ in Toronto. Public housing complexes soon became a major site for the police targeting of non-White youth. As part of ‘intelligence-led policing’, TAVIS forces were mandated to connect with different partners in ‘priority neighbourhoods’. Landlords and particularly Toronto Community Housing (Toronto’s public housing agency) are among the partners. In 1988, Toronto Community Housing had signed an agreement with the Toronto Police to enforce Ontario’s Trespass to Property Act on their properties. However, this agreement did not become public knowledge till 2013. ⁴³ What emerged then was that it had given the police the right to card youth from other neighbourhoods and the surrounding area who would hang out on the public housing property – mostly located in the middle of green spaces with huge open parking lots at the back. Many of the encounters between police and the youth would end in confrontation. And too frequent incidences of carding or a police search finding drugs (usually weed) could result in the eviction of a whole family. After each major police raid since 2006, the families of some arrested youth have been evicted. Such deliberate opacity led to ‘high volumes of cardings and harassments’ of young people in public housing communities. The partnership of major landlords with the Toronto Police has also resulted in collective punishment for some communities after police raids, which include the criminalisation and eviction of the whole families of youths arrested. ⁴⁴

Since the early 2000s, many community activists have criticised the systemic racism embedded in carding. Yet it was not until 2010 that the issue became a topic of public debate. In February 2010, the Toronto Star published a special series, Race Matters, based on information from over 1.7 million civilian contact cards filled out by Toronto Police officers between 2003 and 2008. Race Matters argued that ‘male blacks aged 15–24 are stopped and documented 2.5 times more than white males the same age’. ⁴⁵ In 2012, the Toronto Star updated its data analysis and published another series, Known to Police, with fresh data from 1.25 million contact cards (involving 788,000 individuals) from 2008 to mid-2011. ⁴⁶ The updated analysis confirmed the earlier results. In the words of academics S. Wortley and A. Owusu Bempah, non-White populations in Canada ‘suffer from racial profiling as well as relatively harsh treatment with respect to arrest decisions, police use of force, pre-trial decision making and sentencing’. ⁴⁷

These arguments gained additional publicity when in 2013 a few young Black male activists publicised their own experiences with police. ⁴⁸ Immediately afterwards, the then Toronto Police Services Board chair Alok Mukherjee stated that ‘TAVIS [has] lost its way in terms of the community component’. He warned that ‘TAVIS ultimately becomes simply synonymous with an enforcement piece. And that’s when it becomes, in my mind, counterproductive.’ ⁴⁹ The peak of media criticism was the May 2015 edition of the trendy magazine Toronto Life. Its cover picture was of Desmond Cole, then Toronto Star Black columnist and one of the most vocal critics of carding. Toronto Life featured a long article by Cole entitled ‘The skin I’m in’. ⁵⁰ These public criticisms, along with the initial loose formation of Black Lives Matter Toronto in early 2015, not only affected the future of TAVIS and pushed for an independent review of police contacts with civilians, but also in part influenced the choice of Toronto’s new Chief of Police. In April 2015, Mark Saunders (a political ally of then Chief Blair) became the first Black Canadian to lead the Toronto Police Service and to attempt to calm down the political tensions around racism and policing. In September 2015, the Ontario Liberal government announced dramatic cuts to TAVIS funding, from $5 million to $2.6 million per year as of 2016. While many liberal and left critics celebrated the sudden cuts, other policing strategies in ‘priority neighbourhoods’ were overlooked and have not got attention to date.

Pacification – the other aspect of community policing

Parallel to TAVIS raids and carding, the Toronto police, in collaboration with the City, the province of Ontario and the federal government, also started experimenting with ‘productive’ policing: that is that aspect of policing that, through apparently softening naked coercion, reinforces and maintains the state’s control over the social order. What policing and pacification have in common is a form of political administration of ‘problem’ spaces. In embedding policing in social development, such policing strategies, expanded since the mid-2000s, build, in effect, on ‘winning hearts and minds’ – or, pacification – in the integration of consent and coercion. In 2006, the Toronto Police kick-started a three-year social development pilot project in ‘priority neighbourhoods’: the Youth in Policing Initiative (2006–2009). Its goal was to ‘improve the relationship between the police service and the community, build relationship and decrease gang recruitment’. ⁵¹ Since 2009, the initiative has become permanent, with secured yearly funding of $585,000 from the Ontario Ministry of Children and Youth Services. In 2012, at the height of the debates on racial profiling, the initiative turned into an all-year-around programme.

In 2008, after the death of a 15-year-old Black student, Jordan Manners, in his high school, then Police Chief Blair initiated a school-based policing project in collaboration with the Toronto School Board and the Toronto Catholic District School Board. Initially part of the overarching TAVIS strategy, the School Resource Officer project is about placing police officers in schools in ‘priority neighbourhoods’. Today the programme has become permanent and has been extended to forty-five schools in those neighbourhoods. The Toronto Police has also mobilised popular culture to enhance its public image, giving, in July 2009, the Mixed Company Theatre a $30,000 grant to create DISS. ⁵² Written by award-winning Rex Deverell, DISS mobilised ‘hip-hop, choreography and theatre to draw a voice out of [gang-affected] youth’. ⁵³

In September 2008, Public Safety Canada provided the City of Toronto with a five-year contribution of $4 to $5 million per year for a youth gang-prevention research project. In December 2009, the City rolled out Prevention Intervention Toronto (PIT) in three ‘priority neighbourhoods’. The programme continued until March 2013. PIT was an intensive targeted and integrated case management approach to youth who were ‘at risk of ending up in violence that would end up at jail’. ⁵⁴ These youth were targeted through schools, community centres, in malls and on the streets and buses, or they were referred to the programme by other youth. Part of the rationale was that, without preventive social development strategies implemented by non-police agencies, police enforcement would only further alienate the youths, according to one of the project’s main managers. ⁵⁵

In May 2012, a number of delegates from Toronto went to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan (one of the highest crime locations in Canada) to examine a newly implemented community policing strategy, Prince Albert Community Mobilization Initiative (or the Hub Model). ⁵⁶ The delegation was made up of members of the Toronto Police Service, the City of Toronto (Crisis Response Unit), United Way, and Albion Neighbourhood Services (a community centre located in Rexdale). The Hub Model is ‘an evidence-based collaborative problem solving approach that draws on the combined expertise of relevant community agencies to address complex human and social problems before they become policing problems’. Like PIT, its rationale is based on a shift from ‘incident-driven’ policing to ‘risk-driven’ policing with an early multidisciplinary, multi-sector preventive intervention strategy. ⁵⁷

By the fall of 2012, the Toronto Police Service, the City of Toronto, and United Way had designed a new prevention intervention project based on the Hub Model: Furthering Our Communities, Uniting Services (FOCUS). In January 2013, the City started FOCUS as a pilot project in Rexdale. ⁵⁸ In late June 2016, the City announced that in partnership with the Ontario government and Public Safety Canada, FOCUS would be extended across Toronto.

In their attempts to moderate the violence of coercive policing and to neutralise the threat of the ‘Paris problem’ in a productive and pre-emptive manner, these policing strategies have built on and reinforced the territorialised and racialised security ideology that has heavily shadowed life in Toronto’s ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’. In the name of progressive intervention, they have normalised violence. Among the violent outcomes of these strategies are not only the normalisation of the figure of ‘the immigrant’ as the ‘enemy within’, but also the conflation of the figures of ‘the gangster’ and ‘the immigrant’. This conflation, as we will see, has its roots in the territorialised and racialised security ideologies at the core of both figures and has deepened the violence of policing and the political fear of ‘the immigrant’.

The construction of ‘the neighbourhood’

One of the consequences of the emphasis on focusing on the ‘neighbourhood’ as key to targeting poverty and crime has been the hegemony of a localist ideology, at the expense of bringing into analysis the socio-spatial and racial dimensions of uneven development in capitalist urbanisation. The territorialised dimensions of ‘the immigrant’, ‘immigrant neighbourhood’, poverty, violence, and gangs are the outcomes of such ideologically driven policy-making. For example, academics and policy-makers, police forces and politicians all point to turf politics among youths as evidence that poverty and violence are territorialised phenomena. While proponents justify a territorialised understanding of poverty and crime as based on the allegedly scientific tenets of ‘neighbourhood effects’ literature, such localism has a longer history that goes back to ideas of environmental determinism and social Darwinism in how street gangs were seen and understood in the early twentieth century.

