Maintaining Order
We must abandon the myth that carceral logic = public order
I often think about how we glorify the idea of “maintaining order” in the northern hemisphere, as if it’s synonymous with safety. But what we call “order” is often a palatable way to describe the management of poverty—most commonly through the criminalization of survival and the aesthetic sanitization of cities in the name of capitalist interest.
Few things comfort liberal whiteness and performative benevolence like the fabrication of “clean” urban centres that preserve Canada’s reputation by smoothing poverty out of the frame and rendering certain lives unseeable. The mechanism that keeps so-called Canada running seamlessly—a booming economy, immaculate tourism industry, profitable real estate—relies on ensuring that suffering is kept out of sight.
The other weekend, I stopped at a park in Surrey for a walk with my son and partner. As we parked, we noticed two bylaw officers dismantling a tent, packing up and throwing away someone’s belongings near the perimeter of the parking lot. Whoever had been staying there didn’t appear to be nearby, but the tent and sleeping equipment clearly belonged to someone who had slept there overnight.
As I approached, silently deciding what to say, one of the officers approached me first. Seconds before, I had mindlessly taken a puff from my vape in the parking lot when he scolded me. And I’m paraphrasing:
“There are strict rules in all Surrey parks. No vaping allowed. There are children around.”
There were no children around.
The only children were about a football field away on a playground.
The irony was right in front of me. Blatant.
My vaping, nowhere near children, was treated as an immoral act of indecency. Meanwhile, the officers were actively dismantling what was very likely someone’s entire home, throwing their belongings into bags.
For what it’s worth, as a parent myself, I am far more concerned about the normalization of disposability than an adult vaping in a park.
Whether we consider Surrey, Vancouver, Toronto and much of the Global North, we place enormous value on the idea of “maintaining order.” But what even is “order” anyway?
It has never been about the morally pure façade it claims to uphold, but about deciding which forms of disorder are deemed intolerable and which forms of violence are normalized as the collateral cost of capital and “business as usual.” That designation is how wealth protects itself, how power remains intact.
The public sphere is saturated with white nationalist grievance (as if they ever cared about their “own”), manic hockey fans, algorithmic frenzies, and misogynist tech-bro noise that lulls the public into political sedation. Bread and circuses.
A puff from a vape in open air? Disorder.
A tent in a park? Disorder.
A harm reduction site that prevents death? Disorder.
Cue the pearl-clutching: “think of the children.”
Wholesome events like Drag Queen story time and transgender people simply existing? Suddenly: danger. Outrage.
Manufactured hysteria: Suddenly the fragile male variety become keen advocates for the safety of children while failing to recognize themselves as complicit misogynist actors normalizing the ever so acceptable yet perverse “is she 18 yet?”
A shelter or community space that treats people who use drugs like human beings? A public emergency. A scandal. A crisis. “What has this city come to?” Shut it down—“for the children.”
But mass displacement. Toxic drug deaths. Wage theft. Corporate extraction. Environmental racism. Police violence. The slow grinding down of poor communities continues on an industrial scale, justified as the necessities of capital and the maintenance of order.
People move through the world outraged at the existence of shelters, harm reduction, and tent cities, as if those they bow down to don’t have blood on their hands. As if the real danger is poverty being visible to children, not poverty being produced.
This is how administrative violence works. It doesn’t need to look like an evil villain to be brutal. It only needs to feel normal to the public gaze.
Policing is a massive public expense in the billions across the United States and Canada, yet remains largely untouchable, continuing with little meaningful scrutiny. Budgets skyrocket while every other life-saving service is forced to justify its existence as if it were a luxury. As recent events have shown, the state can axe funding whenever it sees fit, regardless of how many lives are saved or placed at risk.
In No More Police, Mariame Kaba writes about the way funding is allocated in the United States. Annual police funding ranges between $50 and $100 billion, including programs like the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which channels funding to police and prosecutors to address sexual violence (Kaba, No More Police, 2021, pp-90-130). Yet despite decades of investment, rates of sexual violence have not declined in a meaningful, sustained way.
In Canada, policing operates at a similarly enormous scale relative to its population: nearly $20 billion annually. Municipal forces like the Toronto Police Service exceed $1 billion per year, making policing one of the largest single budget items in major cities.
And in Vancouver? The VPD are known to strategically generate overtime pay, costing taxpayers roughly $39 million in 2024 alone.
The Structure of Police Violence
The mythology of policing depends on one thing: that police violence is an anomaly. We’re usually face with narratives of “bad apple”. “tragic mistakes”. “a one-off”.
But examples exist across Canada, and the pattern is consistent: deadly force, limited accountability, and a public trained to move on.
In Campbell River, RCMP murdered Jared “Jay” Lowndes in a Tim Hortons parking lot in 2021, and officers ultimately did not face charges.
In Calgary, police shot and killed Latjor Tuel, a South Sudanese refugee, in 2022. In 2024, Alberta’s police watchdog ruled officers were justified, which was a decision that left many community members questioning what “accountability” even means in this country.
From afar, Vancouver sells an image of scenic uniqueness: ocean and mountain views, progressive branding, “kindness” as identity. It is routinely applauded as “ahead” on harm reduction, held up through Insite, North America’s first supervised consumption site.
People point to the Downtown Eastside and say one of two things:
“See, this city knows how to show up.”
Or:
“These junkies get free drugs and they’re taking over the city. This drug problem must be dealt with once and for all.”
Neither is true.
