Individual and Community Predictors of Arrests in Canada: Evidence of over-Policing of Indigenous Peoples and Communities

Background and Purpose

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada called for all levels of government to commit to eliminating the overrepresentation of Indigenous Peoples in custody by 2025. However, rates of Indigenous Peoples in custody are increasing unabated (Roberts & Reid, 2017). Attempts to reduce overrepresentation have focused too heavily on sentencing and judicial discretion (Jackson, 2015). Greater attention must be given to the role that policing plays (David & Mitchell, 2021). Despite the limited empirical evidence, existing evidence consistently shows that Indigenous Peoples are more likely to have contacts with police (Alberton, 2020), to be arrested (David & Mitchell, 2021), and charged (Bienvenue & Latif, 1974) than non-Indigenous people in Canada.

Building on Alberton (2020) and David and Mitchell (2021)'s work, the following individual- and community-level hypotheses were tested using the 34^th iteration of Canada’s General Social Survey (Statistics Canada, 2019): (1) Indigenous Peoples are more likely to have been arrested than White people. (2) People who have experienced extensive structural violence are more likely to have been arrested. (3) Indigenous Peoples who live in communities with prevalent concentrations of Indigenous Peoples are more likely to have been arrested, and this Indigenous disadvantage is greater than that observed in other places. And (4) Indigenous females who live in Indigenous enclaves are the most likely to be arrested. To test community-level hypotheses, data from the 2016 Canadian census were linked to GSS individual-level data.

Methods

Bivariate analyses were undertaken to observe the magnitude and significance of the between group differences. Logistic regression models were built to test the main predictive effects and full logistic models were used to test the hypothesized two- and three-way interactions.

Results

All four hypotheses were supported. Indigenous Peoples were more than twice as likely to have been arrested than White people (OR = 2.04). Those who reported extensive structural violence were nearly five times as likely to be arrested (OR = 4.77) than those with no such experiences. Indigenous Peoples living in Indigenous enclaves were nearly five times as likely to be arrested than White people in similar communities (OR = 4.83). And Indigenous females who lived in Indigenous enclaves were nearly 20 times more likely to be arrested than otherwise similar, White females (OR = 19.88). Indigenous males in these communities were also disadvantaged relative to their White counterparts.

Conclusions and Implications

These findings suggest that over-policing contributes to overrepresentation of Indigenous Peoples across the Canadian criminal legal system. Given the negative effects of discrimination that ethnic and racialized individuals face across the criminal legal systems in both Canada and the USA, social work educators must work to facilitate students' understandings of these issues and promote the importance of social justice and advocacy work. Beyond educating students, we must take on social justice and advocacy roles in the communities we serve. Finally, this work contributes to the call by Giwa et al. (2020) to improve the knowledge base of social work when it comes to racial profiling and over-policing in Canada.