Rates of Use of Force by Police Officers in Canada: A Move Toward Standardized Reporting

Abstract

The use of force by police officers remains an unfortunate reality of policing. This study gathered data from a sample of Canadian police services in an effort to determine how often force is applied, what type of force is employed, and what impact this has (in terms of effectiveness and injury, both to the subject and the officer). Results indicated that across jurisdictions in Canada, police officers rarely use force. Moreover, the rates at which officers apply force are unrelated to organizational factors such as the size of the policing jurisdiction or the gender demographics of the individual agency. Collectively, the results of this study suggest that the use of force by police is very much the result of the circumstances in which individual officers find themselves at the time the force is applied.