Disarm, Defund, Dismantle
Police Abolition in Canada
New!
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.
Contributors
Shiri Pasternak
Shiri Pasternak is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto and a first-generation Canadian of the Jewish diaspora. She is a member of Toronto Abolition Convergence and has been active in Indigenous solidarity movements for many years as a founding member of organizations like Barriere Lake Solidarity, Indigenous Sovereignty and Solidarity Network, the Anti-Colonial Committee of the Law Union of Ontario, and Defenders of the Land. She is also co-founder and inaugural Research Director (2018–21) of the Yellowhead Institute, a First Nation–focused think tank based out of Toronto Metropolitan University.
Kevin Walby
Kevin Walby is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Winnipeg. He is co-editor of Brokering Access: Power, Politics, and Freedom of Information Process in Canada with Mike Larsen (2012, UBC Press). He is co-author with Randy K. Lippert of Municipal Corporate Security in International Context (2015, Routledge). He has co-edited with Lippert Policing Cities: Urban Securitization and Regulation in the 21st Century (2013, Routledge) and Corporate Securityin the 21st Century: Theory and Practice in International Perspective (2014, Palgrave). He is co-editor of Access to Information and Social Justice with Jamie Brownlee (2015, ARP Books). He is co-editor of Corporatizing Canada: Making Business Out of Public Service with Brownlee and Chris Hurl (2018, Between the Lines). He is co-editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons.
Abby Stadnyk
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 Indigenousled 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 Co-op. 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.
