Police paramilitary units emerged as a tool for police agencies during the 1980’s to deal with dangerous calls for service such as hostage situations, barricaded persons, terrorism and sniper situations. American policing scholars began tracing the annual call outs of tactical units to determine if tactical policing has shifted away from its original purpose towards a more proactive police response. Canadian literature on police militarization is limited but follows similar American research trends by focusing on the annual callouts of Canadian tactical teams to prove that tactical policing has been normalized. This project uses Bourdieusian concepts (field struggle, capital, symbolic power) to address gaps in the existing literature surrounding police militarization by determining the strategies and capital used by community groups and the police to defend and contest police militarization in Canada. This helped answer the primary research question of: What arguments do police, government officials and civil society groups make to support or contest police militarization? What forms of power and symbolic power are utilized to shift opinion? Relying on a Critical Content Analysis, this project established deductive categories from newspaper articles, recommendations from Independent Inquiries and media releases from community activist websites to understand the contests of police militarization. Findings from this project were similar to previous literature regarding the arguments mobilized by the police about police militarization; however, community groups played a more active role in contesting the dominant agendas of state actors through mobilizing moral and emotional arguments. Emotional arguments were influenced by the deaths of George Floyd and Michael Brown and allowed community groups to contest police militarization through defunding and demilitarization arguments. Moreover, findings show that both the police and community groups use community safety arguments to contest and defend police militarization. Legal arguments were also mobilized by relevant parties to address Indigenous human rights violations produced through militarized police dynamic entries. The findings also showed the impacts of high-profile cases on trends within police militarization. The Independent Inquiries following high profile cases such as the Moncton (2014) and Mayerthorpe (2005) shootings influenced military equipment procurement and SWAT standards across Canada. A Political Sociological analysis of my findings revealed the struggle within the field of police militarization regarding the procurement of militarized equipment. This project provided a snapshot of police militarization in Canada to help understand the ongoing militarization issues as well as the relevant actors who are involved in the discourse. Directions for future research are presented at the end of this study.

This thesis is an institutional ethnography of the Nigeria Police Force. It concentrates on evidence from 18 months of fieldwork in one particular police station, in the pseudonymised town of Dutsin Bature in central Nigeria, and draws comparative evidence from examples and locations elsewhere in Nigeria. The fieldwork evidence is also supported by analyses of public discourse, literature reviews, some formal interviews and historical research. The thesis aims to fill a gap in empirical scholarship by looking at policing in Nigeria primarily from the level of everyday practice, and deriving understandings of the ways the overall system works, rather than by taking normative structural approaches and basing suppositions of actual behaviour upon these. It also aims to document emic perspectives on policing in Nigeria, in contrast to most existing scholarship and public discourse which takes an external perspective, from which the voices and worldviews of police themselves are absent. The thesis situates this ethnography within three theoretical terrains. First, developing understandings of policing and public security in Africa, which have often neglected in-depth studies of formal police forces. Secondly, enlarging the ethnographic study of formal institutions in African states, to develop a closer understanding of what state systems are and how they function, beyond the overtly dysfunctionalist perspectives which have dominated recent scholarship. Thirdly, informing ongoing debates over state and society in Africa, problematising understandings which see these as separate entities instead of mutually constitutive, and drawing attention to the ways in which the two interpenetrate and together mould the public sphere. The thesis begins with a historical overview of the trajectory of formal policing in Nigeria, then examines public understandings and representations of policing, before moving inside the institutional boundaries, considering in turn the human composition of the police, training and character formation, the way police officers do their work in Dutsin Bature, Nigerian police officers’ preoccupation with risk and the systemic effects of their efforts to mitigate it, and finally officers’ subjective perspectives on their work, their lived realities, and on Nigeria in an era of transition. These build together to suggest some conclusions pertinent to the theoretical perspectives.

This thesis attempts to identify what the barriers to building a trusted police service in China and India are through answering the questions: How has economic modernisation impacted upon policing? To what extent are the two police forces trusted by its citizens? Do the police carry out their duties in a fair and unbiased fashion? What do police corruption/malpractices look like and why does it persist? And what are the influencing factors in decision-making at the moments-of-truth? There is very limited research into the Chinese Police generally and even less on factors affecting organisational culture, practices, and decision making. There is no comparative study between the Chinese and Indian Police. This thesis found that the Chinese Police are held in higher esteem than the Indian Police by their respective citizenry. Both the Chinese and Indian police use stereotypes and are biased against certain section of society in the way they carry out their duties and that corruption and malpractices are tolerated and engrained in its culture but is subtler in China than in India. However, one surprised finding is that India is more at risk of the rule by man than China, even though India is said to be the world's largest democracy grounded on the principles of the rule of law.