September 11th 2024

Join Us September 23rd, 2024: Surveying Public Attitudes towards the Police with Chris Giacomantonio

Currently, most police services in Canada conduct public attitude surveys on a regular basis; however, no two police services ask the same survey questions, and many police services vary their questions between surveys. These inconsistencies create problems of comparability between jurisdictions and within a given jurisdiction over time. By building surveys that are anchored in a validated set of indicators, and connected to a longer-term plan for establishing and understanding trends in attitudes, police services and governance boards can derive greater value from the surveying process. This session will therefore consider strategies for surveying public attitudes about the police, in light of recent research and key questions regarding what public attitude surveys are good for.

Chris is an assistant professor of sociology at Dalhousie University and is the Director of the Clairmont Centre for Community Safety Research. He is a criminologist and social policy researcher with over a decade of experience conducting research in Canada, the US, the UK and the European Union. His academic research has focused on the organization, governance, and reform of public police in democratic societies, and he also conducts social policy and evaluation research on a wide range of topics including criminal justice and security, harm reduction, health and social care, and social finance. Alongside his work at Dalhousie, Chris is a scientific advisor at Pier Labs, a non-profit social innovation outpost based in Halifax. Prior to working with Pier Labs, Chris was the research coordinator for the Halifax Regional Police, and before that he led the policing research portfolio as a senior analyst at the RAND Corporation’s European offices.

https://capg.ca/webinars/

Join us September 25th:

Homelessness is a social problem, impacting at least 25,000 people per day in Canada alone. Over the past two decades, homelessness has become more visible, leading to increased demands for law enforcement to minimize the visibility of people experiencing homelessness, and manage local encampments. While scholarship exists on police responses to homelessness, the role that municipal bylaw officers play in regulating homelessness is largely unknown.

In this presentation, I explore municipal bylaw officers’ perceptions of their roles and responsibilities related to homelessness in Ontario, Canada. Our analysis demonstrates how bylaw officers’ policies, which focus on the regulation of space, are disconnected from their frontline activities, which require the regulation of people. Situated in a ‘regulatory grey zone,’ bylaw officers rely on discretionary solutions informed by their subjective experiences to govern people experiencing homelessness. To manage complaints about homelessness, bylaw officers use different strategies to invisibilize homelessness, including moving people along and redirecting complaints to other agencies, such as social services and police. We argue that, through their mechanisms of enforcing public space orders, bylaw officers engage in reluctant criminalization using invisibilization tactics. I conclude by discussing areas for future research.

Natasha Martino is a PhD student in the department of Sociology at McMaster University. Her research interests focus broadly around homelessness, policing, marginalization, social exclusion/inclusion, and reintegration. Natasha obtained her Master of Arts in Criminology from Wilfrid Laurier University. Her exploratory research examined the role of bylaw enforcement and municipal ordinances in the social control and management of homelessness and homeless encampments across Ontario. Natasha is currently a research assistant for the University of Alberta Prison Project, and has recently been conducting research with Dr. Tarah Hodgkinson and CAPG on police governance and oversight.

https://capg.ca/webinars/