Police Reform and the Epistemology of Ignorance

• In Event: 21009 - Policing & Surveillance

Abstract

Since 2020, police have formally acknowledged systemic racism in policing and insisted that they can adapt to demands for change. Taking the response of the Toronto Police Service to re-ignited community demands for racial justice as our example, this paper examines how police actively ignored community claims about the harms of policing and subsequent demands for defunding in favour of an approach that reasserted their epistemic authority. Drawing on Charles Mills’ theorization of white epistemologies of ignorance and Magda Boutros’ (2024) theory of the epistemic power of police, we argue that police reform is an exercise in epistemic injustice that relies on an epistemological framework that deliberately mishears and renders unintelligible the substantive grievances of those subjected to police violence.

Authors

• Timothy Bryan, University of Toronto

• Amanda Glasbeek, York University