Policing the Pandemic: Counter-mapping Policing Responses to COVID-19 across Canada

Abstract

Policing agents have been positioned alongside healthcare professionals as central actors in the COVID-19 pandemic response. Provincial and territorial emergency powers enacted simultaneously across Canada mandated physical distancing rules and the closing of non-essential businesses and public services; interprovincial and international borders were closed, with a mandatory quarantine for recent travellers imposed. The Policing the Pandemic Mapping Project (PPMP) was initiated in April 2020 to track, visualize, and understand the scale and scope of pandemic enforcement in Canada. The project was started out of concern that ongoing racist and classist patterns of enforcement evidenced in other criminal justice contexts would only reproduce themselves in new ways in the COVID-19 context. Conceived as an exercise in counter-mapping, data-activism, and interlegal analysis, the central goal of the project has been to scrutinize the role of policing actors in managing situations of crisis and disease. This article provides an overview of the ongoing work of the PPMP, our theoretical grounding, methods, and findings to date. We also reflect on the limits of the project, particularly with respect to the kinds of insights and data analysis techniques that can be used on publicly sourced data about law enforcement. In the discussion and conclusion, we develop several avenues for future research and reflect more broadly on what it means to engage in counter-mapping and data-activism.