skip to Main Content

October 2019

Volume 61, No. 4 | Go to abstracts

Articles

Page 1

Validating the Police Legitimacy Scale with a Canadian Sample
Logan Ewanation, Craig Bennell, Brittany Blaskovits, Simon Baldwin

Page 24

Social Identity in the Canadian Courtroom: Effects of Juror and Defendant Race
Evelyn Maeder, Susan Yamamoto

Page 45

A Quantitative Study of a Drug Treatment Court in a Western Canadian City: Post-sentencing and Reoffence Outcomes
Michael Weinrath, Kelly Gorkoff, Joshua Watts, Calum Smee, Zachary Allard, Michael Bellan, Sarah Lumsden, Melissa Cattini

Page 69

More Canadian Police Means Less Crime
Simon Demers

Page 101

Intersection of Indigenous Peoples and Police: Questions about Contact and Confidence
Amy M. Alberton, Kevin M. Gorey, G. Brent Angell, Harvey A. McCue

Page 120

Exploration des facteurs associés à la confiance des Autochtones envers la police au Canada : la pertinence du modèle expressif
Jean-Denis David

 

Abstracts

Validating the Police Legitimacy Scale with a Canadian Sample

Logan Ewanation, Craig Bennell, Brittany Blaskovits, Simon Baldwin

For years, scholars and law enforcement agencies have been interested in examining the public’s perceptions of police legitimacy. However, previous studies have operationalized “police legitimacy” in a wide variety of ways. In an attempt to standardize this construct, Tankebe, Reisig, and Wang (2016) recently developed and validated the Police Legitimacy Scale using samples from the United States and Ghana. To determine the validity of this scale in a Canadian context, we had 2,962 Canadian community members complete a demographics survey as well as Tankebe et al.’s (2016) Police Legitimacy Scale. Descriptive statistics suggest the majority of responses to the scale do not differ across demographic factors, such as gender or race. Results from a confirmatory factor analysis indicate the previously proposed four-factor model of police legitimacy (lawfulness, procedural fairness, distributive fairness, and effectiveness) strongly fits participants’ responses.

_____________________________________________

 

Social Identity in the Canadian Courtroom: Effects of Juror and Defendant Race

Evelyn Maeder, Susan Yamamoto

The purpose of this study was to examine whether black (n = 90), Indigenous (n = 92), and white (n = 94) mock jurors would make harsher decisions in trials involving other-race defendants. Jury-eligible community members recruited via Qualtrics read a fictional impaired driving and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle case in which the defendant’s race varied (black, Indigenous, white). They then made verdict/sentencing decisions and completed measures of stereotypes. We predicted that mock jurors who endorsed negative racial stereotypes would be more likely to vote guilty and recommend harsher sentences for other-race defendants. Instead, we found that positive personally held stereotypes predicted leniency among white jurors judging Indigenous defendants but no such effects for other trial party combinations. Overall, the black defendant received significantly more lenient decisions as compared to the white defendant. Although no formal policy ensures that specific groups are represented on juries, these data indicate that people process trial information differently as a joint function of juror and defendant race.

_____________________________________________

 

A Quantitative Study of a Drug Treatment Court in a Western Canadian City: Post-sentencing and Reoffence Outcomes

Michael Weinrath, Kelly Gorkoff, Joshua Watts, Calum Smee, Zachary Allard, Michael Bellan, Sarah Lumsden, Melissa Cattini

Drug treatment courts (DTCs) have been proposed as an alternative to custody that will better deal with drug-dependent offenders through application of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ). While DTC proponents emphasize the positive aspects of the judicial involvement and intense treatment that most courts provide, critics observe that there are many punitive aspects to DTCs. Frequent court appearances, curfews, urinalysis, multiple bail conditions, and delayed sentencing can be viewed as extensions of coercive social control rather than as benevolent measures intended to help offenders. Further, critics of Canadian DTCs have challenged the efficacy of treatment. This paper seeks to add to a limited Canadian research literature by examining a DTC in the Prairie city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Two samples are used: sample 1 examines sentencing outcomes and reoffence data for 199 DTC admissions from 2006 to 2014; sample 2 is employed for a quasi-experimental comparative recidivism study using a propensity score matching determined sample of 63 DTC cases with 167 adult probationers from 2010–12. Graduates showed lower rates of reoffence compared to unsuccessful cases. Sentencing outcomes showed that unsuccessful participants were most often incarcerated when re-sentenced on original charges. Probation cases reoffended at higher rates than the matched DTC group. Administrative violations were still higher than in the probation group, and may actually result in an inflated reoffence rate for Canadian DTCs. Policy implications and directions for further research are discussed.

