A criminal trial is a venue where not only individual police officers accused of crimes are put under public scrutiny, but so too are the training and tactics that officer received.
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms prohibits Canadian police from using excessive force and conducting unreasonable searches. But research has found many cases of police violating the Charter.
There have been longstanding calls for police and governments to collect and share data about incidents where the use of force caused injury and death to civilians.
Brenda Lucki’s retirement will change the person in charge of the RCMP. But the organization’s deeper structural problems cannot be fixed with a change at the top.
Police departments have faced recruitment and retention problems since the 2020 George Floyd protests. It has meant some agencies have had to lower standards to attract new officers.
Derek Epp, The University of Texas at Austin and Megan Dias, The University of Texas at Austin
The case of Tyre Nichols highlights how traffic stops can turn deadly. Traffic stops are also prone to racial bias, can break down community trust in police and yield few results, research shows.
In the face of violent crime, both real and imagined, too many U.S. police forces adhere to racist philosophies about rooting out ‘internal enemies’ as they did hundreds of years ago.
A pervasive history of bullying and sexual misconduct plagues law enforcement agencies and illustrates the failure of police forces to police themselves.
Upcoming changes to how complaints against Ontario police officers are processed will make it even harder to monitor human rights violations by police.
Evidence confirms that minimum-force policing is safer and more effective than the style of policing so colourfully depicted in US crime shows and movies like Die Hard.