ABSTRACT
Municipal police forces are established and regulated under provincial legislation, which require cities and towns to furnish adequate policing for their communities. This chapter discusses the definitions of police violence, the history and context of municipal policing. It briefly surveys the literature on the causes of police violence, and examines the prevalence of police violence in Canada. The chapter reviews existing controls on police behaviour, and makes a number of recommendations for the future. Each act of police violence is an event, similar to those measured in conflict processes literature, consisting of a series of stages, actions, or effects. Controlling police violence is part of a larger debate about the autonomy and control of government organizations. The chapter provides an introduction to the problem of public police violence in Canada, there are various factors that make the chronology a limited source for coding events.
