Policing, surveillance, and state violence

Policing practices institutionalized the surveillance of Black movement from slave-patrol logics through vagrancy and prostitution laws that criminalized Black women’s presence in public space, and later through drug prohibition layered onto already over-policed neighbourhoods (Maynard, 2025). The cumulative effect is a system calibrated to find crime where it chooses to look, generating statistical outcomes that rationalize further targeting, a self-fulfilling loop that compounds survivors’ trauma when institutions tasked with protection are experienced as agents of humiliation and harm. These policing patterns shape today’s homicide context by intensifying distrust, reducing cooperation, and diminishing clearance rates, with direct consequences for Black victims’ access to justice. Together, these histories clarify how Canadian institutions came to mark Black bodies as dangerous in advance while simultaneously discounting Black victimization, and help explain why reporting, homicide clearance rates, and service uptake remain shaped by mistrust grounded not in perception but in demonstrable legal and political precedent. What follows examines how these foundational assumptions about who counts as a victim continue to shape the experiences of Black survivors of gun violence and homicide loss.