ZHIQIU LIN. Policing the Wild North-West: A Sociological Study of the Provincial Police in Alberta and Saskatchewan 1905-1932. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. 2007. Pp. 233. $34.95
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many criminologists and a few historians spend their working lives trying to make sense of the often baffling changes in crime rates observed in the couple of centuries in which more or less reliable statistics have been gathered in various countries. There are many large unsolved questions about these figures. Do they represent real changes in behavior, or are they artifacts of the way they are recorded? Are they systematically related to economic or demographic changes? One of these questions is how the changing numbers are affected by the activities of police, and this is the main focus of Zhiqiu Lin's study. The history of policing in western Canada over the last century and a half outside the major cities has been dominated by the North West Mounted Police and its successor, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The important exception was the brief period from 1917 to 1928 in Saskatchewan and 1932 in Alberta, when the federal government withdrew from contracts to provide provincial police services, forcing the two provinces to create their own police. The different organizational structures and policing agendas over the next decade or so provide a good foundation for comparative study. The core of the book is the third chapter, which uses an array of econometric techniques to analyze the data on crime rates. The chapter is quite successful in demonstrating that there was a gradual but real rise in rates of serious crime, while the much larger rise in public order offenses came from political pressures associated especially with the enforcement of prohibition. The size of the police force in relation to the population made little difference. As the author succinctly puts it, “Arrest rates are more influenced by what police do than by their numbers” (p. 81).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".