(CRM3a) Safety, Inclusion and the Future of Policing I

This session will feature research that explores policing practices and community wellness. Existing challenges surrounding the themes of policing, community, safety, inclusion, diversity, and social problems will be further discussed. Tags: Criminologie, Police

Organizers: Doug Thomson, Humber College, Emma Smith, Humber College; Chairs: Doug Thomson, Humber College, Emma Smith, Humber College

Presentations

Doug Thomson, Humber College; Emma Smith, Humber College

Policing and the Community: The Internal Threat to Success

A restructuring in the Toronto Police Service’s Neighbourhood Community Officer Program (NCOP) is causing significant internal and external effects across the city. Out of the seventeen Divisions in Toronto, the Community Response Unit (CRU) has been eliminated in all but three. The reduction of the CRU, tasked with general patrol duties and low-level community interactions, has seen an increased shift in responsibilities for the Neighbourhood Community Officers (NCOs). Pulled away from their designated neighbourhoods, the everyday work of NCOs is now limited and damaged. It takes months of community interaction to build trust and positive relations in a neighbourhood, and the shift in the NCO duties has affected these relations. The NCOP has been extremely successful since its inception in 2013, with strong community support and praise from Judge Epstein (2021) in her "Missing and Missed: Report of the Independent Civilian Review into Missing Person Investigations". The NCOP focuses on building lasting support resources and has been developing strong community ties in high-risk communities. A success built on the principles of taking time to listen to community members and take a ground up approach to problem solving. Through a series of focus groups with NCOs in 2023 and 2024, officers opinions were gathered about the elimination effects of the CRU and the future of their NCO role in urban policing. This feedback highlights the importance and gradual impact of policy decisions on the role of front-line officers. The participants report that they are no longer able to perform their duties as NCO’s with a community support focus, instead they are spending their time engaged in higher level general patrolling, policing events and buildings. With reference to previous reports assessing the NCO program (Webber et al., 2017; Thomson et al., 2021), this research calls for greater transparency and awareness of the essential policing strategies needed to support healthy and growing communities.

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Non-presenting author: Alessya Miceli, Humber College

Sophia Pacini, McMaster University

Understanding Public Perceptions of Police Across Data

This presentation critically analyses the confidence levels that members of the public have in Canadian police and the contradictions that occur across findings on public perceptions of the police. The public’s confidence in the police is declining on a global scale, with countries such as Canada not experiencing an increase in the public’s trust for 50 years. These findings are most prevalent among marginalized and low-income community members while they are less prevalent among those who identify as white, high-income, or among individuals who know a police officer. However, interactions with the police do not translate congruently across all races and levels of income, and empirical findings on the levels of confidence that community members have in the police can be contradictory and translate differently across studies. This phenomenon raises questions including 1) How do different data collection methods affect the ways in which data is collected? 2) Who is participating in the study? 3) Who is not participating in the study? 4) How do the ways in which people complete surveys influence findings? In order for sociologists to adequately understand why phenomena occur, and subsequently how to address such phenomena, the way in which studies are conducted must be further examined. Drawing on data from the General Social Survey, 2020 [Canada]: Cycle 35, Social Identity, as well as community data from Humber College’s research on the Toronto Police Service’s Neighbourhood Community Officer Program, this presentation critically analyses findings related to public perceptions of the police among marginalized and low-income community members. This presentation will also analyse how findings on community perceptions of the police do not always align with public or scholarly narratives. Moreover, this presentation will highlight the contradictions between the results of studies conducted on public perception of the police, and attempt to discuss why such contradictions occur and how these contradictions could be avoided. 

Devin Pratchler, University of Saskatchewan

On s.810.2 Peace Bonds: Reintegration, Risk Management, and Harm

After his release from prison in 2017, Curtis McKenzie was rearrested, but not for a new offence; rather, McKenzie was now the subject of a Section 810 Peace Bond. McKenzie openly struggled with substance use and, although he was now a “free man,” the conditions of his bond required him to stay completely sober. Following a breach of those conditions, McKenzie was returned to the Saskatchewan Penitentiary, where, in 2020, he took his own life. Section 810 peace bonds have come to supplant other forms of community supervision (i.e. parole) for high-risk offenders in Canada. A peace bond is, quite simply, an agreement to keep the peace in the community. This agreement is often accompanied by release conditions intended to curb future harm caused by those deemed likely to (re)offend—even if they have not committed a substantive offence. Through peace bonds, local police have become deputized to screen and surveil people released from prison who would otherwise be unmonitored in the community. Although peace bonds are central to the lived experiences of justice-involved peoples in Canada; only a handful of studies have taken them up within the literature, often from a socio-legal or psychological lens. This study, through a discourse analysis of a 10-year dataset from a local police service, contributes to the literature on peace bonds by providing a critical and sociological analysis of the 810 process. This analysis demonstrates how institutional norms and technologies shape the work of officers in accordance with goals of reintegration and risk management. Preliminary research suggests that, despite the centrality of 810s, these goals are in tension. This is encapsulated by Jung and Kitura (2022), who suggest that police officers involved in 810 work are tasked with “navigating ethical conundrums that tie together the contrasting and possibly conflicting roles of enforcer and rehabilitation facilitator” (38; emphasis added). This implies that police officers, similar to those working in parole, are expected to actively control and surveil offenders, whilst also facilitating the process of reintegration—despite the fact the two roles demand different, and conflicting, responses to risky behaviors. Moreover, the stories of Curtis McKenzie and other Indigenous peoples, however, demonstrates that a third literature is relevant to the use of peace bonds in Saskatchewan—literature related to the imposition of (colonial) harm (Turner 2023; James 2021). Peace bonds are a salient issue within Canadian Indigenous communities, extant research on peace bonds does not reflect this. This opposition calls into question the drivers of peace bond use in Saskatchewan. Specifically, this project asks: i) how do rules and policy shape officer work related to peace bonds? ii) what values are embedded within these policies and how do they shape the work of officers? and iii) how do these values shape the officer/subject dynamic around risk-management, reintegration, and harm? Through 10 years of locally grounded evidence, this project addresses the dearth in the literature by spotlighting s.810 peace bonds locally. Beyond the analysis of police records, this project will bring transparency to peace bonds as a substantive matter within Canada, spotlighting their use and opening dialogues surrounding acceptable risk management and reintegration practices.