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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& #39;s and @j2oachim& #39;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& #39;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& #39;s book shows, the police attacked the students, killing Coralee Hutchison.
5/10 In the 1970s, as Paul Dejean& #39;s and J-C Icart& #39;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& #39;s reaction has always been to do as little as possible. During @Val_Plante& #39;s reign, that has meant doing nothing at all. If city leaders aren& #39;t ready to act they need to resign. #BlackLivesMatter 
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