_____________________________________________

 

More Canadian Police Means Less Crime

Simon Demers

New empirical insights into Canadian policing are derived from publicly available panel data collected by Statistics Canada between 1998 and 2017 across almost 700 Canadian municipal police jurisdictions. Canadian police jurisdictions that hire more officers tend to experience less crime overall, including less property crime specifically. Each additional Canadian police officer correlates with slightly fewer homicides and 13.3 fewer reported property crimes on average, including 2.9 fewer burglaries and 3.7 fewer stolen vehicles annually. The results cannot be explained away by time-invariant jurisdiction-specific factors, population growth, or other time trends common to all jurisdictions. In elasticity terms, a 1% increase in Canadian police staffing is associated empirically with reductions of 0.93% in homicides, 0.44% in property crimes, 0.63% in burglaries, and 1.37% in vehicle thefts. Purely in terms of crime reduction and reduced victimization across these crime types, it is estimated that the typical Canadian police officer has the potential to generate a marginal benefit to society worth more than $114,000 annually. Taking into account unreported property crime would increase the marginal benefit to society up to $198,000. This new evidence confirms that public investments into local policing can contribute to the reduction of crime and can yield social benefits that exceed their costs.

_____________________________________________

 

Intersection of Indigenous Peoples and Police: Questions about Contact and Confidence

Amy M. Alberton, Kevin M. Gorey, G. Brent Angell, Harvey A. McCue

Despite much anecdotal, journalistic, and statistical evidence of their oppression by colonial and neocolonial police practices, little is known about Indigenous peoples’ attitudes towards the police in Canada. The theory that involuntary police–citizen contacts increase citizens’ mistrust, fear, and dissatisfaction and, ultimately, decreases confidence in the police was advanced. Hypotheses arising from this historical-theoretical context were tested with the 2014 panel of Canada’s General Social Survey, including 951 Indigenous (First Nations, Métis, or Inuit) and 21,576 non-Indigenous white participants. Indigenous identity and involuntary contacts were both significantly associated with a lack of confidence in police, p < .001. As hypothesized, the odds associated with involuntary contacts (odds ratio [OR] = 2.66) were stronger than those associated with being Indigenous (OR = 1.81). While the hypothesized ethnicity by contact interaction was not observed, Indigenous participants (5%) were two and a half times as likely as non-Indigenous white participants (2%) to have had relatively frequent (two or more) involuntary contacts with the police during the past year. Therefore, at the population level Indigenous people are at much greater risk of coming into involuntary contact with the police and of consequently lacking confidence in police. Policy implications and future research needs are discussed.

_____________________________________________

 

Exploration des facteurs associés à la confiance des Autochtones envers la police au Canada : la pertinence du modèle expressif

Jean-Denis David

The article explores factors associated with varying confidence in the police by Indigenous people in Canada. Through a comparative approach, it also examines the prominence of these factors with non-Indigenous people. To do so, the study used the 2014 General Social Survey data. Results suggest that confidence in the police by Indigenous people is linked not only to their perceptions of crime, but also their perceptions of the status of social relationships within their community. More importantly, this confidence could be linked to their perception of the equal treatment of citizens by the police. Results also suggest the prominence of the factors with non-Indigenous people. Thus, police practices should not be limited to repressing crime, but should also seek to ensure the well-being of communities in a larger sense and to promote the perception of the equal treatment of citizens. However, these practices seem to be perceived by Indigenous people as being particularly deficient. This would, in part, explain why their level of confidence in the police is weaker than the non-Indigenous people’s confidence.

Back To Top
×Close search
Search