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In October 2018, Canada legalized recreational cannabis. Key goals of legalization included reducing access by minors and eliminating the illicit market. Now, three years into the legal regime, important public policy questions are beginning to emerge. With police being tasked to enforce the Cannabis Act and associated provincial/territorial legislation, there is a critical need to understand their experiences, including the successes they have had, challenges they have experienced, and issues that remain unresolved. This paper begins to address these issues by presenting results from a qualitative study involving law enforcement personnel who, through their primary roles and responsibilities, have been actively involved in overseeing cannabis enforcement (in supervisory roles) since legalization in October 2018. Three key findings emerged from the analyses, and all were tied to the overarching perception that the illicit cannabis market has persisted since legalization: 1) there is a small but significant pattern of abuse of the medical system of production and distribution, specifically tied to designated grower provisions; 2) there are many challenges associated with halting online sales of illicit cannabis; and 3) the issue of unregulated sales of cannabis from Indigenous reserves remains a "hot button" political issue, in need of resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns surrounding the use of force by police officers appear to be growing, fuelled by perceptions that the police use force too frequently, research showing that force is applied disproportionately to members of certain groups, and the view held by some that the mechanisms for holding police responsible for unjustified force are inadequate. In this paper, we advocate for the creation of a national use-of-force database in Canada to gain a better understanding of these issues, adding our voice to those who have already been actively calling for this. We describe some of the potential benefits that would be associated with such a database, including the fact that it would enhance police transparency and accountability, while also increasing our understanding of when and why force is used and what strategies may be useful for reducing inappropriate applications of force. We also highlight some of the challenges we think would be encountered, including mandating nationwide participation, overcoming resistance from the police community, establishing sensible case inclusion criteria, and standardizing data collection. While these are significant challenges, we believe not only that they are possible to overcome but that doing so will provide real value to Canadian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era when reported hate crimes are increasing dramatically, it is troubling that there appears to be, at best, an uneven response to the problem from law enforcement in Canada. Our pilot study of policing hate crime in Ontario is the first attempt to understand whether and how law enforcement think about and act on hate crime. Interviews with officers in eight police forces across eastern and southern Ontario (N = 38) uncovered three clusters of factors that appear to shape how they manage hate crime: environmental, organizational, and individual. What we offer in this paper is a series of related recommendations for enhancing police responses to hate crime along each of the three dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era when reported hate crimes are increasing dramatically, it is troubling that there appears to be, at best, an uneven response to the problem from law enforcement in Canada. Our pilot study of policing hate crime in Ontario is the first attempt to understand whether and how law enforcement think about and act on hate crime. Interviews with officers in eight police forces across eastern and southern Ontario (N = 38) uncovered three clusters of factors that appear to shape how they manage hate crime: environmental, organizational, and individual. What we offer in this paper is a series of related recommendations for enhancing police responses to hate crime along each of the three dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the contemporary moment of Black revolt and the struggle to defund and abolish police in Canada and North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors discuss the importance of replication and reproduction studies to building an evidence base in policing research. This evidence base, they note, is important to the task of informing sound policy and practice in policing and in relation to community safety efforts more generally. Despite the recognized value of such work, a scoping analysis of peer-reviewed Canadian policing research published over the past 10 years reveals that very few researchers engage in research aimed at replicating other studies. Potential remedies are suggested in the paper's conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By examining the police's use of tasers in Canada, this paper attempts to gain some purchase on non-lethal policing: social relations created through non-lethal weapons (NLWs) and modes of force that get under the skin without breaking it. This paper maps out how discourses of "less" lethality, the Braidwood commission's recommendations, military NLW strategy and closed notions of community coalesce within Canada's national-security regime to authorize the use of non-lethal force while at the same time obfuscating the taser's non-lethal capacities, which cause people to fall down and their bodies to leak in unprecedented ways. In closing, this essay outlines what I call a non-containerizing politics of touch that challenges this national-security regime and allows new frameworks for using tasers to develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the contribution certain large Canadian cities may make to the over-representation