Readers will be familiar with the examples of police relations with Aboriginal people and Black Canadians offered by Elizabeth Comack, a sociologist and author at the University of Manitoba who researches issues relevant to innercity communities. Contrary to investigations that conclude racism was not a factor in the shooting deaths by police officers of Aboriginal peoples and Black Canadians, Elizabeth Comack demonstrates unequivocally that “race” and racism are at the heart of these tragedies. Comack argues that law enforcement activity among Aboriginal peoples and Black Canadians must be considered as racialized policing. More than one-off events, race and racism have become normal ways of structuring relations between police and marginalized communities.

The claim that “race had nothing to do with this” contradicts the historical context of colonialism, poverty and social exclusion that mark social and systemically constructed racism. The most public of these events have been reported in news stories, government inquiries, inquests, commissions, media debates, editorials, talk shows, formal research studies, and papers and books by academics and journalists.

A short list of the “problems of considerable magnitude” includes wrongful conviction, shooting deaths, Starlight Tours, excessive violence, dereliction of duty, and over-representation in several areas of law enforcement. Each of these cases, known by the names of the victims — Donald Marshall, Helen Betty Osborne, J.J. Harper, Raymond Lawrence, Dudley George, Neil Stonechild, Matthew Dumas, to name only a few — was surrounded by public controversy and the assigning of blame. Among the most offensive conclusions is the charge that some of these people were responsible for their own deaths.

Along with the extensive research on these public events, Comack conducted interviews to “gather stories of Aboriginal peoples about their experiences with police.” Comack found that most abuses go unreported and unacknowledged as the racialized events that they are because they have become a normal way for police to relate to Aboriginal people.

Although tense and hostile relations between law enforcement agencies and inner-city populations cannot be denied, Comack’s project is not about trashing the police or “proving” the existence of racial profiling. She points out that while the work of the police is to maintain order, it is a very particular type of social order — one that has already been organized and sanctioned in the larger society. Consequently, to speak of racial profiling or “a few bad applies” ignores the much larger issue of racialization that normalizes hierarchies of privilege and oppression in Canada. Upholding the social order is over and against those who are then considered “disorderly,” dangerous, out of place, the racialized “other” — demonstrated in this book as Aboriginal peoples and Black Canadians. When racism is accounted for as an individual act — as it is in courts of law — racism that is systemic and socially organized can never be acknowledged or admitted for investigation, nor examined for its transgressive outcomes.

Without such recognition of systemic racism, legal systems practice a type of objectivity that overwhelmingly favours an ongoing, unequal social order which police services are trained to uphold. Ironically, an underlying order of systemic racism is that race and racism can never be examined or admitted. The culture and ideology of everyday racism operates simultaneously in plain view and always under denial.

This book would be easy to read for its well-researched accounts of shocking events of racialized policing while missing the main argument that these egregious acts are situated within the larger context of Canadian society. Comack’s theory of systemic racism implicates even those who think that racism has nothing to do with them, especially those benefitting from the “order” maintained by racialized law-enforcement agencies. Comack calls for “reframing the problem and re-envisioning the strategies for resolving” them. Sounds like a call for the larger society to come forward.

— Carol Schick, Nov. 2012, Canadian Dimension

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The most disturbing aspect of Elizabeth Comack’s Racialized Policing: Aboriginal People’s Encounters with the Police is not the first-hand experiences it relates in the pages, but the stories it mirrors from today’s headlines.

Take for example a recent case in Ontario which has pushed a coalition of First Nations led by Nishnawbe Aski Nation to file a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. The coalition claims that an internal email, written by a Thunder Bay Police Services detective and mistakenly released publicly, is an indication of the lack of respect Aboriginal people face. That email was entitled “Fresh Breath Killer Captured” and referred to a murder investigation that involved a First Nations victim and the arrest of a Thunder Bay man for second-degree murder. NAN pushed for an investigation by the police service. While the police service agreed to investigate, both the chief and the mayor of Thunder Bay (who happens to serve on the police commission and is a former police officer) claimed there was no racism involved. Not expecting a fair inquiry by the police, the First Nations coalition took its concerns to the Human Rights Tribunal.

This sort of incident is exactly what Comack talks about, making the distinction between racism and racialized policing. Says Comack, “While racial profiling and individual racism are significant issues and must receive attention, we need to broaden our gaze to include the ways in which race and racism play out in institutional practices and systemic processes.” This wider picture is what Comack refers to as “racialized policing.”

There is no lack of incidents for her to choose from when making her point. And these cases are not focused in a single province or one region of the country, but right across Canada.

