Canadian Policing In The 21st Century

A veteran police officer provides insights into decades of unprecedented change.

Police services around the world are embarking on a major period of change that has seen few parallels since the founding of modern policing in the 19th century. A conflation of factors some long-standing, others of more recent origin, but all significant – are now coalescing, with implications for the traditional ways in which police services have been providing safety and security for the public. Today, there are many actors who help ensure a safe and secure environment, including technical specialists, public and private security providers, and first responders. As such, police have begun to work within a safety and security web that requires new and dynamic partnerships, flexibility, and adaptability. In addition, police are addressing increasingly complex and global crimes such as terrorism, identity theft, and cybercrime. These challenges, along with increasing costs, have led many around the world and in Canada to re-examine the traditional policing model and consider what modern approaches are required to ensure effective and efficient policing for the future.

Discusses police management, police accountability, private & public security, police behaviour, professionalism, and ethics, principles of policing.

Focuses on the important challenges facing the police and the community. Part I articulates two views of public policing : policing as force, and policing as risk minimization. Part II examines the new paradigm of community policing and outlines the principles and practices of a made-in-Canada community policing model. Part III looks at the critical issues of the police subculture, ethics and technology. Part IV discusses human resources issues of managing diversity, women in policing, and the recruitment and promotion of visible minorities and aboriginal people. Part V features operational issues such as public order, interrogation, the use of force, police discretion and transnational policing. Part VI explores trends and prospects in the 21st century and the challenges of globalization, terrorism, national security, racial profiling, organizational performance measurement, and the public policing-private security debate.

Although service outsourcing has spread throughout Canada’s prisons and jails, into its police, courts, and national security institutions, and along the border in recent decades, the expanding scope and pace of corporate involvement in criminal justice functions has not yet been closely investigated. Changing of the Guards provides a detailed assessment of privatization and private influence across the twenty-first-century Canadian criminal justice system. It illuminates the many consequences of public–private arrangements for law and policy, transparency, accountability, the administration of justice, equity, and the public. This trenchant analysis raises issues that are relevant in Canada and abroad.