Small-c conservatism is defined by several core characteristics. Among them, opposition to social change, a worldview that assumes a violent state of nature, an assumption that violence is necessary to uphold social order against threats of chaos, and hostility toward outsider groups, who are treated as signs of social change or disruptions to traditional social and power structures. In theory, conservatism can animate the ideas of any political community. Yet in a settler state such as Canada, conservatism is expressed in defence of a racial hierarchy in which the culture, values, behaviours, and wealth associated with whiteness shape the normative milieu that is under threat (and must therefore be defended).

The defence (or reproduction) of these values shares another name: white supremacy. While many associate the term with neo-Nazis and the far right, white supremacy is better understood as the mainstream, normative system where expressions of “the normal” are, in fact, derived predominantly from the experiences of white, settler, consumer classes. Conservative politics provide the most structured grammar for upholding the right to white supremacy, but white supremacy is not limited to one or two political parties: it is the dominant political mode of social understanding in Canada. White supremacy embeds a series of values associated with individualism, processes of civilization and progress, perceptions around work ethic and personal responsibility, and notions of acceptable types of bodies and embodiments—all of which shape a system of epistemic racism where bodily hierarchies structure the social. As products of European, white social structures, these values are recirculated in Canada as “normal” forms of being. And these norms are a powerful social force: they define good and bad citizenship and inform how those who are lower on the social hierarchy of white supremacy are subject to various tactics of control. Notably, the violence of policing.

Not surprisingly, research on police culture has pointed out that police organizations have deeply embedded conservative cultures and police officers hold conservative values. Robert Reiner’s The Politics of the Police is well regarded as providing one of the first systemic typologies of police culture research. Reiner outlines seven core features of police culture: mission, suspicion, isolation/solidarity, police conservativism, machismo, racial prejudice, and pragmatism.2 Although Reiner’s typology was built largely on police ethnography research from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, the typology remains relevant both for understanding research on police and interpreting the actions of police officers and agencies.

Perhaps the most notable characteristic, in the context of defunding or abolishing police, is that of isolation/solidarity. Policing research demonstrates a fascinating duality in which police officers consider themselves social outsiders, but that feeling of isolation then produces intense in-group solidarity within policing cultures. According to Reiner, this duality leaves police often feeling misunderstood, attacked, and underappreciated by the broader public (a theme that has proliferated in contemporary claims that police are victims), while creating greater solidarity among police (and other violence workers like prison guards) who regard their in-group as the only people who truly understand their noble cause.

This theme of isolation/solidarity is perhaps becoming ever more relevant with what has been called the “new visibility” of policing: the use of cell phones and social media to shed light on practices of police violence that have traditionally gone unrecorded.3 Police now regularly complain about the impacts of public scrutiny associated with violence caught on camera, even fuelling what has been called a “Ferguson effect” by which police claim to no longer respond to calls when they feel the risk of being recorded.4 These police efforts to cast themselves as victims of an unsympathetic public demonstrate the core idea of the isolation characteristic: police feel that nobody understands their work, their struggles, their victimization.

In perhaps the most iconic form of white fragility, the state’s marshals of violence regularly attempt to challenge the public response to specific events of police brutality as violent attacks against their institution. An illustrative performance of these tactics is a viral video of NYPD police union leader Mike O’Meara’s rant at the height of the 2020 mobilizations in New York, when police violence was being widely discussed on social media and in mainstream media. O’Meara celebrates the noble work of police officers by denying the existence of racial violence, goes on to blame media, saying “everybody is trying to shame us” by “treating us like animals and thugs,” and then concludes that police are the real victims of violence because “nobody talks about all the police officers who were killed last week.”5 Similar expressions of police victimhood are all too common; they represent an effective tactic to deflect attention away from police violence and its impacts on the communities targeted by policing.

In step with the defunding and abolitionist movements, during the wave of mobilizations that took place during the spring and summer of 2020, police also made extensive use of social media in order to circulate claims of attacks on police, looting, and alleged criminality. As strategic interventions, these efforts are representative of a long-standing practice of police organizations to frame public knowledge and opinions around crime and—given the rise of social media—part of a larger effort to re-establish control over policing and crime narratives. Some policing scholars have described these strategies as forms of “image work”: the performative strategies used by police that are seamlessly recirculated by sympathetic media platforms to reproduce favourable imagery of the police as “guardians of symbolic order.”6

In their classic text Policing the Crisis, Stuart Hall and his co-authors describe police acting as the “primary definer” of media representations about criminality during the 1960s and ’70s.7 Showing the racialized character of these representations, the authors argue that police image work functions to strategically direct attention away from issues of injustice—like economic inequality, colonialism, racism, or corruption—by promoting visions of disorder and, in particular, the threat of Black criminality that political and media elites associated with radical US social movements of those decades.

By twinning social movements with the threat of criminality, the institution of policing functions as an “ideological conductor” for a range of conservative politics associated with the early iterations of a “tough on crime” stance. Policing the crisis did not merely include the police violence and brutality directed toward progressive movements, but also the ideational control of the public (and in particular the white consumer class) expressed through the threat of crime and the nobility of the police. More than forty years after the analysis offered in Policing the Crisis, these conservative values have become widely normalized through the popularity of mass incarceration and racial capitalism.

As the movement for defunding grows, so do claims of police victimization and the articulation of police as the “thin blue line.” Tyler Wall has described how the “thin blue line” represents an assemblage of ideas and associations that convey—explicitly and esoterically—how contemporary capitalist society would be impossible to maintain without the police.8 A deeply conservative worldview that is nonetheless prolific among liberal political circles, the notion presents the police as the only social instrument that protects deserving citizens—itself a racialized construction based on the norms of whiteness—against violent and predatory others. While politicians and police agencies in Canada are astute enough to (mostly) stay clear of official Blue Lives Matter rhetoric and the banner of the “thin blue line,” their representations of crime and social disorder are implicit mechanisms to recirculate the same conservative values of the police as essential and noble social guardians. Even self-identifying progressive organizations recirculate the ideational values of the “thin blue line” and balk at concrete actions that disrupt the institutional power of police.

The police suppression of social movements in Canada especially illustrates the active function of police in upholding conservative politics while simultaneously delegitimizing and demobilizing movements that seek to challenge and replace that order. Scholars in Canada, likewise, have demonstrated how police organizations have a history of targeting Indigenous people, Black people, and people of colour, queer and trans communities, and a broad array of leftist groups.9 While police often make public claims to be neutral or merely enforcing laws, research using Access to Information requests has documented the extensive ties between policing and extractive agencies.10 Policing in Canada has always functioned, as Shiri Pasternak notes in this collection, to advance the settler colonial “ideology of conquest, removal, and dispossession.” A contemporary iteration of colonial practices to support extractive companies and other corporations includes police agencies explicitly rationalizing the need for interventions in the name of progress, economic development, and protection against criminality and “extremism.”11 Antifa, Black Lives Matter, decolonial movements, and other initiatives are emerging targets of police suppression, likely due to their effectiveness at reaching a broader public and mobilizing specifically against police power.

It is precisely the ability of Indigenous communities and the Black Lives Matter movement to articulate alternatives to existing models of policing and white supremacy that fuels police suppression of these groups. The work of reimagining policing (in both its specific and ideational forms) that is necessary for the success of the defunding and abolitionist movements cannot be advanced without first acknowledging the settler colonial roots of policing. In Canada, the m...