The bestselling first edition of Policing Black Lives became a mainstay of bookshelves and classrooms across North America and Europe as the first comprehensive account of the state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. This revised and expanded edition updates the original text in the wake of global Black uprisings in 2020 and offers new insights on how to build liveable futures without policing.

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, award-winning scholar and activist Robyn Maynard traces the afterlives of slavery across multiple institutions. Maynard sheds light on the state’s role in perpetuating colonial dispossession, racial profiling, police killings, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as the ubiquity of Black resistance. 

The first new chapter meticulously documents how half a century of police reforms have served to undermine Black freedom struggles while expanding the scope and scale of policing in Canadian society. In the second, Maynard advances a compelling vision for making policing obsolete and building new forms of safety.

À propos de l'auteur

Maynard, Robyn

Robyn Maynard is an author and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto-Scarborough. Her writing on borders, policing, abolition and Black feminism is taught widely in universities across Canada, the United States and Europe.

Maynard’s first book, Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, is a national bestseller, designated as one of the “best 100 books of 2017” by the Hill Times, listed in The Walrus‘s “best books of 2018,” shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award, the Concordia University First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction, and the winner of the 2017 Errol Sharpe Book Prize. In 2018 the book was published in French, titled NoirEs sous surveillance. Esclavage, répression et violence d’État au Canada, and won the 2019 Prix de libraires. Her second book, Rehearsals for Living, co-authored with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, is a Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and CBC national bestseller and was shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award for literary non-fiction, a Toronto Heritage Award, and designated one of CBC’s “best Canadian non-fiction books of 2022” and the “best 100 books of 2022” by the Hill Times. Other awards include “2018 Author of the Year” from Montreal’s Black History Month and the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQI* Emerging Writers.