Ontario Provincial Police shot and killed unarmed protester Dudley George during a 1995 standoff with Aboriginal people in Ipperwash Provincial Park. In Winnipeg, there were the shooting deaths by the police of JJ Harper (1998) and 18-year-old Matthew Dumas (2005). In Saskatoon spanning from 1990 to 2000 there is the infamous Starlight tours, in which Aboriginal people were taken from the downtown area and dropped on the outskirts of the city. Such treatment resulted in the deaths of Neil Stonechild (1990) Rodney Nastius (2000) and Lawrence Wegner (2000).

In Comack’s examination of the system, she also looks at why Aboriginal people sometimes react the way they do to police or figures of authority. Many don’t have the expectation of fair treatment, whether that’s based on present occurrences or having grown up with family who were part of the residential school system. After all, it was police who accompanied the priest or school master to the homes to take away the children. The roots of distrust are deep and there is no clear indication that there are reasons for that distrust to change.

Comack also examines the inquiries called as a result of some of the questionable deaths of Aboriginal people. These are as disturbing – if not more so – than the actual incidents. They are more disturbing because there is always the belief that an inquiry starts from a place of wanting answers and will end in a place of getting those answers. However, in a system where the police department investigates the actions of its own police officers, often times the officer is not found culpable or receives a light reprimand. It is no wonder NAN and the other First Nations in the Thunder Bay situation are pushing for an outside inquiry. It is the wider commissions that seem to get results.

Comack is clear in presenting her work that it is not about police bashing but about examining the system.

Comack raises the issues, examines them carefully, and leaves disquieting truths.

And those truths are upheld in today’s news.

— Reviewed by Shari Nanine, Jan. 2013

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During a period when the current government puts controlling crime as one of its top priority and considers it as a key threat to the Canadian society, Elizabeth Comack has written a book that implicates racism as a driver of contemporary policing and as a contradiction to our aspiration of a free and democratic society. The book is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 sets the tone by defining the key terminology for the book – race, racism, othering, and racialization and policing. Racism is the use of racial categories to define an Other. It cannot be reduced to the proclivities of individuals because racist beliefs and actions that infiltrate everyday life become part of a wider system that reproduces racism and racial inequality. Canada has engaged in the racial project, which simultaneously interprets, represents, and explains racial dynamics in order to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines. The characterization of Canada as a nation of immigrants makes it easy to forget that Canada is also a white settler society whose origins lie in the displacement and dispossession of the original inhabitants of the land. Professor Comack then focuses on the Aboriginal-police relations and argues that colonialism has not disappeared but has taken on new forms in contemporary times. Aboriginal people’s deadly encounters with the police have a much broader ramification: how race and racism are embedded in everyday experiences and institutional practices, and how they are implicated in our society’s prevailing patterns of marginalization and social exclusion.

Chapter 2 introduces the debate of racial profiling versus racialized policing by focusing on related experiences of African Canadians in Ontario. This discussion paves the road for the rest of the book to study Aboriginal people’s experiences. Chapter 3 sets the historical record right of European immigration into Canada. It pinpoints the discrepancy between the official discount and the actual happening. The project of colonizing the indigenous population and constructing a white settler society may be less bloody than that of the US, but the end results are similar. The increasing number of European immigrants brought with them the virtual extinction of the buffalo, the infectious disease, whiskey trade, and the starvation. The author omitted an important historical fact that the Aboriginal population shrank from the time of European immigrant arrival up until the 1960s. Aboriginals were painted as “savages,” “inferior,” and “child-like” in the past and as “welfare recipients,” the “drunken Indian,” and the “criminal Other” in the contemporary time. Stripped into poverty and living in substandard situations, Aboriginals are subject to social exclusion. North-west Mounted Police had powers that were unprecedented in the history of police force: they were able to prosecute, judge, and jail an accused. Similar to the role of the past, contemporary police forces in Canada have been assigned a central role in the management and containment of the “problem populations.”

Chapter 4 describes the incidents of the lethal shooting of J.J. Harper in Winnipeg in 1988 and the following controversial over his death. The detailed description and analyses lead to the conclusion that the incident is not accidental, but has its roots in racism and is related to racial policing. Chapter 5 focuses on the recurring events of starlight tours in Saskatoon. Again these seemingly unrelated incidents are linked to the racialization of the police culture.

Chapter 6 examines the lived experiences of Aboriginal people in a non-random sample of 78 interviews. One by one, these interviews reveal a social reality: there is no trust between Aboriginals and the police. The majority of these Aboriginals have a story or two of the failure of the police because the police do not trust the tales of Aboriginals. Clearly, the missing trust is not an isolated phenomenon. Chapter 7 discusses more recent shooting death of Matthew Dumas in 2005. It concludes that it is tragic, but “not unexpected” (p. 217). The officer’s ethnicity has minimal to do with pulling the gun trigger. Rather it is the police culture or racialized policing that is the culprit.

