Constructed Police Knowledge on “Marginal Movements”. Montreal Police’s GAMMA Project
Contributing to the ever-growing sociological and criminological research on policing of protests and of those on society’s margins, this article analyzes the construction of police knowledge in the context of the implementation of the Montreal Police Department’s controversial GAMMA project. Created in 2010, the project was intended to track marginal and anarchist activities and movements in the city of Montreal. After a two-year-long legal debate, documents were obtained through provincial access to information legislation and show that, far from dealing only with events that could be criminalized, GAMMA’s implementation fundamentally involved problematization of the political marginality of social groups. Characteristics of marginal movements were implicitly considered to be visible indicators of possible criminality, as were specific political convictions and characteristics, which led GAMMA officers to be suspicious of members of such groups. The article explores the subjectivity of police knowledge that underlies the idea of institutionalizing, on a municipal scale, a differential response targeting specific marginal movements. Our results are discussed in the context of recent research on protest policing and marginality, particularly the concepts of “selective incapacitation”, “intelligent control”, and “landscapes of exclusion”.