“It's Communal Trauma”: Exploring the Individual and Communal Dimensions of Trauma Stemming From Encounters With Police SWAT Teams

The social harms of police militarisation in Canada have been relegated to the analytical margins. The exploratory literature investigating trauma stemming from encounters with police Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) teams largely emphasises the individual dimensions of this issue, but little is known about the broader communal impact of police militarisation. Informed by semi-structured interviews, this work investigates the lived experiences of trauma and mental health challenges among 25 informants with direct or vicarious encounters with SWAT teams. The results illustrate (a) the complexity of the mental health challenges facing participants including nightmares, flashbacks, and hypervigilance, among other challenges and that (b) Black participants situate their trauma relative to a communal trauma stemming from the history of anti-Black racism in Canada. The results not only demonstrate the racial dimensions of the social harms of police militarisation, but offer an avenue to critically interrogate the concept of the “ideal victim” to examine how these harms are obscured by larger institutional knowledge structures that racialise crime and buttress militarised policing.