Preface
My interest in policing issues began when I was a member of Toronto City Council during the 1970s and early 1980s. When teaching at York University in the early 1980s, I was asked to devise a course on policing, and that led to my 1985 book, Police: Urban Policing in Canada.
As I turned to other activities my interest did not wane, but there was always a problem of finding a forum for expressing ideas about police. In the late 1990s, I helped establish the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition (TPAC). For more than a decade, this organization has met monthly to try to understand the policing world and to discuss police policies in a constructive manner. It hasn't always been easy. For instance, Toronto police chief Julian Fantino sued me for libel and slander for
what he said was a misinterpretation of a Supreme Court of Canada ruling about the way the Toronto police force carried out strip searches. I had to find money to retain a lawyer and agree to apologize for whatever I had said, but in that apology I stated that I would continue to press for a better strip-search policy to be used by Toronto police. (As noted in this book, we were not successful in reducing the number of strip searches carried out by Toronto police: almost one-third of all those police in canada arrested are strip searched, even though the Supreme Court stated that strip searching should be done rarely.) TPAC has produced a bimonthly electronic bulletin since 2002 (available at www.tpac.ca), and it traces many policing issues in Toronto over this eight-year period.
Then, in 2007, I taught a one-semester course in policing at Ryerson University. This book emerged as a result of that activity. In writing Police in Canada, I have been amazed at just how little has changed
since 1985. Some of the most interesting thinking about police activities occurred in the 1970s and 1980s (as one notes from the essays in David Bayley's recent book, What Works in Policing), and since then it seems most police forces have been closed to experimentation and external study. This makes the case for needed change all that more urgent.
I thank my friend Jim Lorimer for asking me to do this book, and for the editorial assistance of Diane Young at Lorimer's and Alison Reid. This book is dedicated to my long-term colleagues at TPAC, Anna, Richard, Harvey, and Else Marie, who have been strong friends in reviewing and acting on this most important of public policy issues over the years.
Policing the Wild North-West
