Unpacking The "Pre-Event" in By-Stander Video of Police Militarization Tactics on Un-Housed Communities.


Chante Barnwell, York University, Toronto

Exposed amongst the multiple waves of the COVID-19 pandemic was the proliferation of videos depicting the removal of encampments containing unhoused people in large cities across Canada. The Canadian Human Rights Commission defines Homeless encampments as “temporary outdoor campsites on public property or privately-owned land… [which] result from a lack of accessible, affordable housing”(Flynn et al., 2022,p.10). They further attest that Homeless encampments in Canada are not new, and exist at the axis of various policy failures and crises, including “the opioid crisis, racial injustice, police misconduct, and ongoing colonization”(Flynn et al., 2022,p.10). The video documentation of encampment dismantling and removal, taken by various community members and shared in the digital sphere, has called attention to the role video activism plays when acts of violence are unleashed on vulnerable populations by law enforcement bodies who utilize military-centric tactics. Military-centric law enforcement rose amidst domestic unrest and rioting within North America and beyond, where policing bodies became an “extension of intelligence gathering”(Robé, 2016,p. 163).Furthermore, this change provided the space for protests and their participants, to be seen as a direct threat to law enforcement, grouping it into a larger category that includes “terrorism, war, and violent crime”(Robé,2016, p. 163). Further, it has been said that video activism connects the “discursive topoi of counter-surveillance with counter-publics,” ultimately distorting the division between “witnessing and political action”(Simons, 2019, p. 23). Therefore, in my presentation, I will examine the video and social media activism of an organization that advocates for unhoused communities in Toronto, Canada. The video and case study at the center of my presentation captures the pre-event, not the event or the post-event, in the process of an encampment clearing by various state actors in the summer of 2021 at Lamport Stadium Park encampment in Toronto. I chose to explore the significance of video footage that captures the pre-events of police militarization intimidation tactics on vulnerable populations instead of the main event or the post-event because the latter events usually depict the active application of various levels of force by law enforcement and more the after-effects of this violence on vulnerable communities and their allies. I argue that video footage of the pre-event needs to be unpacked within Socio-Legal scopes and plays a critical role in contextualizing and understanding the main event and post-event. Moreover, the juxtaposition of daunting performative gestures of law enforcement against the affective intervention of community members’ publicly ridiculing law enforcement’s actions before contact contributes to a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between militaristic performances, community intervention and digital activism. This triangulation of elements directly speaks to scholar Ben Brucato’s arguments around chanting as a “shaming technique”(Brucato, 2016, p.14) and bystander watching as “an intercession”(Brucato, 2016, p. 2). To conduct my analysis, I utilized methodological approaches adapted from visual and sensory criminology frameworks to flesh out the nuances associated with the pre-event images of encampment clearing in this case study. Visual criminology is said to offer “a new center of analytical, theoretical, and methodological approaches from which to understand the power of the image of crime and punishment beyond the written and numeric”(Rafter and Brown, 2018). Similarly, sensory criminology expands on the notion of criminological analysis, grappling with “the totality of our sensory perception as crime and power routinely materialize in the senses”(McClanahan and South, 2020, p.17). Ultimately, I contend that videos capturing the pre-event of militarized law enforcement tactics on vulnerable communities in the digital sphere become a catalyst of accountability and a public forewarning of asymmetrical power hierarchies in community law enforcement interactions.

This paper will be presented at the following session: