Canadian Social Group Memberships' Confidence in the Police, Surveillance, and Political Behavior

• In Event: Poster Session: New Research in Information Technology and Politics & Canadian Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Canadian Politics

Abstract

The police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black American, prompted massive protests across the United States and around the globe in the spring and summer of 2020. Like those south of the border, Canadian protesters gathered to bring renewed attention to a longstanding problem: systemic racism and police impunity. While race, dissatisfaction with the police, and politics have received much attention in popular media, surprisingly little political science research considers the relationship between race, attitudes toward the police, and political behavior in Canada. Do Canadians attitudes towards the police vary along racial lines? How do attitudes toward the police mobilize political engagement? We help answer these questions using data from a variety of sources that provide a small time series before, during, and after the revival of the Black Lives Matters protests: the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies, the 2019 and 2020 2019-2020 General Social Surveys, and the Impacts of COVID-19 on Canadians Experiences of Discrimination and Perceptions of Safety survey administered by Statistics Canada. We find that across the datasets, there is a persistent racial gap in police confidence, with people of color expressing less confidence than white Canadians. We find this gap in immigrants compared to people born in Canada and between respondents living under the poverty line and above it, but we find no gender gap in confidence in the police. We also find lower confidence in the police is associated with protesting. Greater confidence in the police is associated with a higher probability of voting Conservative and a lower probability of voting Liberal. This paper speaks to the Canadian Politics Section’s call to submit proposals that speak to contemporary political, policy, and social issues and trends related to decolonization, migration, systemic discrimination, and social inequality.

Authors

• Isadora Borges Monroy, McGill University

• Edana Beauvais, Simon Fraser University

• Heather Pham