Exercising Judgment: Some Reflections on Police Discretion in Canada

Event Description

This paper draws on an expert report for the Joint Federal/Provincial Commission into the April 2020 Nova Scotia Mass Casualty, and re-examines some of the key accounts of police discretion that have dominated the sociological and criminological literature on police decision-making since the 1960s. In particular, it considers whether it is true to say that broad, largely unsupervised discretion remains an inescapable part of modern police work, and asks whether that discretion - and its relationship to the powers and duties of the police - needs to be re-conceived with a view to subjecting it to more effective statutory regulation and oversight in Canada.

Please contact Michelle Burchill for the Zoom link.

Speaker

Dr. Benjamin Goold is a Professor at the Allard School of Law. He holds degrees in law and economics from the University of Tasmania, as well as a BCL and doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His major research interests include privacy rights, the use of surveillance technologies by the police and intelligence communities, and the governance of international borders.