The Chicago School of urban sociology has been an important intellectual force in this regard. Its major thinkers, such as Fredric Thrasher, held that it was the high level of neighbourhood social disorganisation in the poor immigrant enclaves and slums of Chicago that turned these areas into breeding grounds for street gangs and it helped to create the racialised figure of the gangster – the Irish, Polish or Italian immigrant. ⁵⁹ In twenty-first-century Toronto, that racialised figure is most often the Indigenous, the Black (Caribbean and African) and more recently the Muslim youth living in low-income, working-class neighbourhoods.

How accurate is the territorialised conception of ‘the gangster’ and ‘the immigrant’ in today’s Toronto? Emphasising the territorialised security ideology at the core of these figures does not mean such territorialisation is pure fiction. Like other forms of ideology, it shapes reality even as it de-historicises the production of that reality. Territorialised politics, or rather ‘neighbourhoodism’ as some activists would call it, is a reality – and at times a violent one – for youth from low-income neighbourhoods in Toronto. ⁶⁰ Such neighbourhoodism is very different from the mythical image of Toronto as ‘city of neighbourhoods’. While the latter celebrates the particular aestheticised characteristics of a locality, the former is indissolubly woven into the everyday contradictions of living within the arbitrary confines of territorially stigmatised localities. How this neighbourhoodism is produced, however, has less to do with poverty and youth gangs per se than with a combination of systemic racism, political alienation, territorial stigmatisation and the criminalisation of poverty. ⁶¹

Neighbourhoodism is a reaction to the systemic violence that the youth from low-income neighbourhoods are subjected to on an everyday basis. They take refuge in building a sense of ownership in their neighbourhoods to the point of grounding their identities within the geographical limits of the immediate localities within which they are obliged to live. And police are influential in reinforcing youth neighbourhoodism. Divide and rule tactics are fundamental to community policing strategies of gathering information and making arrests. One such tactic is to put youth from different (rival) neighbourhoods together in one cell, in detention centres or prisons. ⁶² Aware that whatever disputes happen in those cells will eventually unfold on the streets, the police’s aim is to get the rest of the ‘gang’ members out and arrest them. Youth activists and social workers explained to me how this tactic has added to street violence, criminalisation, and ever more territorialised rivalry among youths from different neighbourhoods. ⁶³

In his studies of Black post-secondary students living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and those living in the Jane and Finch neighbourhood, sociologist Carl James observes that ‘the Toronto-wide second generation Black youth defined “community” in racial terms – Blackness’, while those in Jane and Finch neighbourhood identified ‘first in terms of geography, with fixed physical coordinates or boundaries, and second in terms of ethno-racial identities’. ⁶⁴ James relates such neighbourhoodism to the territorial stigmatisation of Jane and Finch not just by the media, politicians and the police, but also by the area-based education policies targeting ‘at-risk’ youth. ⁶⁵ The very construction of the ‘at-risk’ designation, James argues, is based upon and reproduces racist, classist and gendered stereotypes of Black youth as ‘immigrants’, ‘troublemakers’, ‘athletes’, ‘underachievers’ and ‘fatherless’. ⁶⁶ Rather than addressing the violence of this siege of the youth within the boundaries of their neighbourhoods, area-based urban policy and policing in these localities have facilitated not just the production of the figures of ‘the gangster’ and ‘the immigrant’, but also the conflation of these two figures, doubling the violence that these already alienated, marginalised and exploited sections of population are subjected to on an everyday basis.

Youth neighbourhoodism is partly a reaction to the systematic racist, classist, gendered and territorialised domination over non-White youth in ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’, partly the internalisation of these forms of domination by the youth. This form of identification with one’s neighbourhood has had social and political implications. It has narrowed how youth understand their own state of being besieged within the boundaries of low-income neighbourhoods. Instead of seeing how broader systemic contradictions and state-led strategies reproduce their poverty and criminality, often these youth ‘don’t go beyond their immediate [surroundings], and this gets into how they understand themselves and understand how [broader] issues can affect their community’. ⁶⁷

