Beyond binaries: a comparative analysis of police reform in Jamaica and Canada

ABSTRACT

This article challenges the developed-developing binary when understanding police reform by comparing two cases – Jamaica and Canada. Grounded in critical development studies and criminology literatures, it demonstrates divergences in police organizational structures/mandates and some convergences in police reform efforts, failures, and resistance to systemic change despite vast context variations. Therefore, it creates room for questioning the challenges of police reform in the development discourse as primarily a feature of a nation’s development, or lack thereof, and instead prompts us to rethink how we conceptualize, understand, and address police institutional structures that affect both developing and developed countries alike.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article remet en question la dichotomie développé/en développement dans le contexte des réformes de la police, au fil d’une comparaison des cas de la Jamaïque et du Canada. Notre analyse se place dans la lignée d’études critiques sur le développement et d’études de criminologie, et son but est de démontrer la divergence entre les structures organisationnelles et les mandats de la police, ainsi que certaines convergences entre les efforts de réforme de la police, leurs échecs et la résistance aux changements systémiques en dépit d’un grand nombre de variations contextuelles. Ainsi, cet article représente une opportunité de remettre en question la place des défis de la réforme de la police dans le discours sur le développement—s’ils sont essentiellement une caractéristique du développement d’une nation, ou bien de son manque de développement—et il nous invite au contraire à repenser la manière dont nous conceptualisons, comprenons et faisons face aux structures institutionnelles de la police qui influencent à la fois les pays en développement et les pays développés.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• police reform
• Caribbean
• Canada
• convergence

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professors Stephen Baranyi and Paul Haslam, and Dr. Gédéon Djissa for their valuable feedback on different drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Issues of legitimacy are not confined to developing contexts. Bailey and Dammert (2006) highlight the connection between police reform, politics, and security as it relates to legitimacy and public support of democracy. While legitimacy is important, it seems to extend beyond the police themselves to entail their role in achieving security as a contributor to maintaining support for democracy.

2 Some documents point to the period of reform and modernization commencing in 1998.

3 The JCF’s (2022) use of the term ‘transformation program’ to describe their broad process of police reform and Huey, Ferguson, and Schulenberg’s (2023) reference to ‘transformational programmes’ as one type of reform, points to the ease in which terms in the police reform discourse can easily be conflated and meanings differ across people, reform efforts, organizations and contexts.

4 Since Anthony Harriott’s (2000) ground-breaking work on Police and Crime Control in Jamaica, there has been limited empirical engagement with police reform in Jamaica aside from donor-funded or internally generated reports.

5 The fatal shootings total consists of 118 involving the JCF and 9 shootings by the Jamaica Defence Force. Additionally, there were reports of other types of force use like assault (397), discharge of a firearm (255), and threats (82), among others (INDECOM Jamaica 2021, 11). The Independent Commission of Investigations publishes quarterly reports tracking the name, gender, and location of security force-related fatalities. The researcher drew on their extensive knowledge of Jamaica to categorize the locations into affluent and working-class areas. They excluded incidents at police stations, hospitals, malls, clothing stores, petrol stations, markets, and on the property of a religious entity. Additionally, incidents that did not involve the JCF, fatal traffic collisions, and death in custody were omitted from the analysis.

6 Prof. Eli Sopow served with the RCMP for over 20 years. His research on organizational and societal change and his professional experiences position him as an authoritative source to speak on these issues.

7 The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s dataset reports that in 2020, Canada had 759 (575 males; 178 females) homicides.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jody-Ann Anderson

Jody-Ann Anderson is a PhD Candidate and Vanier Scholar at the University of Ottawa’s School of International Development and Global Studies. Her research focuses on how institutions, like the police, can sustainably transform in contexts of increasing complexity. She currently works or has worked on various issues that include but are not limited to policing, security sector reform, violence reduction, and youth development.