A Canadian Exception to the Punitive Turn? Community Responses to Policing Practices in Winnipeg’s Inner City
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
While criminologists have made the case that a “punitive turn,” spurred on by penal populism, is being witnessed in several Western countries, some have argued that Canada is the exception to this trend. But recent developments in Winnipeg, Manitoba suggest that a made-in-America crime control strategy—zero-tolerance policing—has been imported into the Winnipeg context to combat the pressing problems of drugs, gangs, and violence in inner-city communities. Can this development be interpreted as evidence of a punitive turn? Has penal populism found its way into a Canadian jurisdiction? Drawing on interviews with inner-city residents, businesspeople, and community workers, we show that people in Winnipeg’s inner city have a sophisticated understanding of the causes of social problems in their neighbourhoods and a very clear vision of what they believe the role of police in the inner city should be: one in which the police work with the community as part of a wider effort of community mobilization. These findings do not support the view that Winnipeg is a Canadian exception to the punitive turn. Rather, they suggest the presence of community resistance to aggressive “get tough” strategies of crime control, and of the potential to fashion radically different solutions to the complex problems confronting inner-city communities.
 
 Résumé. Bien que les criminologues aient établi le bien-fondé qu’un «virage punitif», incité par un populisme pénal, se manifeste dans plusieurs pays occidentaux, certains prétendent que le Canada fait exception à cette tendance. Or, les récents développements à Winnipeg, au Manitoba, portent à croire qu’une stratégie américaine de lutte contre le crime, c’est-à-dire un maintien de l’ordre avec tolérance zéro, a été importée à Winnipeg pour régler les problèmes pressants de drogues, de gangs de rue et de violence dans les communautés des quartiers centraux de la ville. Ce développement peut-il être interprété comme preuve d’un virage punitif? Le populisme pénal est-il entré dans la juridiction canadienne? À partir d’entrevues avec des résidents, des gens d’affaires et des travailleurs des communautés des quartiers centraux, nous démontrons que les habitants de ces quartiers de Winnipeg comprennent bien les causes des problèmes sociaux qui y existent et qu’ils ont une vision très claire de ce que le rôle de la police devrait être dans ces quartiers, à savoir que la police devrait travailler avec la communauté dans le cadre d’une mobilisation communautaire plus large. Ces conclusions ne prouvent pas que Winnipeg soit l’exception canadienne au virage punitif. Au contraire, elles suggèrent la présence d’une résistance communautaire aux stratégies disciplinaires agressives de lutte contre le crime et la possibilité d’arriver à des solutions tout à fait différentes aux problèmes complexes auxquels les communautés des quartiers centraux des villes font face.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it