Resisting ‘progressive’ carceral expansion: lessons for abolitionists from anti-colonial resistance

This article documents a government-led strategy to more closely integrate policing with community-based ‘crime prevention’ programming in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. These initiatives have targeted neighborhoods with large Indigenous populations. In this article I illustrate how community-level conflicts over responses to ‘crime’ are also sites of settler colonial conflict, and how settler colonial governance is reproduced and resisted through the governance of crime. Interviews with politicians, policy-makers, bureaucrats in the crime prevention branch of the provincial government, and directors and employees at community-based organizations suggest that the pursuit of the government strategy of integrated crime prevention and suppression has been more a project of attempting to ‘manage’ urban Indigenous people than serve their interests. As a contribution to abolitionist thought and theory, this article profiles sites of conflict between community police and community-based organizations over definitions of the ‘crime’ problem in city-center Winnipeg. These examples highlight a kinship between carceral abolitionist and decolonial politics.