of aboriginal people in the criminal justice system. The nine cities under study are large urban areas known in Statistics Canada terms as Census Metropolitan Areas (CMA's). The cities are located in eight provinces, and represent Western, Prairie, Eastern and Atlantic Canada. For the analyses, a variety of Statistics Canada and Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) data, as well as Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (CCJS) and Correctional Services Canada (CSC) data on aboriginal offenders and over-representation and other aboriginal criminal justice research, were analysed. The paper explores a number of theoretical concepts such as social disorganization, social learning theory, and posits others to understand the urban reality for aboriginal populations and, from that, regional variation in over-representation. Prairie cities appear to contribute disproportionately to the over-representation problem and advantage and disadvantage are disproportionately distributed in urban centres across the country. The nine cities are grouped into high, medium and low “contribution to over-representation” cities based on the demographics of their aboriginal populations. The paper suggests that more research is required to understand how advantage and disadvantage are bestowed on reserve and, by implication, on urban aboriginal populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion paper on policing has been the most widely distributed product of a broader initiative undertaken by the Ministry of the Solicitor General of Canada under the direction of AndréNormandeau of the Criminology Department of the University of Montréal and Barry Leighton of the Ministry Secretariat. Its purpose has been to review current trends and likely future directions for policing in Canada. The paper is the synthesis of consultations and background reviews of issues the results of which were presented in a national workshop held in October 1990. The purpose of this exercise was strategic in nature and in its authors' words, aims to provide a single coherent view of policing in Canada as it is likely to evolve over the next decade. This view is that of community-based policing. The authors claim that community-based policing is the object of growing consensus and that, furthermore, there exist no competing views if policing. Policing approaches of the past, identified in the document only as professional policing, are relegated to the position of historical artifacts. Professional policing is viewed by the authors as no more than a momentary hiatus in the history of policing strategies which, with the advent of modern community-based policing, return to their original and purer conception.

There is a consensus that some racial groups are over-represented in their contact with the Canadian justice system, but a lack of agreement about possible reasons for this over-representation. The two dominant explanations for disproportionate minority contact (DMC) with the police are differential involvement in crime and differential treatment by the police. Differential treatment may be due to disproportionate possession by minorities of risk factors for police contact or to discriminatory policing. This paper uses data on self-reported delinquency and police contacts from a representative sample of Canadian youth aged 12 to 17 years from the National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth to test the hypotheses that DMC is due to differential involvement or to differential treatment due to disproportionate risk factors. The results indicate that there was disproportionate minority contact with the police, but no support was found for explanations of DMC in terms of either differential involvement or differential treatment due to risk factors. Distinguishing between youth who report violent delinquency and all other youth, DMC was found only for the non-violent youth; this DMC was also not explained by differential treatment due to risk factors. By eliminating other explanations, the results suggest that racially discriminatory policing may be one explanation for DMC in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses nine years of youth court data to understand two different trends: increases in the proportion of youth court cases (found guilty) involving girls and few changes in the rate of finding girls guilty in youth court. It appears that the increased proportion of cases involving girls (found guilty) is due more to a decrease in the rate of finding boys guilty than to an increase in finding girls guilty. Thus, in understanding trends in the use of youth court, explanations should explore why it is that the rates for girls are relatively stable whereas the rates for boys, for property offences in particular, are decreasing. An explanation that assumes that rates of offending (or apprehension, or imposition of guilty findings) are increasing for girls will not, we suggest, fit the existing data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years the Canadian criminal justice system has been plagued by a number of high profile wrongful convictions. While each of these cases has raised serious questions concerning the justice process as a whole, particular attention has been directed towards the police and their ability to satisfy their dual mandate of investigating crime while protecting the interests, rights, and freedoms of the accused. One notable aspect of police operations that has come under increasing scrutiny in this regard is the police interrogation, a practice which is both upheld by police officers as a crucial means of gathering information and disposing of cases, and denounced by civil rights advocates as a serious threat to the standards of fairness and due process. In adopting the police interrogation as its object of study, this paper will argue that each of these characterizations are severely limited, and ultimately, misrepresentative of the