Policing black lives, revised and expanded edition

The bestselling first edition of Policing Black Lives became a mainstay of bookshelves and classrooms across North America and Europe as the first comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. This revised and expanded edition updates the original text in the wake of global Black uprisings in 2020 and offers new insights on how to build liveable futures without policing.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, award-winning scholar and activist Robyn Maynard traces the afterlives of slavery across multiple institutions. Maynard sheds light on the state’s role in perpetuating colonial dispossession, racial profiling, police killings, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as the ubiquity of Black resistance. 

The first new chapter meticulously documents how half a century of police reforms have served to undermine Black freedom struggles while expanding the scope and scale of policing in Canadian society. In the second, Maynard advances a compelling vision for making policing obsolete and building new forms of safety.