Chapter 8 concludes powerfully that democratic racism prevails in Canada and the “discourse of denial” – the failure to acknowledge that cultural, structural, and systemic racism exists – is its manifestation. Colonialism is evidenced in contemporary Canada by the desperate living conditions in many First Nations communities. Beyond the usual recommendations, Professor Comack advances two creative solutions: reframing the problem and community mobilization.

This is a compelling book and I recommend it without hesitation. The book is simply the best on the market that breaks the “Northern taboo” by talking frankly about the issues of race and racialized police in Canada. It moves away from the simplistic claims such as “police are racist bigots” or that the problem is one of the “few bad apples.” It analyses the complicated issue with an objective sense and sensibility. It is theoretically rigorous and marshals an abundance of empirical qualitative material based on years’ of field work and high-profiled cases. It is timely: the normalization of these abuses leads to less recognition and more scorn against those who try to assert any issue with the status quo. In addition, it is very readable, with many vivid descriptions. Finally, it is accessible enough for a student text and it is available as an inexpensive paperback in these straightened times.

— Dr. Liqun Cao, University of Ontario Institute of Technology

-CCJA, Jan. 2013

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 Readers will be familiar with the examples of police relations with Aboriginal people and Black Canadians offered by Elizabeth Comack, a sociologist and author at the University of Manitoba who researches issues relevant to inner-city communities. Contrary to investigations that conclude racism was not a factor in the shooting deaths by police officers of Aboriginal peoples and Black Canadians, Elizabeth Comack demonstrates unequivocally that “race” and racism are at the heart of these tragedies. Comack argues that law enforcement activity among Aboriginal peoples and Black Canadians must be considered as racialized policing. More than one-off events, race and racism have become normal ways of structuring relations between police and marginalized communities. The claim that “race had nothing to do with this” contradicts the historical context of colonialism, poverty and social exclusion that mark social and systemically constructed racism. The most public of these events have been reported in news stories, government inquiries, inquests, commissions, media debates, editorials, talk shows, formal research studies, and papers and books by academics and journalists. A short list of the “problems of the considerable magnitude” includes wrongful conviction, shooting deaths, Starlight Tours, excessive violence, dereliction of duty, and over-representation in several areas of law enforcement. Each of these cases known by the names of the victims–Donald Marshall, Helen Betty Osborne, J.J. Harper, Raymond Lawrence, Dudley George, Neil Stonechild, Matthew Dumas, to name only a few–was surrounded by public controversy and the assigning of blame. Among the most offensive conclusions is the charge that some of these people were responsible for their own deaths.

Along with the extensive research on these public events, Comack conducted interviews to “gather stories of Aboriginal peoples about their experiences with police.” Comack found that most abuses go unreported and unacknowledged as the racialized events that they are because they have become a normal way for police to relate to Aboriginal people.

Although tense and hostile relations between law enforcement agencies and inner-city populations cannot be denied, Comack’s project is not about trashing the police or “proving” the existence of racial profiling. She points out that while the work of the police is to maintain order, it is a very particular type of social order–one that has already been organized and sanctioned in the larger society. Consequently, to speak of racial profiling or “a few bad apples” ignores the much larger issue of racialization that normalizes hierarchies of privilege and oppression in Canada. Upholding the social order is over and against those who are then considered “disorderly, “ dangerous, out of place, the racialized “other”–demonstrated in this book as Aboriginal Peoples and Black Canadians.

When racism is accounted for as an individual act–as it is in courts of law–racism that is systemic and socially organized can never be acknowledged or admitted for investigation, nor examined for its transgressive outcomes. Without such recognition of systemic racism, legal systems practice a type of objectivity that overwhelmingly favours an ongoing, unequal social order which police services are trained to uphold. Ironically, an underlying order of systemic racism is that race and racism can never be examined or admitted. The culture and ideology of everyday racism operates simultaneously in plain view and always under denial.

This book would be easy to read for its well-researched accounts of shocking events of racialized policing while missing the main argument that these egregious acts are situated within the larger context of Canadian society. Comack’s theory of systemic racism, implicates even those who think that racism has nothing to do with them, especially those benefitting from the “order” maintained by racialized law-enforcement agencies. Comack calls for “reframing the problem and re-envisioning the strategies for resolving” them. Sounds like a call for the larger society to come forward. The book would benefit from an index and a final copy-edit.–Carol Schick

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In her study of racism in Canadian policing, Elizabeth Comack, a sociologist at the University of Manitoba, describes in detail this and other investigations, commissions and inquiries into police racism. In some instances these deal with the apparent mistreatment by police of racial minorities as a collective (as in the case of blacks in Toronto and aboriginal people in Saskatchewan and in Winnipeg’s inner-city communities). In many instances they deal with more specific police incidents such as the police killing of Matthew Dumas and J.J. Harper and the freezing deaths of Stonechild and three other aboriginal men in the custody of Saskatoon Police Services. Comack’s description of these instances, the police investigations that followed them and the judicial inquiries that were sometimes called is extensive. In fact, of the 230 pages of text in Racialized Policing, more than 180 of them are devoted to the details of incidents and the investigations that followed. It is hard to know if this is a criticism. To label these descriptions tedious is unfeeling (although the long methodological battles over proving, or disproving, racial profiling is definitely tedious). To consider the descriptions unilluminating is to ignore the moral and normative lessons of narrative. They are, however, presented by Comack with scant social analysis, as if they disclose their own significance.

