Practical or Tactical?: A Political Sociological Analysis of the Contests of Police Militarization in Canada

Abstract

Police paramilitary units emerged as a tool for police agencies during the 1980’s to deal with dangerous calls for service such as hostage situations, barricaded persons, terrorism and sniper situations. American policing scholars began tracing the annual call outs of tactical units to determine if tactical policing has shifted away from its original purpose towards a more proactive police response. Canadian literature on police militarization is limited but follows similar American research trends by focusing on the annual callouts of Canadian tactical teams to prove that tactical policing has been normalized. This project uses Bourdieusian concepts (field struggle, capital, symbolic power) to address gaps in the existing literature surrounding police militarization by determining the strategies and capital used by community groups and the police to defend and contest police militarization in Canada. This helped answer the primary research question of: What arguments do police, government officials and civil society groups make to support or contest police militarization? What forms of power and symbolic power are utilized to shift opinion? Relying on a Critical Content Analysis, this project established deductive categories from newspaper articles, recommendations from Independent Inquiries and media releases from community activist websites to understand the contests of police militarization. Findings from this project were similar to previous literature regarding the arguments mobilized by the police about police militarization; however, community groups played a more active role in contesting the dominant agendas of state actors through mobilizing moral and emotional arguments. Emotional arguments were influenced by the deaths of George Floyd and Michael Brown and allowed community groups to contest police militarization through defunding and demilitarization arguments. Moreover, findings show that both the police and community groups use community safety arguments to contest and defend police militarization. Legal arguments were also mobilized by relevant parties to address Indigenous human rights violations produced through militarized police dynamic entries. The findings also showed the impacts of high-profile cases on trends within police militarization. The Independent Inquiries following high profile cases such as the Moncton (2014) and Mayerthorpe (2005) shootings influenced military equipment procurement and SWAT standards across Canada. A Political Sociological analysis of my findings revealed the struggle within the field of police militarization regarding the procurement of militarized equipment. This project provided a snapshot of police militarization in Canada to help understand the ongoing militarization issues as well as the relevant actors who are involved in the discourse. Directions for future research are presented at the end of this study.