Abstract

As profit-seeking consumption spaces, sustained by wage labor, local businesses generally em-brace neighbourhood police practices. Yet, whether business-police relationships differ across business spaces, has been largely undocumented and unexplored within the academic literature. This research uses North End, Halifax as a case study to investigate how businesses influence po-licing practices both within their own space and within the neighborhood more broadly. Using abo-lition as my geographical method, I study business spaces as potential commons: sites for prefigu-rative politics, or abolitionist geographies in the making, while remaining attentive to the ways business spaces resist these framings, and instead map on to carceral geographies. I carry out this analysis in the form of a three-part audio documentary series, included here as three written scripts. Interviews with business owners, business association board members, and long-term res-idents, living and working in the North End between the 1960s and today, populate these scripts, showing how diverse actors have mediated and understood safety, and policing, across time and space. Altogether, this research situates neighbourhood businesses within the complex Canadian landscapes of carcerality, while also aiming to document how these same businesses might, and have been, sites of radical placemaking and abolitionist futures to come.