But do they? The stories of death and denial of justice in police contacts with visible minorities present a staggering contrast with those enjoying white privilege. However, one would most certainly get an argument about this from members of the white underclass. And this raises the crucial question of the real drivers of the differing treatment of categories of persons by the police. The hopelessly naive view would be that good and bad persons—or, in the specific context of policing, offenders and non-offenders—get appropriately different treatment. It is hardly worth debating that privileged offenders are treated with more respect and with closer attention to the requirements of fair process than are non-offenders from disliked and disrespected minority communities.

The analytic tension that is worth exploring is whether Canadian policing’s callousness and brutality to some classes—blacks, aboriginals, sex trade workers and the drug dependent—is a matter of an internally constructed police culture of active disrespect for these groups or whether it arises exogenously from a broader social devaluing of the worth of some people. Comack has her view on this issue and it follows that of Justice Wright: it is that deep community division produces police racism.
For Comack, the purpose behind the social instrument of policing is the reproduction of order. At one level this is a truism. Insofar as social order is defined by the proscriptions of criminal law, police do, indeed, attempt to replicate criminal law’s notions of a well-ordered society. But she makes a deeper point. Social order is not just a matter of defining crimes; it is also about establishing social values. It is not just based on offences; it is conforming to social expectations. It is not just avoiding convictable deviance; it is living by conventions of thought and action. Under this sociological view of order, threats to it arise through mere social fear of difference, especially differences over values—values of purity, endeavour, relationships, economic value, dress and so forth. The sheer fact of difference in Canada’s aboriginal population—a difference that, perhaps, we too easily label as social dysfunction—licenses a strong popular disregard for the place and contribution of that population. According to Comack, this is the beginning (and, possibly, the end) of police indifference to the humanity, the needs and the entitlements of aboriginal people, whether or not they are actually offenders.

Comack buttresses her thesis of endemic Canadian disrespect for aboriginal peoples through reference to two other sources of this condition. First, she includes a history of the colonialist history of European settlement. Although her history is relatively extensive, it is too brief, too monolithic, to capture the nuances of the vacillations in this relationship between the periods of trust and mutual covenant and the simply disastrous policies grounded in cultural superiority, domination, destruction and, at its lowest point in the 20th century, eradication. But her conclusion is correct. Colonialism can destroy the cultural, social and political integrity of peoples and, thus, render impossible the desired conditions of mutual support, mutual respect and reconciliation.

Comack also points out the social conditions that many aboriginal people must endure: poor housing, poor schooling, exclusion from socially valued roles, poor health and poor health care, poor personal security and so on. These conditions should evoke compassion and a determination to extend care and mercy. In fact, they trigger blame, resistance to social investment and very low respect. Comack’s view is that it is not surprising if police fail to find a way to act generously and constructively in the face of these strongly negative social attitudes.

The irony of this thesis, then, is that police forces are not the engines of Canadian racism. They certainly do not confront and overcome it and, indeed, they act as its most effective carrier. But that racism is not a police construct; it is a condition of Canadian aboriginal/non-aboriginal relations that they reflect and reproduce—mere sperm and eggs to our country’s misguided and destructive parenthood.

However, one should not leave the topic of this book without returning to the question of whether there can be any nurturing of human excellence in Canadian policing. False optimism about progressivism in Canadian policing would be wrong if it were to be used to deny the concerns raised by Comack in her book. Yet her account is partial. In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of developments designed to improve justice for distinct minorities, particularly for aboriginal communities. Community policing, police liaison in schools with large aboriginal student bodies, aboriginal police forces, special First Nations courts, special rules for sentencing, the development of community justice responses to offending, diversion programs, development of First Nations laws, tripartite agencies for responding to the social causes of disorder and so forth have become a major part of doing criminal justice in Canada. These reflect a determination to transform the criminal justice system from being criminogenic in aboriginal communities to helping construct healthy and well-functioning communities. While these developments have not produced the dividend of equality in criminal justice experience, it is discouraging to the reformers throughout the system if the treatment of racism in Canadian criminal justice ignores these innovations, efforts and hopes. Canada is not always
a pretty society, and Comack is right to point out one of the ways that this true, but its vine has its trees.

—John D. Whyte

LIterary Review of Canada, July/August 2012

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