Commissioned Reports

This report will explain the structure of police services in Nova Scotia. It will provide a snapshot of how policing was structured and resourced to function in April 2020, including the role of the RCMP and municipal police services. The report will explain the role of other government agencies such as Canada Border Services Agency and the Criminal Intelligence Service Nova Scotia. It will also look into governance and oversight, operations, resource allocation, and strategic planning, integrated policing and information sharing.

Author:

Barry MacKnight

This report will define mass casualty events and will survey the scholarship and policy work that has been completed in Canada with respect to mass casualty events. It will identify the key lessons that can be drawn from scholarly studies about mass casualty events in Canada and some of the key gaps within the policy and scholarly attention. It will also address the social context of perpetrators of mass violence and debates about “lone-actor” events.

Authors:

David Hofmann, University of New Brunswick

Lorne Dawson, University of Waterloo

Willa Greythorn, University of New Brunswick

This report will explain what constitutes a mass casualty event. It will also evaluate the published research about other mass casualty events by identifying gaps within the scholarly and policy literature. The authors will describe their work to establish a register of mass shootings in the United States of America and their own research on mass casualty events, including research into the relationship between masculinity and mass violence.

Authors:

Tristen Bridges, UC Santa Barbara

Tara Leigh Tober, UC Santa Barbara

This report will explore the relationship between mass casualty events, family violence and gender-based violence. It will describe trends within research and policy with respect to these kinds of violence, and explain how expertise in family violence and gender-based violence may help researchers and policy actors to better understand, prepare for, identify warning signs for, and respond to mass casualty events. The authors will also attend to research that documents how other forms of inequality and marginalization such as Islamaphobia and racism, are also implicated in the perpetration of mass casualty events.

Authors:

Jude McCulloch, Monash University

JaneMaree Maher, Monash University

This report will describe the key research findings that emerge from the authors’ research and that of others into the psychiatric and social impacts of surviving a mass casualty on survivors and families, with a particular focus on the research and findings that emerge from the Utøya mass casualty event and its aftermath. The report will describe the immediate, medium term and long term supports offered to survivors of Utøya and their families, and the gaps that the researchers’ studies have identified in those supports, identify the supports needed by survivors and families of victims of mass casualty events and the timescale on which these supports are necessary, and share insights or recommendations emerging from their research about how institutions and communities can prepare for and respond well to mass casualty events when they occur and in the medium- and long-term after such events.

Authors:

Grete Dyb, University of Oslo

Ingebjørg Lingaas, Norwegian Center for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies

This report will address the needs of survivors and communities in the wake of mass casualty events. The report will draw from the author’s empirical research with survivors and communities to provide recommendations about how survivors’ and communities’ needs should be understood, how these needs may change over time, and how they may change with the context of a given event and the community in which it occurs. The report will also explain how needs for support may be distributed within a community beyond the circle of those most directly affected by the events.

Author:

Jaclyn Schildkraut, SUNY Oswego

This report will define the concepts of risk assessment, prediction, prevention and late enablers. The authors will explain the use of these psychiatric terms for identifying potential dangerousness and understanding the perpetration of mass casualty offences. The author will review and assess the psychiatric literature with respect to whether there is or could reasonably be a meaningful profile for those who are at risk of perpetrating mass casualty offences. This report will also identify other relevant barriers and challenges to developing meaningful, evidence-based approaches to preventing or predicting the perpetration of mass casualty events, and to understanding them after they have occurred. This report will address how the principles the author has set out apply to information available to the Commission about the perpetrator of the April 2020 mass casualty that took place in Nova Scotia.  

Author:

Alexander (Sandy) Simpson, CAMH and University of Toronto

This report will define the fields of psychological assessment and risk assessment that may be used by law enforcement agencies and courts and review the scientific and evidence basis for the techniques used by psychological evaluators. It will also set out best practices for and limitations of psychological assessment and risk assessment in a manner that is generalizable to post-mortem psychological assessments. The authors will assess the extent to which the “Psychological Autopsy” produced with respect to the perpetrator of the April 2020 mass casualty that took place in Nova Scotia  reflects evidence-based techniques and best practices set out in the authors’ report.

Authors:

Kristy Martire, University of New South Wales

Tess Neal, Arizona State University

This report will address the phenomena of intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, family violence and coercive control. The authors will define these phenomena and explain what is known from empirical studies of how these phenomena manifest in Canada and, to the extent possible, specifically in Nova Scotia. The report will address research regarding police perceptions of and responses to these phenomena, identify barriers to reporting these harms and barriers to other non-state responses such as leaving relationships.

