Drug decriminalization and policy alienation among frontline police in British Columbia: A qualitative study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Research Summary This qualitative study examines how frontline police officers in British Columbia experienced and adapted to Canada's first formal drug decriminalization policy 1 year after implementation. Drawing on 30 semi‐structured interviews and using thematic analysis with a policy alienation and street‐level bureaucracy lens, we analyzed how officers felt alienated from the policy process and coped with this experience as frontline implementers. Key themes show that frontline officers experienced processes of policy alienation in various ways: they felt that the policy was misaligned with their frontline perspectives; the Policy undermined their ability to help people in their communities; and legal ambiguity surrounding the Policy was challenging to navigate. Their coping strategies revealed that officers interpreted and executed decriminalization in divergent ways. Policy Implications These findings have important implications for policymakers and police leadership considering drug policy reforms. Officers’ feelings of disempowerment and policy meaninglessness, especially in contexts of legal ambiguity, may lead to inconsistent or inequitable enforcement. Strengthening communication across police ranks is critical. Middle managers may help translate reform goals, identify resource gaps, and support effective coping strategies. Legal clarity should extend beyond policy updates to help officers reconcile overlapping laws and reduce liability concerns. While there are limits to policy consultation with frontline officers within the hierarchical structure of police institutions, reform efforts should still engage with frontline officers’ working logics. Training should address harmful attitudes and misunderstandings of drug use, clarify legal boundaries, and mitigate unintended harms of enforcement. Ultimately, effective drug policy reform in a multi‐jurisdictional system requires acknowledging how frontline officers interpret and shape policy within institutional constraints.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".