Police Encounters and Experiences among Youths and Adults Who Use Drugs: Qualitative and Quantitative Findings of a Cross-Sectional Study in Victoria, British Columbia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
People who use drugs are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system in Canada; how they come to be in contact with this system is typically through encounters with police. Understanding the nature of encounters between people who use drugs and police is vital to developing interventions and policing practices that are appropriate, fair, and promote the well-being of this community. This study quantitatively and qualitatively examines police encounters from the perspectives of youths and adults who use drugs in Victoria, British Columbia. The results show divergent predictors of police encounters and perceptions of these encounters based on age cohort. Youths were more likely to report police encounters and were more likely to perceive these encounters as negative compared with the adult cohort. Among both age groups, unstable housing was a significant predictor of reporting a recent encounter with the police. Among adults only, opioid use was a significant predictor of negative encounters. The qualitative findings show that negative perceptions were largely due to police harassment, being labelled as a person who uses drugs, and interference with drug paraphernalia. These findings also show that mutual respect and relationships built over time contribute to more positive reports of encounters. There were also many reports of positive experiences despite legal interference. These results suggest that people who use drugs belong to a group that are labelled and discriminated against, but that relationship building between people who use drugs and police can have a positive impact. These results may inform local policing practices and cultures, which can promote the health and well-being of the community.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".