Being Black in Southern Alberta.


Ibrahim Turay, Lethbridge College and University of Lethbridge

Knowledge of the often-negative experiences of people of African descent from their encounters with police in Canada tends to be informed primarily by academic literature from the United States (US) and the Province of Ontario, making it seem incidences of police violence directed towards Black Canadians are, for instance, not prevalent in the Canadian prairie provinces. This paper represents a chapter in my dissertation project aimed to amplify the voices of self-identified Black youth, aged 16-30, in Southern Alberta of their experiences from their encounters with police in Lethbridge, Calgary, Brooks, and Medicine Hat. Using a Critical Race Mixed Methodology consisting of an online perception survey and interviews, I created 37 cases that I analyzed in NVivo, using an intersectional Counter-Storytelling framework. Findings from this study suggest the type of policing they experience is associated with their identified city of residence and gender. For example, those who identified as women, who were also Black youth from Lethbridge, were more likely to experience subtle forms of police violence, ranging from dismissiveness to harassment and intimidation. In contrast, participants from Calgary who predominantly identified as men were more likely to experience physical and hostile police violence, ranging from handcuffing to having firearms aimed at them. Thus, I found that anti-Black police violence is as much a problem in Southern Alberta as in larger cities like Toronto or Ottawa, Ontario and that covert police violence happened more to the participants and significantly impacted them.

This paper will be presented at the following session: