Exploring the Intersectional and Spatial Implications of the Police Power to Search Dwellings Incident to Lawful Arrest: A Comment on R. v. Stairs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines whether the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in R. v. Stairs to alter the baseline police power to conduct searches incident to lawful arrest adequately addresses issues of intersectionality and spatiality. The paper’s principal focus is on race and class, which is analyzed through the lens of critical theories around race and space/spatialization, drawing on Black geographies and Critical Race Theory (“CRT”). It will also consider critical legal theories that urge us to conduct a distributional analysis of the differential impacts of legal standards. Importantly, the paper considers how courts do and should conceptualize privacy and domesticity for Black individuals and families. Specifically, it analyzes whether the Majority’s emphasis on police and public safety in conducting warrantless home searches will disproportionately affect Black households and their residents, particularly those located in so-called less desirable or high-risk neighbourhoods. Indeed, like their bodies, Black spaces (e.g., houses, communities) are read as more risk-prone and are approached cautiously and, at times, with pre-emptive violence. Some scholars have contended that the use of pre-emptive state violence is based on racial logic. An instance of this occurs when narratives that associate Black individuals and the spaces they occupy as dangerous influence the way police offıcers perceive public and offıcer safety. Indeed, exaggerated risk perceptions have led to excessive and deadly use of force, dehumanizing and dignity-affronting policing practices.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.040 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.021 | 0.028 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".