Policing and Indigenous Civilian Deaths in Canada

With the recent growth in scholarship in the USA regarding police killings of civilians, it is notable that the topic has gone largely unstudied in Canada even though the country faces high levels of death through legal intervention. Using data from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Deadly Force team, we conduct an event history analysis of where and when civilians in Canada are killed by law enforcement, with a particular focus on the deaths of Indigenous civilians. For both the general population and Indigenous peoples, we find that police killings of civilians are most likely in urban centres and not in Indigenous communities. Higher levels of crime severity and criminal incidents are associated with more civilian deaths, as are relatively lower incomes and housing quality. Police staffing levels are not related to deaths for either population, but killings for both populations are much less likely in areas policed by the RCMP and with higher police productivity, as proxied for by clearance rates. Higher levels of female officer employment are linked to lower civilian deaths for Indigenous peoples. These results are consistent with both racial and economic threat theories, as well as reactive hypotheses. The findings are largely consistent with the literature from the USA and suggest that previously evaluated US-based interventions, such as improving force diversity, may be able to lower deaths of Indigenous civilian deaths in Canada.