Community policing: expanding the carceral web

Excerpt from Policing Black Lives: Revised and Expanded

As a response to growing movements against racism and police brutality in the 1960s and 1970s, a package of police reforms began to be marketed as “community policing.” Based on a co-operative model, the philosophy of community policing generally contrasts with the military-bureaucratic model of policing, which relies on hierarchy and the use of force. In terms of practical changes, the community policing package consisted of a number of reforms meant to alter public perceptions: community relations and neighbourhood policing, channels for community dialogue and outreach at ethnic and racial community events meant to facilitate trust. Other reforms included hiring more Black officers and diversifying the police force, and increasing and expanding training on race relations and de-escalation. The practice of policing itself also faced reform, advancing toward a proactive rather than reactive response to activities deemed criminal, under the auspices that an augmented police presence would deter crime and halt it in action. 

Part of the premise for adopting community policing relied on a sense of white nostalgia based on the notion that community policing would return the role of law enforcement to an imagined “good old days.” As Justice [Donald] Morand put it for The Royal Commission into Metropolitan Toronto Police Practices: "What we have lost is the neighbourhood policeman who walked along the street and spoke to the members of the public, calling many by name as they passed by. The 'cop at the corner' was an institution loved, revered and respected by all. He knew his people and they knew him. They built up a permanent bond of mutual trust."

Other reformers framed community policing as a novel shift away from the militaristic structure that policing had historically followed. Either way, police reformers offered the same solution, to “increase the number of personal contacts with the public” through community policing. Facilitated by an increase in training, a greater diversity of officers and more personal contact, community policing would provide police with “as broad as possible a cross-section of issues in a community” and bring police “into direct and intimate contact with youth in their own settings, including street corners, schools and drop-in centres.” Reformers believed this newfound proximity between police and communities would constitute “a radically different form” of policing.

Community Policing: From the 1960s to the Turn of the Century 

The reform perhaps most oriented toward increasing contact between police and Black communities is neighbourhood policing, also called community relations policing. Neighbourhood policing, a key pillar of most community policing reforms, has taken different forms in different cities, but the overall stated goal is building relationships with marginalized communities to help stop or prevent crime. This role is sometimes undertaken by community liaison officers; other times, squads are created and assigned to particular neighbourhoods. This form of policing is supposed to play a central role in “referral, prevention and public education” for Black and racialized communities, and increase police presence in and knowledge of the “ghettos” through high school and community outreach. Yet, as noted by Marielle Franco, Black Brazilian feminist and public leader, policing focused on proximity “presents a certain utopian image that deviates significantly from its practices.”

In Toronto, the first community policing model began in 1967, when the Community Service Officer Program was introduced in two working-class neighbourhoods with large Black and racialized communities. By 1970, it had expanded citywide. The use of community officers – trained by psychiatrists, counsellors and sociologists – expanded upon the 1973 creation of the Ethnic Relations Unit, which established “ethnic squads,” including a “Black section” in 1975. In 1978, police noted that community policing “has grown considerably and their training in social services has broadened” – with police beats set up “to improve each officer’s knowledge of the problems relating to that segment of the community, through close contact with the people living and working in the neighbourhood.”

In the words of Black community advocate Wilson Head in 1983, after he had served for six years as a police-community liaison, the police remained an “occupying army” in poor Black neighbourhoods.

The introduction of community police was described by one officer as “a public relations job” meant to “sell the department” to the public. While the larger white public and a few moderate community organizations may have been assuaged by the focus on relationships, the harms of policing were measurably untouched. Community policing “reinforced rather than challenged police assumptions” about Black and racialized  communities. In fact, the ethnic squads “blurred the meaning of racial violence; rejected the criticisms of dozens of community leaders, politicians, and civil rights organizations; and reasserted a police position that they, along with ‘white’ Torontonians, were often key victims” when it came to allegations of racism. A report commissioned by Canada’s solicitor general to look into community policing found in 1975 that “the behaviour of regular police officers towards the public was altered only slightly, if at all” and that community police teams were often marred by  misconduct and corruption. The Black communities now courted by community policing efforts were still subject to sustained harassment and abuse. Data for 1977–78 collected by the Ontario Human Rights Commission demonstrated that 72 per cent of complainants alleging police harassment were Black.

Despite the demonstrable application of a community race relations focus, and the many police officers “sincerely convinced that they are making tremendous inroads in these areas,” there were “few if any measures of the level of accomplishment.”

