The Dual Perspective: Unpacking Police-Citizen Arrest Encounters

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Campeau, Holly

• SSHRC IG awarded 2020. The community is an essential partner in law enforcement, and municipal "citizen satisfaction surveys" provide police with a snapshot of how the public perceives their performance. However, only a small proportion of respondents represented in these samples have experienced direct contact with police, and very few had an encounter that resulted in arrest. The implications of this are: (1) we end up with a general measure about "reputation" of police from people who are not exposed to routine police practices; and (2) use-of-force events become archetypes in the media, depicting interactions with law enforcement as inherently negative or violent. The police-citizen encounter is thus an under-studied interaction. As police serve as gatekeepers to the criminal justice system, it is critical that we understand how both parties engaged in police-citizen encounters make sense of these interactions, in all their forms. This proposal presents a two-phased expanded project with three police services: Edmonton Police Service, Greater Sudbury Police Service and Ottawa Police Service. Combining data with an ongoing case study with Calgary Police Service, this yields an overall four-city comparison across two provinces. In Phase 1, we study how people make sense of arrest encounters soon after their own has taken place. We will apply a semi-structured questionnaire to interview arrestees in police custody units in Edmonton (n=90), Sudbury (n=40), and Ottawa (n=70). In Phase 2, we will interview frontline police officers (n=30; n=15; n=25) in order to reflect on their own experiences of arresting citizens. Pairing these narratives with those of arrestees will provide a multifaceted account of police-citizen encounters. The resulting dataset would be the only one of its kind in Canada: there is no research examining the "dual perspective" of police-citizen encounters and rarely do we hear directly from those who have direct contact with police or those who are freshly arrested.

• Date created

  2019-10-11

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Insight Grant
  • IG
  • SSHRC
  • Criminology
  • Sociology
  • Policing
  • Police Encounters
  • Arrest
  • Police Legitimacy
  • Legal Cynicism
  • Criminal Justice
  • Public Policy
  • Law Enforcement
  • Interactions with Law Enforcement
  • Western Canada
  • Central Canada

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-adfd-1m24

• License

  © Campeau, Holly. All rights reserved other than by permission. This document is embargoed to those without UAlberta CCID until 2025.