Building Transparency Through a Canadian Police Use-of-Force Database

No police-sponsored or government-sponsored national use-of-force database currently exists in Canada. Creating a national use-of-force database would help to increase police transparency, improve public perceptions of police legitimacy by showing that force is used rarely and is generally justified when it is used, enhance our understanding of use-of-force dynamics, lead to potential mitigation strategies to reduce use-of-force incidents, and address public misconceptions aboutpolice use-of-force. Establishing a national use-of-force database will also likely come with challenges associated with inconsistent reporting, resistance from the police community, establishment of standardized inclusion criteria, missing data due to privacy issues (e.g., health data), and database ownership concerns.