About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


64 Canadian J. Criminology & Crim. Just. 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/cjccj64 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION Introduction to the CJCCJ Special Issue on Police Use of Force Remi Boivin* School of Criminology, Universite de Montreal Recent fatal encounters between citizens and trained and better armed police officers raise questions about the use of force and, more generally, the role of the police in our societies. The deaths of George Floyd (Minneapolis, Minnesota), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Mis- souri), Sammy Yatim (Toronto, Ontario), and Alain Magloire (Montreal, Quebec) sparked social unrest and fuelled political movements such as Black Lives Matter throughout the world. While important observations, discussions, commentaries, and questions followed these events, one common characteristic, in both traditional and social media, is the ten- dency to oversimplify situations without relying on contextual and empirical evidence. Coverage of events now also crosses borders easily to become international news while legal situations - and thus, the supporting frame for analysis - remain national. Floyd's and Brown's deaths resonated outside the United States and affected our understanding of police interventions, but ultimately they happened in a specific country with specific issues. We might live in a globalizing world, but the police remain a state or national entity, not a global one. Still, a wide range of scientific studies supported by empirical evidence can provide helpful knowledge to the debates, regardless of their geographic focus. The possibility of using force has long been understood as a key characteristic of the police. In his classic book The Functions of the Police in Modern Society, first published in the late 1960s, Egon Bittner (1970: 42) defined the role of the police as a mechanism for the dis- tribution of nonnegotiably coercive force employed in accordance with the dictates of an intuitive grasp of situational exigencies. In other words, the police could be distinguished from other professions by the fact that officers are legally allowed to use force to pursue their work. Subsequent researchers argued that Bittner's definition was inaccurate: for ex- ample, Jean-Paul Brodeur (1983, 2010) underlined that other security workers were also allowed to use force in specific contexts, such as in transporting valuables. Many researchers showed that the use of force was actually rare: most estimates suggest that force is used in less than one percent of police interventions, which implies that the police do many *Please direct correspondence to Remi Boivin, School of Criminology, Universite de Montreal, Pavillon Lionel- Groulx, 3150, rue Jean-Brillant, Montreal, QC, H3T 1N8; remi.boivin@umontreal.ca © 2022 Canadian journal of Criminology and Criminal justice / Revue canadienne de criminologie et de justice penale, 64, I, (January IJanvier), I-5 doi:10.3138Icjccj.2021-0063