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Paper short abstract:

Algorithmic policing is the latest frontier of colonial aggression in Canada, and the Canadian state is invested. An analysis of Canada’s AI policy funding police departments in their technological integration is necessary to analyze the data economy as the new modality of Canadian imperialism.

Paper long abstract:

Algorithmic policing is one of the latest frontiers of colonial aggression in Canada, and the Canadian state is invested. My analysis engages both the literature on critical data studies with abolitionist epistemologies. I also want to advance a discussion on the next frontier of abolitionist concern in Canada as it concerns the carceral technologies of settler colonial states. The primary research questions animating my work are as follows: How do data and algorithmic technologies act as the carceral modality through which white supremacy is advanced, with policing as the apparatus affirming consolidating Canadian settler colonialism? How are the developments in predictive analytics in Canadian police departments extending the coloniality of the nation state through data surveillance into private life? My investigation aims to first evaluate the development of predictive policing in Canada in various Canadian cities. Second, interpret and theorize the legal conditions that facilitate a data market climate favorable for private firms to privatize, and profit from public data for private profit, something theorized as a new “data enclosures” by authors such as Mark Andrejovic. Third, to theorize how these data enclosures that presume data to be a free resource for monetization might reconstitute subjectivity of users by extracted from their labour and content of their intimate life. Lastly, to provide theoretical generalizations on how these case studies my points to a new extended form of coloniality by the Canadian nation state through algorithmic policing in the goal of securing national sovereignty.