The conflation of ‘the gangster’ and ‘the immigrant’ is central to Toronto’s area-based urban policy and social-development-based policing strategy. For those involved with ‘at-risk’ and ‘high-risk’ youths, gangs are not about urban violence per se. Rather, gangs in Toronto are also a problem of nation building, which is where the question of social cohesion with its racialised connotations of national identity and belonging comes in. The major concern is that these ‘at-risk’ non-White youth

no longer [consider themselves] Canadian, no longer Torontonians, no longer part of the society that they live in and as a result they create their own subculture … of Us against Them. [That mentality includes:] we have to create our own trade system, our own economic system, our own way of defending ourselves. And a code that says, if I get hurt or someone victimizes me, I can’t go to the police because those are the people who were beating me up the last 6 weeks. I need to get it done and do it myself, which is where the violence begins … So you have racist policies or policies that were not necessarily racist in intent but in delivery. Racial profiling is of that nature. ⁶⁸

In this view, the ‘Us against Them’ mentality is not simply about (‘them’) the police, but rather more importantly (‘them’) the state via the police. Police and policy-makers see the lack of national belonging as one of the major reasons that gangs are attractive to youth. The obsession with nationalist loyalties to Canada is also at the heart of perceiving the figures of ‘the immigrant’ and ‘the gangster’ as the ‘enemy within’. The Prevention Intervention Toronto strategy and FOCUS both aim to undo these forms of identification and ways of thinking through intensive management intervention:

[For] every kid that came to the program we did a pre- and post-survey with them. We asked them: Where are you from? And they all said, Jamaica, Africa … Number one place was the Caribbean, and two was actually the Middle East, and three was West and East Africa. When we changed the question to where were you born? 100% were Canadian. ⁶⁹

Conclusion

What are the lessons to learn from the case of community policing strategies in Toronto? First, we need to pay attention to the interconnections between area-based urban policy and policing strategies. Scrutinising how urban policing is part and parcel of other state-led strategies of targeting ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’ helps us to link these policies at the urban scale to the broader imperialist politics and policies of development and security in ‘ungoverned spaces’ and ‘humanitarian zones’.

Second, we need to bring into analysis the coercive and productive dimensions of policing. Understanding policing solely as a coercive force will blind us to the various ways that the state mobilises its police power. The continuation of violence, as Eyal Weizman demonstrates, requires techniques and strategies for moderating violence. ⁷⁰ And this is at the heart of the productive dimension of policing, and how urban policing in the ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’ of the metropole and the imperial strategy of pacification in the former colonies form each other dialectically. Grasping this is imperative to rethinking radical politics. When the Ontario government cancelled TAVIS in 2016, many of those who celebrated this move as a victory overlooked another reality. The Ontario government, stated the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, was now interested in focusing on ‘a proactive, collaborative, and community-based model of policing’. ⁷¹

The current ‘productive’ shift in policing strategies is not limited to Toronto, or Canada. This shift to make policing ‘proactive’ draws not only from the military strategy of pacification but also from the discourse of public health, in particular the current policy popularity of social determinants of health and epidemiological criminology in the corridors of the World Health Organization. This latter trend is based on the revival, since the mid-2000s, of the nineteenth-century understanding of crime as a contagious disease. ⁷² In the autumn of 2005, the French media were quick to mobilise an epidemiological metaphor to depict the uprising of the French banlieues as ‘contagious’. In the aftermath of the 2011 youth unrests in England, in an article for The Guardian, Gary Slutkin, one of the most influential voices in epidemiological criminology and the embedding of policing in social development, argued that ‘rioting is a disease spread from person to person – the key is to stop the infection’. ⁷³ It is of the utmost importance to remember that the political fear associated with the current popularity of conceiving disorder as disease, as contagious, has an anti-revolutionary history,

Indeed, the concept of contagion, is much less a question of microbiology or epidemiology than it is a question of how ideas circulate … implicit in the concept of contagion is the belief that revolutionary ideas are inherently contagious. ⁷⁴

Finally, as we saw in the case of Toronto, area-based urban policy and policing do not just intervene in and on already existing targets and spaces; rather these strategies are fundamental to the dialectical production of the objects, subjects and spaces of state intervention. This, too, is of the utmost importance at the present time, when urban diversity and integration have become a key security question in western cities, and when the increasing success of rightwing populism and the fear of ‘home-grown radicalisation’ linked to international terrorism has brought ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’ into the spotlight. Many on the liberal-Left spectrum have called for more state intervention. But what kinds of state policies of intervention are needed to debunk the racialised and territorialised security ideology around ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’? This is an open question in need of urgent debate.