Ted Rutland on Fady Dagher

Ted Rutland gives his thoughts on Fady Dagher and community policing, in a twitter thread.

The risk is that instead of providing community services, the city can simply provide police. I also like his point that “the police don’t so much work with communities as *produce* communities. The people and groups they work with become “the community,” a police-community alliance that informs and feeds the repression of non-allied community members.”

I remember being enlightened some years ago, in a piece concerning the experiences of Black people in Montreal, that journalists tended to talk airily about “the Black community” but that there wasn’t any such thing. There were anglophone Black folks, Haitians, Black francophones from Africa, and many Black people not fitting into any neat category, not all fitting into one tidy community definition.

Anyway, read the thread.

Dagher is promising a balance between repression and prevention.