Policing Black Lives

A comprehensive account of policing Black life in Canada and a vision for Black futures beyond surveillance and confinement.

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 livable 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 labor 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.

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. Her writing appears in Washington Post, World Policy Journal, the Toronto Star, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Woman Studies, and Critical Ethnic Studies among others.

• Publisher: Duke University Press (October 14, 2025)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 400 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781478033073
• Item Weight: 1.19 pounds
• Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9.1 inches