Secure and Monitor: Racial Regimes of Property and Policing in Gentrifying Halifax

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between gentrification and policing by considering how regimes of property and policing produce racial subjects. To do so, we draw together recent scholarship on racial regimes of property and a more established literature on community policing. We then use this work to trace how regimes of property and policing overlapped in a gentrifying neighbourhood of Halifax, Canada. Here, regimes of property and policing both encouraged white homeowners to see the neighbourhood as their own and gave them opportunities to act on this perception. The same two regimes constructed the Black tenants of the neighbourhood's largest public housing complex as the antithesis of white homeowners, making them the targets of increasingly invasive property and policing practices as gentrification proceeded. The tenants, however, also maintained forms of ‘non‐propertied’ collective life in and against these regimes, prefiguring a world beyond property, policing and their violent intersections.