Police Powers in Canada

Police Powers in Canada
Author: University of Alberta. Centre for Constitutional Studies
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 1994-01-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780802073624

The television spectacles of Oka and the Rodney King affair served to focus public disaffection with the police, a disaffection that has been growing for several years. In Canada, confidence in the police is at an all-time low. At the same time crime rates continue to rise. Canada now has the dubious distinction of having the second highest crime rate in the Western world. How did this state of affairs come about? What do we want from our police? How do we achieve policing that is consistent with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? The essays in this volume set out to explore these questions. In their introduction, the editors point out that constitutional order is tied to the exercise of power by law enforcement agencies, and that if relations between the police and civil society continue to erode, the exercise of force will rise - a dangerous prospect for democratic societies.

Ancillary Police Powers in Canada

Ancillary Police Powers in Canada
Author: John W. Burchill
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2024-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0774871083

Police enforce the law, but they must also obey it. Statutes circumscribe how law enforcement officers conduct their work. At the same time, Canadian courts have handed police many powers to stop, search, and otherwise investigate people in the pursuit of public safety and crime prevention. Ancillary Police Powers in Canada explains what these common-law police powers are; how they came to be; and, crucially, what the potential dangers are in their expanding scope. What is the difference between police duty and lawful authority? Should the Supreme Court rescind powers when the police tactics they enable become controversial? This nuanced book surveys the evolution, application, and future of judge-made police powers. The authors bring historical perspective, critical legal theory, and empirical analysis to an issue that is fundamental to constitutional protection from state interference with individual liberty.

A Critical Theory of Police Power

A Critical Theory of Police Power
Author: Mark Neocleous
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 178873520X

Putting police power into the centre of the picture of capitalism The ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations.

The New Police Science

The New Police Science
Author: Markus Dirk Dubber
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2006
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780804753920

This interdisciplinary and international volume provides a critical analysis of the power to police as a basic technology of modern government found in a vast array of sites of governance, including not only the state, but also the household, the factory, the military, and—most recently—the global realm of war, police actions, and peace keeping.

Policing Black Lives

Policing Black Lives
Author: Robyn Maynard
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Total Pages:
Release: 2017-09-18T00:00:00Z
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1552669807

Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates. Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities. A call-to-action, Policing Black Lives urges readers to work toward dismantling structures of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society.

The Punitive Turn

The Punitive Turn
Author: Deborah E. McDowell
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2013-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813935210

The Punitive Turn explores the historical, political, economic, and sociocultural roots of mass incarceration, as well as its collateral costs and consequences. Giving significant attention to the exacting toll that incarceration takes on inmates, their families, their communities, and society at large, the volume’s contributors investigate the causes of the unbridled expansion of incarceration in the United States. Experts from multiple scholarly disciplines offer fresh research on race and inequality in the criminal justice system and the effects of mass incarceration on minority groups' economic situation and political inclusion. In addition, practitioners and activists from the Sentencing Project, the Virginia Organizing Project, and the Restorative Community Foundation, among others, discuss race and imprisonment from the perspective of those working directly in the field. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, the essays included in the volume provide an unprecedented range of perspectives on the growth and racial dimensions of incarceration in the United States and generate critical questions not simply about the penal system but also about the inner workings, failings, and future of American democracy. Contributors: Ethan Blue (University of Western Australia) * Mary Ellen Curtin (American University) * Harold Folley (Virginia Organizing Project) * Eddie Harris (Children Youth and Family Services) * Anna R. Haskins (University of Wisconsin–Madison) * Cheryl D. Hicks (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) * Charles E. Lewis Jr. (Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy) * Marc Mauer (The Sentencing Project) * Anoop Mirpuri (Portland State University) * Christopher Muller (Harvard University) * Marlon B. Ross (University of Virginia) * Jim Shea (Community Organizer) * Jonathan Simon (University of California–Berkeley) * Heather Ann Thompson (Temple University) * Debbie Walker (The Female Perspective) * Christopher Wildeman (Yale University) * Interviews by Jared Brown (University of Virginia) & Tshepo Morongwa Chéry (University of Texas–Austin)

Police and Government Relations

Police and Government Relations
Author: Margaret E. Beare
Publisher:
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2007
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

Questions of police governance, accountability and independence have been subjected to thorough research before. That the issue still draws critical attention more than twenty years after the McDonald Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police suggests that understanding and a resolution to the issue still eludes us. Despite the modifications to police practice that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has brought, there is still concern over the degree of independence the police exercise, and debate over where the line between legitimate government direction of the police and illegitimate political interference should be drawn. Police and Government Relations explores the question of police governance and independence from a number of different points of view. Editors Margaret E. Beare and Tonita Murray offer multi-disciplinary, comparative, and case-study methodologies written by scholars from law, political science, and criminology to illustrate the diversity of opinion that exists on the topic and to explore how the operating tension between police independence and democratic governance and accountability has played out, both in Canada and other countries. This book does not attempt to find final answers; its goal is to provide a framework for a continuing discussion that may lead to helpful and workable recommendations for the future. It serves as an academic and intellectual contribution to an important matter of public policy.