Toronto and the ‘Paris problem’: community policing in ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’

Since 2005, references to the ‘Paris problem’ have become increasingly frequent among media pundits, urban policy-makers and police agencies to warn about the malaise of Toronto’s low-income, majority non-White neighbourhoods (referred to as ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’). A reference to the rebellion of the French banlieues against state power in France, the ‘Paris problem’ is code for the spectre of ‘race riots’ in Toronto. Here the author looks at the birth of the ‘Paris problem’ and examines the community policing strategies that were rolled out in its aftermath in Toronto. The article demonstrates how these were intertwined with urban policies of social development to which policing was integral. In this, policing needs to be understood holistically as not just coercive in function, but also as ‘productive’; that is, aimed at the manufacture of consent and ultimately of pacification of unruly populations. Underpinning these processes, and also engendered by them, is a racialised and territorialised security ideology crystallised around the figure of ‘the immigrant’ and the conception of ‘immigrant neighbourhoods’. At the heart of such policy-making is a corralling and containing of poor, working-class, ethnically defined communities – youth in particular – that serves to entrench division while maintaining heavy-handed state control.