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1/10 Anti-Black policing in Montreal has existed for centuries - as Black scholars have documented. In the 17th and 18th centuries, there was no formal police department. Enslaved Black people, however, were surveilled and policed by *all* white citizens.
2/10 The policing of enslaved Black people in Montreal is especially clear in the case of freedom runners, people who "stole away" by stealing themselves. Charmaine Nelson's and @j2oachim's writing on runaway slave ads documents this early period of anti-Black policing.
3/10 When a formal police dept was created in 1865, it incorporated existing anti-Black logics. Black cty orgs, like the Montreal branch of the UNIA, were especially targeted. As Leo Bertley's work shows, the police surrounded UNIA events and arrested Garvey on a 1928 visit.
4/10 Anti-Black policing continued in the 1960s. In 1969, Black students occupied the computer centre at Sir George Williams University to protest institutional racism. On the 13th day, as Denis Forsythe's book shows, the police attacked the students, killing Coralee Hutchison.
5/10 In the 1970s, as Paul Dejean's and J-C Icart's work shows, the police were especially brutal toward Haitians and Haitian activists. In 1979, the police attacked a group of Haitian youth playing soccer, leading to the first mass protests against police racism in Montreal.
6/10 The police brutalized other Black groups as well. Juanita Westmoreland-Traoré submitted a report to the City in 1979 that documented a range of police abuses, including attacks on Black community spaces and demands to see the immigration papers of Canadian-born Black people.
7/10 The height of anti-Black policing in Montreal occurred in 1987-93, when police killed Anthony Griffin, Preslie Leslie, Osmond Fletcher, Kirt Haywood (likely), Marcellus François, and Trevor Kelly. As Dorothy Williams and @UwokwaMugabo show, Black resistance was fierce.
8/10 The war on street gangs, begun in 1989, has provided a cover for anti-Black policing ever since. As the work of Anne-Marie Livingstone and MTLsansprofilage shows, police stops of profiled Black youth - which are off the charts - are often the prelude to escalating violence.
9/10 Between 2014 and 2018, the Montreal police killed another five Black men: Alain Magloire, René Gallant, Bony Jean-Pierre, Pierre Coriolan, and Nicholas Gibbs. A 2019 study found that Black Montrealers are 4x more likely to be stopped than white people.
10/10 Black resistance to racist policing in Montreal dates back centuries. The city's reaction has always been to do as little as possible. During @Val_Plante's reign, that has meant doing nothing at all. If city leaders aren't ready to act they need to resign. #BlackLivesMatter 