If “free drugs” were reality, we would be closer to ending the toxic supply crisis—which has killed over 53,000 people in this country as of December 2025. What actually works is expanded evidence-informed prescribing, pharmaceutical alternatives, and community-led compassion clubs. But that is not what is happening.
Misinformation persists because it serves a purpose: manufacturing outrage and granting social permission to dehumanize people already living in a system that depends on keeping them out of sight.
Abolition organizing has taught me that care and control have always existed in tandem.
Like all police gangs, the VPD does not primarily respond to violence. It defends property, capital, corporate interest, and manages visibility to maintain Vancouver’s aesthetic façade. It enforces who are worthy of being seen, where they can exist, and when their suffering becomes unacceptable.
The war on drugs: bureaucratized.
In British Columbia, decriminalization came and went amid moral panic. The war on drugs did not end, it was bureaucratized.
Instead of mass arrests alone, we now see:
increasing street sweeps
ongoing police seizures
expanded surveillance
forced displacement
area restrictions
hostile infrastructure
constant pressure to “move along”
The message is clear: you do not belong here.
Overt police violence isn’t only the dramatic type of force. It also appears through routine practices.
Research co-authored by Tyson Singh Kelsall and colleagues showed that despite publicly claiming otherwise, police drug seizures during the decrim model’s expansion in Vancouver and Surrey, and found that police regularly confiscated drugs from people who use drugs without making arrests. Confiscation doesn’t end drug use. It forces people back into the unpredictable illegal market & risk of further harm, during a toxic supply crisis where potency fluctuates and violence is probable.
Drug seizures have never eliminated risk. In fact in many cases officers are well aware of the fact that the so called “suspect” may owe money for the substance seized, which, under street politics puts them in danger.
And still, society expresses more outrage toward harm reduction sites, safer supply interventions and other more “radical” initiatives (despite effectively reducing harm), than state practices that actively increase overdose vulnerability; like prohibitionist acts of drug seizures.
The language remains clinical, administrative, even compassionate at times. “We’re doing our best.” “We’re following the evidence.”
But the reality continues. Violent containment of poverty so the city can keep feeling orderly, and undisturbed.
The familiar machinery.
Budgets pass.
Operations proceed.
Encampments are cleared.
Belongings are destroyed.
People are displaced.
The machinery keeps moving.
Rose-coloured film.
Aestheticized violence.
Naming cruelty does not stop it.
Weaving in buzzwords, pronouns and land acknowledgements won’t unbleed our streets. They won’t reverse the under-acknowledged collective grief we haven’t been able to process because it has never stopped. It has already been normalized.
One of the clearest examples of class hypocrisy that Mariame Kaba writes of is the abysmal response to wage theft. Employers stealing wages that are legally owed (Kaba, No More Police, 2021, pp. 30-50). It’s a type of harm that fractures families and communities over time leading to the type of poverty, trauma and isolation that causes encampments, petty theft and substance use.
But police don’t raid corporate offices for wage theft and the subsequent likelihood of survival crime. If addressed at all, it’s slow, bureaucratic, ineffective.
And then there’s the absurd legal landscape of miscellaneous harm:
Don’t roll dice on the sidewalk,
But by all means gamble in a casino where the ‘man’ legally preys upon your demise.
Same activity. Different moral framing and classist-racialize context.
Kaba further points to where harm is routinely concentrated yet rarely policed as such, Wall Street, corporate boardrooms, fraternities—spaces where exploitation, financial harm, and sexual violence are well documented, yet remain largely outside the scope of what we call crime (Kaba, No More Police, 2021, pp, 30-50).
The enforcement gaze doesn’t move upward toward power. It stays fixed on poverty, survival, and those already rendered suspect.
Police do not raid corporate offices for wage theft. When addressed, it is slow, bureaucratic, ineffective.
Same activity. Different class and racialized context. Different moral framing. Different outcome.
We should be well established by now that policing was never actually implemented for true public safety but as an effective tool that maintains “order” in service of the predatory class.
The sedation of distance
If you’ve reached this far, it may be that you care. We cannot settle for defunding the police as it ends up serving as an aesthetically watered down version of itself while maintaining the same system. It’s like gouging a wound and pretending it is healing.
Under an individualist world where we are taught complacency through normalized wool over our eyes but,
Distance acts like a sedative. When harm is not close enough to touch, it becomes easy to ignore. Individualism narrows care to proximity.
We must resist that.
I once believed desensitization meant strength. That it proved I could keep walking through fire. Resilience. It felt like a virtue. But desensitization is adaptation, not resilience.
And the system depends on that kind of adaptation. It thrives on fatigue, on numbness, on confusion between resignation and wisdom.
Thinking back to that moment in the Surrey park, the contradiction feels undeniable.
A vape was treated as a threat to public decency. A home being dismantled was treated as governance.
That is what manufactured compliance and maintaining order looks like in practice: small moral infractions policed with urgency, while entire communities are cast as threats and structural violence unfolds visually subtle (desensitization helps ease the effect), yet still in plain sight.
Above all, order is what people call it when power stays exactly where it is.
So the question becomes: are we willing to share power with those this system renders unseeable?
The call is to move beyond theory.
Show up. Organize. Commit to mutual aid. Be inconvenient. Defend harm reduction. Fight displacement. Interrupt sweeps. Support peer-led solutions. Demand resources move toward housing, healthcare, income, and community care.. in places where safety is actually made.
And remain in a state of resistance.