Policing, Social Injustice and Decolonization

This study explores the emic concept of the “Frame Case,” arguing that it serves as an entry point in deconstructing and dismantling the colonial entanglements in contemporary systemic policing practices. Frame Case is a culturally specific term used by typically black and brown residents in criminally labelled communities—poor, working-class urban, suburban, and rural neighbourhoods—to describe experiences of how and why police officers falsely accuse, target, and arrest individuals for crimes they did not commit (Chapman 2019). Situated within the coloniality of power theory, I extend the definition of systemic policing entanglements to refer to the reproduction of colonial hierarchy, knowledge and cultural inequalities in contemporary practices of surveilling working-class communities (Müller 2019; Jackson et al., 2021). Utilising a narrative design and intertwining qualitative methods within a Caribbean-centric virtual environment, sixteen culturally relevant ‘on/lime and ole talk’ virtual sessions were conducted incorporating 15 semi-structured interviews with Frame Case survivors and knowledgeable observers and one chat-based focus group and archival data. The findings suggest that Frame Case both exemplifies and counters neo-colonial/systemic policing entanglements in 21st-century Trinidad and Tobago. I identified this dual connection guided by Hilde’s (2020) work on counternarrative analysis, demonstrating how master narratives uphold and re-enforce and counter-narratives challenge and resist the functioning of systemic policing. To address this multi-layered problem of Frame Case, this study proposes a community-led Frame Case non-governmental organisation that utilises decolonial principles to address the problem. The elements of this unique strategy comprise strategic activism targeting systemic policing institutions and advocating for the humanity, rights and redress to the issues of the Frame Case Survivors, a self-financing element in reducing economic dependency and fostering a sustainably led mission-driven social enterprise for community justice, as well as decolonising capitalism in structure and operations, particularly in its focus of prioritising social and economic needs over profit.