cop city swagger takes an etymological and theoretical dive into the words “safety” and “care,” questioning whose “safety” matters in the City of Vancouver. Spanning from 2019, near the beginning of the pandemic and the corresponding rise of anti-Asian hate crimes in the city, to 2023, the centennial year of the Chinese Exclusion Act, cop city swagger conducts an inquiry into Vancouver’s first Chinese Canadian mayor – the first Vancouver mayor to be publicly endorsed by the Vancouver Police Union – who promised to address “safety” by increasing the number of police officers on the streets.

Mercedes Eng is a prairie-born poet of Chinese and settler descent living in Vancouver on the unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Territories. Eng’s creative practice combines teaching in classrooms and on the ground, experiential knowledge, community organizing, independent study, and a hybrid poetics that deploys multiple forms of language from theory to memoir to historical and official state documents to art and photography. She is the author of Mercenary English, a long poem about sex work, violence, and resistance in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, winner of the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and my yt mama. Her writing has appeared in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry, Jacket 2, Asian American Literary Review, The Capilano Review, The Abolitionist, and r/ally (No One Is Illegal), Survaillance, and M’aidez (Press Release).

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