Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada

Canadian laws are just, the police uphold the rule of law and treat everyone equally, and without the police, communities would descend into chaos and disorder. These entrenched myths, rooted in settler-colonial logic, work to obscure a hard truth: the police do not keep us safe.

This edited collection brings together writing from a range of activists and scholars, whose words are rooted in experience and solidarity with those putting their lives on the line to fight for police abolition in Canada. Together, they imagine a different world--one in which police power is eroded and dissolved forever, one in which it is possible to respond to distress and harm with assistance and care.

Shiri Pasternak is the co-founder and former Research Director at Yellowhead Institute (2018-2021), currently on a research leave from the Institute. She is an Assistant Professor in Criminology at X University. Her book, Grounded Authority, published by the University of Minnesota Press, is an in-depth critique of the federal land claims policy in Canada from the perspective of Algonquin law, and was published in 2017. It won the Canadian Studies Network Book Prize in 2017 and the Western Political Science Association Clay Morgan Award for Best Book in Environmental Political Theory. It also won an honourable mention from the Association & Anthropology, Legal Studies Association Book Prize. Pasternak is the co-author of three major Indigenous policy analysis reports published by the Yellowhead Institute, as well as numerous briefs on issues like critical infrastructure, international law, and abolition. She is a frequent contributor to national newspapers and magazines, receiving an honourable mention this year by the Digital Publishing Awards for her writing on the Wet'suwet'en conflict in 2020. She has also published academic writing in the South Atlantic Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, Antipode, The New Brunswick Journal of Law, and Environment and Planning D. She writes about resource extraction, Crown-First Nations fiscal relations, police, and the relationships between capitalism and colonialism.

Kevin Walby is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg. He has authored or co-authored articles in British Journal of Criminology, Qualitative Inquiry, Qualitative Research, Punishment & Society, Antipode, Policing and Society, Urban Studies, Surveillance and Society, Media, Culture, and Society, Sociology, Current Sociology, International Sociology, Social Movement Studies, and more. He is author of Touching Encounters: Sex, Work, and Male-for-Male Internet Escorting (2012, University of Chicago Press). He is co-editor of Brokering Access: Power, Politics, and Freedom of Information Process in Canada with M. Larsen (2012, UBC Press). He is co-author with R. Lippert of Municipal Corporate Security in International Context (2015, Routledge). He has co-edited with R. Lippert Policing Cities: Urban Securitization and Regulation in the 21st Century (2013, Routledge) and Corporate Security in the 21st Century: Theory and Practice in International Perspective (2014, Palgrave). He is co-editor of Access to Information and Social Justice with J. Brownlee (2015, ARP Books) and The Handbook of Prison Tourism with J. Wilson, S. Hodgkinson, and J. Piche (2017, Palgrave). He is co-editor of Corporatizing Canada: Making Business Out of Public Service with Jamie Brownlee and Chris Hurl (2018, Between the Lines Press). He is co-editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons.

Abby Stadnyk is a white settler scholar and community organizer based in amiskwaciy (also known as Edmonton, Alberta). She is a founding member of Free Lands Free Peoples (FLFP), an Indigenous-led anti-colonial penal abolition group, as well as the Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta Abolition Coalition (SMAAC), a prairie region abolition coalition. She has published in Perilous Chronicle, Canadian Dimension, Kite Line Radio, and The Media Coop. Most recently, she served on the editorial collective for a special issue of Briarpatch magazine on prison abolition, featuring the writing and artwork of incarcerated people in Canada and the United States.