Community policing in Canada

Abstract

In Canada, community policing has replaced professional crime control policing as the dominant ideology and organizational model of progressive policing (Murphy, 1988b). What is interesting about Canadian policing — but not unique to it — is that despite the relative lack of external pressures1 for police reform the country has gradually adopted a shift towards community policing. With heavy reliance on ‘US-tested and proven’ police innovations, technologies and strategies, Canadian policing is argued to have used ‘innovation through imitation’. Possibly this took place due to the proximity to the American experience and the growing readiness on the part of police chiefs and administrators to adopt strategies and tactics that seemed to work for their southern neighbour. This, in turn, was perceived as encouraging a wholesale and uncritical import of policing philosophies and technologies — mostly from the country’s American neighbour — which are not always appropriate to Canadian policing (Murphy, 1988b). At the same time, Canada is also not less influenced by the tradition and heritage of British policing and is following developments there quite closely. In fact, a recent community policing conference (organized by Loree and Murphy, 1986) dedicated a greater portion of its proceedings to developments in the London Metropolitan Police Force than to other relevant US advances in community policing.