more subtle functions of interrogative practices. Specifically, drawing upon the research literature in Britain, the United States, and Canada, the police interrogation will be conceptualized as an interactional medium in which commitments are fashioned to particular criminal identities and renditions of events in a manner that seeks to confirm and legitimate official police narratives. The implications of this constitutive, rather than merely coercive, function of the interrogation will be examined with particular attention to the issues of police accountability, and the limits of legislative reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of networks of governance beyond the state through an examination of the programs of one of the institutions of security within the University of Toronto, Ontario, the Personal Safety Awareness Office (PSAO). The analysis is aimed at exploring the ways in which three themes that have been identified in the literature as crucial features of contemporary governance--a focus on community, local responsibility, and a risk mentality--operate outside of established state structures. The analysis is based on two sources of data. The first source of data is comprised of lengthy discussions with the person who established and was responsible for running the PSAO for the six years of its existence. Secondly, the authors conducted an examination of PSAO files. As both of these data sources provide limited and filtered access to what really happened, the accounts provided both in the interviews and through the case files were analyzed for evidence of the nature of the programs for governing security the PSAO sought to realize. The authors use these programs to illustrate the sort of strategies for governing security that are emerging outside of police organizations.

This paper examines the precipitous drop in crime rates in Edmonton reported over the past two years. Previous analysis shows that the major reasons for changes in crime rates include: reduction in the numbers of the at-risk population: deterioration in the social and economic climate: changes in laws; alterations in access to police; and changes in the proactive nature of policing. The results of analysis of data drawn from official files and community surveys from one city indicate that the drop in crime rates are a function of declines in property crime reporting: administrative decisions taken to alter the access to police resources for the public; and a shift towards community policing with an emphasis on problem solving and crime prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the organizational demands of the native policing environment are examined to analyze their effects on native policing arrangements and the constraints and linkages that govern innovation and reform at the levels of policy and program development. It is argued that, as environmental conditions vary and change, current methods of organizing and delivering native police services will become increasingly problematic. Some of the key principles and issues that underlie policing models are discussed and examined in the native context. It is concluded that a community-based approach to policing is a promising strategy that may uniquely serve the interests and requirements of particular native communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the findings of a study of five years of Amerindian police occurrence reports. It examines the role of the police on twenty-five reserves in Quebec including police/population ratios and the service activities of police. It also examines crime rates and offender, offence, charging, and disposition characteristics of the cases. It concludes that community variation exists along a number of dimensions but that the role of police is similar in the provision of service. Charging and dispositions appear more severe than elsewhere but, without better information on prior record and how files are opened, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a preliminary description of the way in which problems of order are dealt with in three Northern Ontario Nishnawbe-Aski Nation communities. Data from interviews of community members, police occurrence reports, and court records were examined. People in the three communities differed, sometimes dramatically, in their estimates of how frequently various specific forms of disorder occurred in their communities. Similarly, they varied in their views of whether these problems should be dealt with by the community itself or by the police and courts. Not surprisingly, then, rates of various types of occurrences, as reported by the Ontario Provincial Police, also varied across communities. Official rates of charging residents of the communities varied across communities and across time. In 1988, for example, the number of charges per 100 residents was over five times as high in one of the three communities as it was in another. In 1990, however, the relative charging rates had reversed, with adult charge rates decreasing by almost 80% in one community and increasing by 187% in the other. A substantial portion of those interviewed in two communities indicated that they do not feel comfortable calling the police if there is trouble. Similarly, substantial numbers of those interviewed in two of the communities did not think that the court does what the community would like it to do. Overall. most people interviewed did not believe that most problems of order got settled in a satisfactory manner by the Euro-Canadian system. Clearly, problems of order within these communities are not being dealt with in a stable satisfactory manner. How they should be dealt with, however, is not clear. Given the variability that exists across communities, it seems likely that different solutions must be tailored to fit -- or must be made flexible enough to fit -- the needs and wishes of each unique community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]