Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Canadian judges stressed denunciation and deterrence in 92% of police sentencings since 1990
Danielle McNabb and Kate Puddister read 93 sentencing decisions from 1990 to 2024, the first large-scale audit of the sentencing end of Canadian police accountability. Probation was the most frequent sentence, in 48% of cases.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- The first large-scale study of how Canadian courts sentence police officers, co-led by Brock's Danielle McNabb and Guelph's Kate Puddister, covers 93 decisions and more than 100 officers from 1990 to 2024.
- Judges emphasized denunciation and deterrence in 92 percent of those decisions, according to the study, which is published in Police Quarterly.
- Probation was the most frequent sentence at 48 percent of cases, followed by incarceration of less than two years at 26.7 percent and conditional discharges and conditional sentence orders at 18.8 percent each.
- Assault, theft and misuse of police property were the three most common offences, and the most common misuse was accessing police databases to stalk victims or to help commit other crimes.
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Why it matters
- capability Publishing outcomes from investigation through sentencing would let people outside a courtroom audit the earlier stages of the pipeline the way these researchers audited the sentencing end.
- constraint Departmental culture, the blue wall of silence and the disproportionate rates of police violence against Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities are beyond anything a sentencing judge can order, so responsibility for them sits with oversight and discipline bodies.
- decision The consistency argument takes the question out of individual courtrooms: the authors want the factor in statute because judges now apply it informally, and unevenly between jurisdictions.
Denunciation and deterrence are the objectives a judge names in reasons for sentence, and a judge can name both while imposing a community sanction.
The four sanction shares the authors report add to 112.3% of cases, so some of the 93 decisions are counted in more than one category [18]. The published summary stops at the most frequent sentences; terms of two years or more get no line of their own [22]. Across 1990 to 2024, the set works out to about 2.7 sentencing decisions a year for the whole country [17].
Every case in the file is a sentencing decision, so every officer in it had already been convicted [20]. It describes what courts do with an officer who reaches sentencing. The complaints, investigations and charges that stopped earlier leave no sentencing decision to code, so the study cannot count them. For the argument that criminal prosecution is the weak link in police accountability, this evidence covers only the last step.
About 84% of the offences were committed by officers who were on duty [8].
"Breach of trust, which is a criminal offense in Canada, recognizes there are certain types of officials who are in positions of trust and who hold a lot of power, so we expect these individuals to be held to a higher standard and held to account when they abuse the authority society has granted them," McNabb said [12].
Hate motivation and intimate partner violence already oblige a Canadian judge to consider a serious sanction [10]. The factor McNabb describes would extend that obligation to every criminal case with a police officer as the offender [21]. The authors' own framing, carried in the title of the Police Quarterly paper, is that this addresses rotten apples and not rotten barrels or orchards [15][16].
"This would encourage courts to consider the wider, systemic and institutional context of police criminality. It would also help to ensure that sentences are always aimed at repairing the public trust that is diminished when police officers commit crime," McNabb said [13].
What to watch
- Whether any MP picks up the officer-specific aggravating factor as a Criminal Code amendment.
- A count of charges laid against Canadian officers over the same 35 years, which would show how selective the 93 decisions are.
- Whether provincial oversight bodies begin publishing outcomes from investigation through sentencing, the authors' second ask.