The “Jamaican Criminal” in Toronto, 1994: A Critical Ontology

Abstract

On Tuesday, April 5, 1994, in downtown Toronto, a 23-year-old woman named Georgina Leimonis was shot and killed in a café known as “Just Desserts.” The fear surrounding the incident was bound up from the beginning with concerns about a peculiar category of person—the “Jamaican criminal”—because the suspect sought by police in connection with the killing, and later convicted and imprisoned for it, had immigrated to Canada from Jamaica during his early childhood. This article discusses the construction of the Jamaican criminal in the English language press through the lens of Michael Foucault’s concept of critical ontology.