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, unrelenting police harassment and  brutality against Black communities occurred alongside the expansion of community policing. In the words of Black community advocate Wilson Head in 1983, after he had served for six years as a police-community liaison, the police remained an “occupying army” in poor Black neighbourhoods. A 1992 study on the Toronto police force’s race relations evaluated the community-oriented mechanisms put in place over the past decade. In 1980s Toronto, community policing was renamed “zone policing,” and the police established pilot projects in working-class  Black and migrant communities (the Jane and Finch neighbourhood and Parkdale neighbourhood), based on a mix of foot patrols, school presentations, ethnic festivals, and classic “crime prevention.” The study noted that police cumulatively spent in excess of three thousand hours per month focused on community policing aimed at “improving race and ethnic relations.” Zone policing had expanded the role of community policing beyond the ethnic squads and into policing proper, focusing not only on Black communities but on neighbourhoods with predominantly Black, racialized, and working-class communities. Despite the demonstrable application of a community race relations focus, and the many police officers “sincerely convinced that they are making tremendous inroads in these areas,” there were “few if any measures of the level of accomplishment.” The study concluded that communities perceived no change or improvement in trust and that the police displayed “a lack  of accountability and commitment” to the communities being policed, likely due to the “paramilitary structure” of law enforcement.

Over two decades into the neighbourhood policing experiment, Akua Benjamin, Black Action Defence Committee member and Ryerson University professor, told the press in 1990 that in Black neighbourhoods being targeted by police – Jane and Finch, Regent Park, and St. James Town – “the everyday encounter between members of the Black community and the police is one of violence,” where young Black people and Black men “continue to be picked up, continue to be  harassed, continue to be brutalized as police carry out their racist stereotype that all Black men” are criminally suspect and that their communities are “havens for drugs and drug abusers.” Kathleen King-Powers, a James Town community spokesperson, described how neighbourhood police routinely beat up and abused young Black people, saying she had  “watched little kids being slapped around” and called racial slurs. Zone policing, framed as a means to build up race relations, was also used as a tool in the [Brian] Mulroney government’s expanding wars on drugs and gangs. Intelligence gathering occurred in the same predominantly Black neighbourhoods where Toronto police launched a number of raids likened to an “invasion” and “siege.” Indeed, community policing could have deadly outcomes: according to the lawyer representing the family of Raymond Lawrence after his death by police, Lawrence had been killed by an officer in a policing unit that was hastily assembled to respond to community safety complaints.

Police visits to schools in neighbourhoods with large Black populations were justified by the need to identify criminal drug networks, whereas police visited schools in primarily white neighbourhoods to train students on how to avoid becoming victims of a crime.

By the 1990s, Black communities, scholars, and legal experts were as inundated with community relations and neighbourhood policing as they were with police brutality. And they understood that these were two parts of the same project. Midway through a set of police-led “community consultations” hosted by the Jamaican Canadian Association with representatives from Toronto’s Black communities, the police shot a sixteen-year-old Black teenager over a traffic violation. At an ensuing protest of five hundred mostly Black attendees, Black organizers demanded the police chief step down and criticized the police offers of dialogue and community outreach as “window-dressing efforts.” Benjamin warned crowds of Black protesters, “We are going to be shot down, killed and slaughtered” by police unless substantive changes are made. Clearly, the increased presence and proximity of police to Black communities had not achieved the stated goals. 

Realities in Montreal were markedly similar to those in Toronto. A study by urban geographer Ted Rutland on community policing in Montreal from 1978 to 1994 found that although community policing was invoked to appease the public after high-profile killings of Black community members, documented police violence increased after its implementation. A police practice originally espoused as a form of nonpunitive outreach was transformed into a highly repressive set  of measures aimed at youth as a moral panic arose over “Black gangs.” Police visits to schools in neighbourhoods with large Black populations were justified by the need to identify criminal drug networks, whereas police visited schools in primarily white neighbourhoods to train students on how to avoid becoming victims of a crime. The foot and bike patrols once described as community outreach were retooled to expel Black and racialized youth from public spaces through ticketing for minor offences in the name of improving white neighbours’ “feelings of security.”

By the turn of the century, the expanded powers that community policing accorded law enforcement officers had become entrenched in policy in many cities, regardless of their impacts. When in 2003 Julian Fantino described the Toronto Police Service as “an innovator in the vanguard of police race relations for at least a quarter of a century,” he was not wrong. Police chiefs, including Fantino himself, had met with Black community members, and members of the force had taken part in outreach to racialized youth. They had advanced a policy of “zero  tolerance” for racially biased policing, building on decades of so-called community relations. But at the same time, the police paired “dialogue” and “outreach” with relentless racial profiling, harassment, and physical and psychological violence.

Excerpt reprinted with permission from Policing Black Lives: Revised and Expanded Edition by Robyn Maynard (Fernwood Publising, October 2025).