Capital, Colony, and Control: What Were the Police Actually Protecting?

📚Lecture: "Capital, Colony, and Control: What Were the Police Actually Protecting?"
🎤Speaker: Nick Paquin (MA in History and Museum Educator)

With frequent reports of police violence, abuse of power, killings, and the suppression of protests and Indigenous rights, many people say modern policing is broken, that this isn't what police are supposed to do. But is that true? Or is policing operating exactly as it was designed to just as it has since its beginnings?

In this lecture, we will explore the history of Canadian police, starting with its origins in the creation of the capitalist system of labour and continuing through English dominion over Ireland, Canadian westward expansion, participation in a Victorian-Era war on the other side of the planet, an underground Bolshevik conspiracy, amalgamation of power, illegal surveillance, and Disney.

Most commonly available police histories are written by police organizations, current or former cops, their families, or their fans. This is not that.

Nick Paquin is a museum educator having worked in several museums across the country. He got his BA in history at Carleton, and his MA in public history at uVic. For that Master's, he researched archived complaints against the police in BC from the late 60s and early 70s and compiled a history of our police based on the work of other historians and sociologists studying policing from social and progressive perspectives.

🍻Get a drink, connect and learn at Tipsy Scholars

Agenda

6:00pm - Doors open: Grab a seat, order drinks and food and settle in.

6:55pm - Host Introduction

7:00pm - Lecture starts

7:45pm - Q&A with Audience

8:00pm - Socialize and make friends, grab drinks