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Policing and Indigenous Civilian Deaths in Canada

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Abstract

With the recent growth in scholarship in the USA regarding police killings of civilians, it is notable that the topic has gone largely unstudied in Canada even though the country faces high levels of death through legal intervention. Using data from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Deadly Force team, we conduct an event history analysis of where and when civilians in Canada are killed by law enforcement, with a particular focus on the deaths of Indigenous civilians. For both the general population and Indigenous peoples, we find that police killings of civilians are most likely in urban centres and not in Indigenous communities. Higher levels of crime severity and criminal incidents are associated with more civilian deaths, as are relatively lower incomes and housing quality. Police staffing levels are not related to deaths for either population, but killings for both populations are much less likely in areas policed by the RCMP and with higher police productivity, as proxied for by clearance rates. Higher levels of female officer employment are linked to lower civilian deaths for Indigenous peoples. These results are consistent with both racial and economic threat theories, as well as reactive hypotheses. The findings are largely consistent with the literature from the USA and suggest that previously evaluated US-based interventions, such as improving force diversity, may be able to lower deaths of Indigenous civilian deaths in Canada.

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Data Availability

All data used in this study are available from the corresponding author on request

Notes

  1. Existing work by Carmichael and Kent (2015) and Pedicelli (1998) are notable exceptions, but both works face extremely limited sample sizes.

  2. We believe that this is a particularly important lens to apply, as data from the USA show that there is discriminatory use of lethal force against Indigenous peoples there as documented in Edwards et al. (2019). In the Canadian context, with a much larger Indigenous population share, there is reason to believe that these effects may be more salient, particularly if racial threat theories hold.

  3. While we have filed PAS data for 870 communities total, there is substantial variation within these 870 communities as to the individual variables that are available. As such, when considering PAS variables, we do so in a one-by-one fashion to maintain a reasonable sample size.

  4. This rate of growth over such a short period of time is troubling and not reflected in the USA.

  5. From 2010 to 2014, average annual Indigenous civilian deaths numbered 3.8, but that number sharply spiked to 6.7 in 2015–2020. For the overall population, average annual law enforcement killings rose from 25.6 in 2010–2014 to 34.2 in 2015–2020.

  6. For example, for decades, the police in Saskatoon took Indigenous civilians on “starlight tours” in which Indigenous civilians would be dropped outside of the city in the middle of the night, without clothes, in the winter months.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the CBC Deadly Force team for making their data publicly available.

Funding

This research received financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada

    Rob Gillezeau

  2. Department of Economics, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA

    Drake T. Rushford

  3. Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    David N. Weaver

Authors
  1. Rob Gillezeau
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  2. Drake T. Rushford
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  3. David N. Weaver
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Correspondence to Rob Gillezeau.

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Appendix:

Appendix:

Fig. 10
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Total deadly force incidents by armed status. Notes: All deaths by legal intervention by armed/unarmed status from Marcoux and Nicholson (2021)

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Fig. 11
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Indigenous deadly force incidents by armed status. Notes: Indigenous deaths by legal intervention by armed/unarmed status from Marcoux and Nicholson (2021)

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Total deadly force incidents by police type. Notes: All deaths by legal intervention from Marcoux and Nicholson (2021) by policing jurisdiction as calculated by the authors

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Indigenous deadly force incidents by police type. Notes: Indigenous deaths by legal intervention from Marcoux and Nicholson (2021) by policing jurisdiction as calculated by the authors

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Fig. 14
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Total deadly force incidents by region. Notes: All deaths by legal intervention from Marcoux and Nicholson (2021) by region

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Indigenous deadly force incidents by region. Notes: Indigenous deaths by legal intervention from Marcoux and Nicholson (2021) by region

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Fig. 16
figure 16

Indigenous deadly force incidents by community type: Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Notes: Indigenous deaths by legal intervention from Marcoux and Nicholson (2021) by whether a community is an Indigenous community from the CWB dataset

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Table 8 All civilians killed with provincial fixed effects
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Table 9 All civilians killed with PAS controls and provincial fixed effects
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Table 10 Indigenous civilians killed with provincial fixed effects
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Table 11 Indigenous civilians killed with PAS controls and provincial fixed effects
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Gillezeau, R., Rushford, D.T. & Weaver, D.N. Policing and Indigenous Civilian Deaths in Canada. J Econ Race Policy 5, 210–239 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41996-022-00097-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41996-022-00097-6

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