“Act Surprised, Show Concern, Deny, Deny, Deny:” An Intersectional Analysis of Police Culture, Institutional Betrayal, and Upholding the Status Quo in Canadian Policing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Police officers in Canada continue to publicly expose toxic work environments, misogyny, racism, criminal acts such as sexual assault, stigmatized mental illness, cover ups, and retribution for those who come forward. Marginalized members of the public report similar experiences in their interactions with the police, indicating a connection between the internal workplace environment and public service. Canadian police leaders, their affiliates, and government bodies are aware of the systemic issues present in the institution. Yet, little has changed in a meaningful way.\nIn light of these challenges and lack of change, a framework to better understand the mechanisms, scope, and impact of marginalization processes in the institution is needed. This framework must capture how the institution’s historical legacy of white supremacist patriarchy operates currently to support the dominance of white, cisgender, heterosexual men. This study asks why there has been limited progress (and for whom), how the institutional status quo is maintained, and the impacts at individual, group, and institutional levels.\nTo address these questions, this exploratory study analyses data from 116 interviews from 31 police services across Canada and a national, on-line, self-report survey with 727 participants. An inter-disciplinary approach using theoretical frameworks from sociology, psychology, intersectional feminism, and organizational theory with concepts from critical race theory and masculinity theory offer new theoretical contributions to the body of work on police culture. Overall, this study finds hypermasculinity, whiteness, assimilation and conformity, and a resistance to change remain at significant levels in police services across Canada. The institution remains a gendered and racialized organization, which negatively impacts the personal and professional lives of those who do not “fit.” Strong evidence of assimilation and conformity expectations were found, including varying acts of retribution for those who deviated. As a result, a culture of fear and silence was prominent for most officers regardless of gender, ethno-racial identity, rank, and their intersections. This led to significant reluctance to report mental illness and internal misconduct such as harassment and discrimination. A deeper understanding of why and how the status quo remains is the first step in dismantling the power structures that uphold it.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 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".