Social Welfare or Social Warfare? Montreal’s Police “Mixed Squads” in the Neoliberal-Carceral Conjuncture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates the recently popularized police reform of "mixed squads" (or "co-response teams”) in which officers train, collaborate, and patrol alongside non-police workers such as social workers or mental health professionals. In response to political upheaval against policing, prisons, and criminalization, mixed squads have been portrayed—by the state, the media, and much of the academic literature—as a new approach to the management of marginality in public space (notably homelessness and mental illness), based on support rather than repression. Taking the city of Montreal as a case study and operating under the framework of conjunctural analysis, this thesis argues that mixed squads are the opposite of what they claim to be: they do not reduce police violence but rather extend it, and do not provide support to marginalized people but rather preclude it. A critical examination of the impact of mixed squads—based on an analysis of interviews with community workers, archival documents, and media coverage—reveals that mixed squads serve as 1) a public relations strategy to re-legitimize policing in the absence of meaningful reform, 2) an expansion of criminalization and repression, and 3) a form of counter-insurgency that disrupts, transforms, and replaces existing ecosystems of community care, weakening their ability to provide services and to foster political resistance to repression. Moreover, a historical analysis reveals that, far from being a progressive police reform, mixed squads are the result of the state's consistent refusal to enact progressive reforms. Mixed squads appear to be a legitimation strategy of the neoliberal-carceral state, threatened by its own failures and by growing political opposition, whose survival depends on the continued retrenchment of state support, expansion of state violence, and persecution of marginalized social groups. As such, mixed squads are a tool of sociopolitical struggle, intended to entrench policing as the main response to social inequality by erasing the symbolic, material, and institutional boundaries that distinguish support from repression, attempting to dissolve the former into the latter. This thesis recommends the elimination of mixed squads and the implementation of well-known, evidence-based solutions to police violence and social distress, which have been intentionally sidestepped in favour of mixed squads.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".