AP/CRIM 4664 6.00

The Politics Of Canadian Policing In Global Context

Crosslisted: AP/SOSC 4664

The course explores the politics of contemporary Canadian policing in the context of the history of modern governance. It explores the police role in society and interrogates policing in terms of fairness, inequality, discrimination and social justice. It further explores the relationship between policing, media, law, politics and social order, emphasizing the local effects of the global politics of policing. The course contains four parts: Theory and Research; History; Contemporary Police Practice and the Police Imaginary; Law and Politics. The first asks ‘who are the police?’ and ‘what is policing?’ The second explores the history of modern policing from prior to the French Revolution until today including policing in Europe, Britain and the United States and the spread of the police idea globally via colonialism, imperialism, and mimesis. The third explores social research on 21st-century Canadian policing practice, focusing on the police role in relation to social justice; the pluralization of policing and variations in cop culture; and media and technological effects on policing. It examines how social research has revealed the practices of policing as a fundamental aspect of social order in Canada. The fourth part explores the relationship between police and the law, paying attention to democratic and legal accountability, given the complex inter-relations between the local and the global. As a whole, the course grapples with the problem of how police power can be made accountable to the general well-being, given that the context is a global one of competing sovereignties and a plural legal order.