The “Jamaican Criminal” in Toronto, 1994: A Critical Ontology

D’Arcy, Stephen

doi:10.22230/cjc.2007v32n2a1824

Cited by 24 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Given the febrile nature of Canadian multiculturalism the incident was interpolated into discourses about race and crime. Criminologists, who have longer memories than most for crime news, were able to draw parallels to another incident that had happened in Toronto more than 10 years previously, the so-called 'Just Desserts Murder' (D'Arcy, 2007). The incident took place on Tuesday 5 April 1994, in downtown Toronto, when a 23-yearold woman named Georgina Leimonis was shot and killed in a café known as 'Just Desserts'.…”

Section: Guns Crime and Social Order In Canada's Media Hall-of-mirrorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Guns, crime and social order

Sheptycki

2009

Criminology & Criminal Justice

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Canada has undergone intensive public debate concerning firearms over the past two decades, much of which has concerned the effectiveness of gun control legislation. Since about 2005 public discourse has focused increasingly on an upsurge in gun-crime perpetrated by street-level criminals. The article examines the projection of these concerns within the Canadian mass media and through official statistics. It shows that gun control legislation appears to have had a positive effect on gun-related crime in Canada, but that a residuum of gun-crime has remained. Evidence suggests that a process of pistolization is ongoing in some places, but that it is not a dominant strain. The article also looks at some examples of grassroots resistance to pistolization in Canada in some communities that are worst affected by street-level gun crime.

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Section: Guns Crime and Social Order In Canada's Media Hall-of-mirrorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Guns, crime and social order

Sheptycki

2009

Criminology & Criminal Justice

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“…Social-science representations of Downtown Kingston and Jamaican transnational crime cannot be seen as fully separate from either local or international popular cultural and journalistic depictions. Jamaican popular music, films and fiction share a strong emphasis on violence (see Thomas, 2011: 147), while local and international journalistic reports on poverty and crime have also tended to reinforce the reputation of Jamaica’s urban poor – and black male inner-city residents, in particular – as innately and excessively violent (Murji, 1999; D’Arcy, 2007). As Thomas notes (2014: 197), as a consequence of ‘ghetto porn’ representations of Kingston’s inner-city neighborhoods,the violence that occurs in these communities is seen as episodic and culturally derived rather than the result of structural and institutionalized political decisions over time [and] many Kingstonians (and Jamaicans, more generally) who do not live in downtown garrisons have a difficult time imagining people who do as being fully human […]Such considerations have also framed my representational choices in publishing on organized crime.…”

Section: The Specter Of Sensationalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing around violence: Representing organized crime in Kingston, Jamaica

Jaffe

2019

Ethnography

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Ethnographies of Latin American and Caribbean gangs tend to emphasize the violent practices of these social groups. My own research in Kingston, Jamaica, on criminal leaders known as 'dons', analyzed their entanglement with the Jamaican state and studied how their relations with inner-city residents resemble citizenship relations. While dons are undoubtedly directly associated with Jamaica's high homicide levels, they also provide social welfare and public order, and my work has focused principally on this relatively non-violent side of donmanship. In this article, I reflect on the factors underlying this particular representational emphasis, which has sometimes led to accusations of my 'romanticizing the dons'. Assessing these various factors, the article considers whether it is ethically justifiable and epistemologically sound to produce ethnographies of violent actors without dwelling in detail on their acts of violence. Given the skew in studies of criminal organizations, and of inner-city life, toward extensive description of and analytical attention to violence, I propose that producing ethnographic narratives that decenter it is in fact justifiable. In addition, studying criminal organizations through less common frameworks can open new avenues of exploration that may be obscured if we continue to satisfy popular and academic expectations of the centrality of violence.

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“…We're a better place than that. (Elliott, 2012) By identifying the shooting as a "neighbourhood social issue," the editorial isolated the "problem" from the rest of the city, facilitating the identification of "criminal" spaces, inhabited by "criminal" subjects (D'Arcy, 2007;Henry, Hastings, & Freer, 1996).…”

Section: Place and Criminalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“We must use every legal means to … put them behind bars, or to run them out of town”: Assembling citizenship deservingness in Toronto

Villegas

2018

JCRI

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This paper examines the assemblage and reassemblage of citizenship deservingness in Canada in the past few decades. By citizenship deservingness, I refer to the ways immigrant and racialized persons are accorded value and opportunity to access and retain formal citizenship status, including the right to remain in Canada. In order to make this argument, I examine the response to a 2012 shooting in Scarborough, an “inner suburb” of Toronto, Canada. I situate the shooting responses alongside policy and discursive changes that have made it easier to deport permanent residents from Canada if they have committed certain criminal acts. As scholars have noted, the targets of such policies are often the same individuals profiled and typecast as committing criminal acts—namely, immigrant and racialized men. In the Scarborough shooting, Jamaican men were specifically criminalized and targeted for exile from the city and country. My analysis demonstrates how, through this process, discourses of race and space came together to produce and legitimate policy changes that continue to erode the rights accorded to permanent residents and citizens.

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The “Jamaican Criminal” in Toronto, 1994: A Critical Ontology

Cited by 24 publications

References 8 publications

Guns, crime and social order

Guns, crime and social order

Writing around violence: Representing organized crime in Kingston, Jamaica

“We must use every legal means to … put them behind bars, or to run them out of town”: Assembling citizenship deservingness in Toronto

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