Authors

Carmen Gill, University of New Brunswick

Mary Aspinall, University of New Brunswick

This report will address crime prevention and community safety in rural communities. This author will explain the concept of urban bias in policy making, and how this concept applies to crime prevention and community safety in rural communities. The report will describe how responsibility for rural crime prevention and community safety is effectively delegated to municipal and local governments and civil society and the resource implications of this allocation for those communities. Community resilience within rural communities will also be considered.

Author:

Karen Foster, Dalhousie University

This report will provide a literature review of rural policing, addressing topics including community relationships, the nature of rural policing, and challenges in rural policing including with respect to culture and local/centralization dynamics.

Author:

Anna Souhami, University of Edinburgh, Law

The report will address inter-agency communications, interoperability, and cooperation among police services, and between police and other emergency services. The report will identify mechanisms and structural measures that can be put in place to mitigate against failures in inter-agency coordination, and will point to case studies and best practices where these exist. This report will refer to relevant research literature, and will attend particularly to Canadian case studies and those in peer jurisdictions.

Author:

Curt Taylor Griffiths, Simon Fraser University

The report will consider police and first responder decision-making during mass casualty events. This report will describe the author’s research on decision-making in conditions of threat and uncertainty, and draw on other literature where relevant. It will also address the challenges of preparing police and first responders for mass casualty events, community and policing resources that will be drawn upon within crisis response, and the role played by civilians within critical incident response. Where helpful and appropriate to do so, the author will draw on lessons learned from events that have parallels to those being considered by the Mass Casualty Commission, for example, the Utøya massacre of 2011 and the subsequent review of police responses to those events.

Author:

Bjørn Ivar Kruke, University of Stavanger

This report will provide a psychological review of critical incident decision-making by emergency personnel. The report will consider the personal attributes that support sound decision-making, the role of training, the impact of stress on decision-making, and common cognitive processes during critical incident response. Where salient, the report will draw on analogous examples of critical incident decision-making.

Author:

Laurence Alison, University of Liverpool

This report will explain the Canadian Communications Interoperability Continuum and the Alert Ready system as it has been designed and implemented. Specifically, the report will explain what communications interoperability means, how efforts to pursue communications interoperability are governed, and how interoperability systems are designed in Canada. In addition, the report will describe Alert Ready, explain how it works, how it is governed and designed, as well as its capabilities and limitations.

Author:

Chris Davis, Landsdowne Technologies Inc.

Also contributing: Cheryl McNeil, Peter Gamble

This report will explain key principles of system design and governance with respect to public alert systems and describe how the priorities and preferred outcomes for communities and emergency services organizations can be incorporated into the design and governance of public alert systems. It will explain key principles of inter-agency collaboration and inter-operability in effective emergency and critical incident response, including with respect to public communications and education. The author will identify best practices and useful models from other countries, provide examples of the successful application of the principles set out within the report, and compare Canadian practice with the best practices and principles identified.

Author:

Michael Hallowes, Emergency Services Commissioner, Victoria, Australia (ret.)

This report will describe the police duty to warn the public in Canada, drawing on relevant examples from other cases and instances in which the duty to warn has been explained and/or applied. The report may also draw on examples from other jurisdictions. The report will explain the purpose of the duty as it has been described in case law, reports and academic literature and, where relevant, explain the history of debates about the purpose, scope and limits of the duty, and how those debates have been resolved.

Author:

Rakhi Ruparelia, University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law

This report will address the literature on police culture and organizational culture in other spaces (e.g. public service organizations) to the extent that useful analogies can be drawn with those other spaces. The report will explain the role of organizational culture in making sense of significant events such as those the Mass Casualty Commission is studying.

Author:

Holly Campeau, University of Alberta

This report will provide a critical examination of the scholarly literature on the nature of police discretion, focusing on how the working culture and organization of law enforcement agencies fundamentally structures the exercise of police discretion and associated powers, such as the powers of arrest, detention, and use of force. In particular, this report will highlight some of the key barriers to making police discretion more transparent, information sharing more routine, and oversight more effective. Where possible and useful, it will attend to comparative examples from non-Canadian jurisdictions to identify some best practices and promising approaches to ensuring that police services are subject to meaningful legal oversight and accountable to the diverse communities they serve.

Author:

Benjamin Goold, University of British Columbia, Allard School of Law

This report will provide a legal history of firearms regulation in Canada. The report will explain the strategies that have been used to address the dangers associated with firearms (in particular semi-automatic long guns) and address the debates that have played out within Canadian public policy about these strategies. This report will address the enforcement of firearms regulation and the smuggling and illegal trafficking of firearms and associated paraphernalia.

Where possible, the author will identify the strength and shortcomings of past legislative approaches and of plausible alternative approaches.

Where possible, the report will identify what (kinds of) weapons have been implicated in mass casualty events in Canada, with reference to specific examples and the legislative or policy response, if any, to these events.

Author:

Blake Brown, St. Mary's University