The increase use of formal youth diversion programs in Canada coincided with the enactment of the Youth Criminal Justice Act in 2003. Following the tenets of the labeling theory, the statute sought a balance that would help limit formal court intervention to increase fairness and accountability for youth committing minor offenses. Despite the perceived benefits, diversion programs have not escaped criticism. Some researchers contend pre-charge diversion programs that are based on police discretion may suffer from selection bias. Using police data from a local police service ( N = 6,479 cases) in Ontario, Canada, this article conducts a bivariate analysis to explore the personal characteristics of first-time offending youth (gender, race, and area of residence) and attempts to determine whether there are any differences in the youth being charged or diverted for minor drug possession and minor thefts. Results demonstrate variances in charging practices based on race. Race has a small but statistically significant impact on arrest decisions. In general, Black youth are more likely to be charged and less likely to be cautioned than White youth and youth from other racial backgrounds. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Research based in the US and Britain have established that perceptions of the police are particularly low among youth and racialized communities. However, by contrast, little is known about racialized youth perceptions of the police within Canada. Due to formal and informal bans on the collection of race-based data, Canada maintains its international reputation as a tolerant multicultural society. Using the critical race methodology of composite counter-storytelling, this paper will highlight the perspectives of Black and Indigenous youth and explore their experiences with law enforcement. This aims to counter Canada’s international status as a multicultural utopia and demonstrate how legal criminal justice actors, such as the police, perpetuate the marginalized status of Black and Indigenous youth through the process of criminalization.
In an era when reported hate crimes are increasing dramatically, it is troubling that there appears to be, at best, an uneven response to the problem from law enforcement in Canada. Our pilot study of policing hate crime in Ontario is the first attempt to understand whether and how law enforcement think about and act on hate crime. Interviews with officers in eight police forces across eastern and southern Ontario ( N = 38) uncovered three clusters of factors that appear to shape how they manage hate crime: environmental, organizational, and individual. What we offer in this paper is a series of related recommendations for enhancing police responses to hate crime along each of the three dimensions.
In recent years, police violence has amassed notable international attention from the public, practitioners, and academics alike. This paper explores experiences and perceptions of police violence in Canada, documenting the impacts of direct and vicarious experiences of police violence on inner-city residents. The study employed semi-structured interviews with 45 community members across three Toronto inner-city neighbourhoods. Using a general interview prompt guide, participants were asked a range of questions about their experiences with and perceptions of police, and particularly, of police violence in their community. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, thematically coded, and analyzed. All participants reported direct and/or vicarious experiences of police violence, and most described experiencing long-standing, and continual fear that police contact would result in harm to them. Further, participants described a variety of serious and negative outcomes associated with experiencing and/or witnessing police violence. Police violence in Canada is a public health issue that requires an integrated public health policy approach to address the negative outcomes associated with direct and vicarious police violence exposure.
Situational action theory (SAT) posits that morality plays a core role in determining whether situations are viewed as suitable for crime. However, little attention has been paid to moral identity, the degree to which a person considers morality to occupy a central position in their view of themselves. Using a convenience sample of Iranian soccer fans ( N = 374), we test both the direct and moderated role of moral identity in explaining cyberbullying, an outcome that differs from most SAT research focusing on violent/property crime. We find that fans with a weaker moral identity tend to engage in more cyberbullying and that moral identity significantly interacts with a number of SAT-derived predictors (moral emotions, self-control, perceptual deterrence, and situational morality) in expected ways.
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