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Marquis, Greg. 2016. The Vigilant Eye: Policing Canada from 1867 to 9/11. Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood Publishing. 272pp. Paperback. US$30.00. ISBN: 9781552668207.
Historian Greg Marquis's The Vigilant Eye: Policing Canada from 1867 to 9/11 provides one of the first comprehensive overviews of police operational history in Canada. There is arguably no better scholar than Marquis to write such a book, a historian with over three decades experience researching Canada's unique history of policing. The Vigilant Eye is about the complex, variegated history of operational policing in this country, but it is also a book about surveillance. Synthesizing nearly 150 years of police history, Marquis uses the metaphor of the "vigilant eye" to highlight longstanding trends in the history of Canadian policing away from more explicitly violent, aggressive tactics toward subtler, intrusive means of surveillance embodied in anti-terror laws and the growing adoption of intelligence-led policing tactics.
Marquis's project is ambitious, motivated by the "lack of a basic overview of the development of Canadian law enforcement" in the literature (pg. 3), but his accessible writing style and narrative approach keeps the reader from getting lost or feeling overwhelmed by the breadth of data. Marquis focuses specifically on the operational history of public police, though he does acknowledge the importance of the ballooning private security industry at several points in the book. Although Marquis does not take an explicit theoretical stance in the introduction, where he briefly compares what he calls "Whig" and "Marxist-inspired" theoretical explanations of policing (pgs. 4-5), by Chapter 1 it becomes clear that Marquis sides with more critical schools of thought. Throughout the book, Marquis remains skeptical of the official rationales championed by police and is not one for sugar-coating the numerous issues of police racism, colonization, criminalization of dissent, sexism and homophobia, and civil liberties abuse that continue to plague police relations in Canada today. That each of these issues is "rooted in past practices and attitudes" (pg. 3) makes Marquis's book all the more timely and compelling.
The Vigilant Eye consists of six chapters, an epilogue, and an index. Each chapter...