Submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Mater of Arts in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 1995. / The police role appears to be a controversial issue since the evolution of modem policing in Great Britain with the establishment of the Metropolitan Police under the leadership of Sir Robert Peel in 1829. The South African Police Service. and in particular the erstwhile Venda police. are no exceptions to the rule. The primary aim of this investigation revolves around the statistical measurement of the perceptions and attitudes of respondents pertaining to the role and functions of the Venda police. For this purpose. a sample group of 406 respondents. arbitrarily selected from four areas. namely : Thohoyandou, Makwarela, Sibasa and Shayandirna, were subjected to a closed. structured questionnaire regarding various aspects of the role and operational function of this independent police force. Statistical tests, such as the F-test, were implemented to test for significance and reliability of data obtained from questionnaires. The statistical results only represent the perceptions and attitudes of the research group towards the Venda police. The findings indicate: • that the majority of the respondents perceive the role and function of the Venda police as an important social service; • that both male and female respondents have significant different perceptions of the police role as it relates to the operational rendering of this social service function; •. insignificant differences between the various educational qualification groups pertaining to police partiality. abuse of power and authority, lack of knowledge and imperiousness on the part of the police are observed; • an unwillingness among the sample group to report crime to the police due to, inter alia. the inability of the police to effectively solve criminal cases, an arrogant attitude among police officials. etc.; and • that in general. the global image of the Venda police is somewhat negatively evaluated by the total research group. Recommendations are as follows: • the cultivation of a better understanding of the police role by means of facilitating closer contact and co-operation with the public; • to provide an improved social service to the public by means of rapid responses to calls for assistance and complaints; • establishing a police-citizen partnership in crime prevention by means of implementing a community style of policing; • improving the educational qualifications and training procedures of policemen.

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In Canada, people who experience mental health disability are over-represented among those who die in police interactions. At present, there is sparse national data available about the nature and extent of police-involved deaths of persons who experience mental health disability. Using mixed methods including access to information requests, media analysis and thematic analysis, this study analyzes data from coroner and medical examiner reports produced from 2004 to 2014, including descriptions of 433 police-involved deaths in Canada to explore the over-representation of people who experience mental health disability. Secondly, it provides a review of contemporary case law on legal liability and accountability of police, comparing traditional tort law and criminal prosecution approaches with the potential for discrimination claims on the ground of disability. This review focuses on police use of force and considers the benefits and drawbacks to tort, criminal and human rights law as means of legal accountability for police-involved injuries and deaths of persons who experience mental health disability. Employing a typology of police-involved deaths, it is demonstrated that persons who are perceived to experience mental health impairment are over-represented among several types of police-involved deaths subject to coroner or medical examiner proceedings. Further, it is suggested that recommendations stemming from coroner and medical examiner reports offer few helpful suggestions for meaningful reform to prevent such deaths. Lastly, it is suggested that discrimination claims are unlikely to prove more successful than tort claims or criminal prosecution as a means of sparking police reform. However, recognition of the potential for systemic discrimination by police should cause governments to re-evaluate police practices and societal strategies to address mental health crises.

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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.