Managing Major, Critical and Public Order Incidents in Canadian Policing

This brief examines Canadian police incident command response teams’ process of decision-making during major, critical, and public order events. It explores the different factors that influence how police Incident Commanders (ICs) approach their work, and demystifies this work and how it is organized and operationalized.

The chapters in this book detail:

• The basics of how incident command is structured in Canada.

• How incident command models in Canada relate to those in other countries.

• Overviews of the training and responsibilities for different incident command types.

• First-hand accounts of how ICs approach their work and feel about the decisions they have to make.

This book is ideal for practitioners and policymakers who are interested in how this mode of policing works. It is also suitable for policing students in upper-level criminology and criminal justice courses curious about this potential line of work.

Dr. Laura Huey is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, the Editor of Police Practice and Research and a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. She has sat on the Council of Canadian Academies’ Expert Panels on Policing and Cybercrime, the Royal Society of Canada’s Covid-19 Taskforce, and was formerly a Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. National Police Foundation. She is also the founder and former Director of the Canadian Society of Evidence-Based Policing (CAN-SEBP) and has engaged in consultative work for the Canadian federal government, provincial police organizations and other groups. Dr. Huey’s work in the field of crime and security is primarily focused on policing (frontline and criminal investigation), victimization, terrorism, and cyber-security. Her research has appeared in the British Journal of Sociology, the British Journal of Criminology, Sociological Review, Society & Mental Health, Theoretical Criminology, Criminology and Criminal Justice, the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and various other international journals. She is also an International Advisory Editor for Theoretical Criminology and on the editorial advisory boards of Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Surveillance & Society. This will be her 12th book.

Dr. Lorna Ferguson is a Banting Postdoctoral Researcher at Memorial University and is the Founder of the Missing Persons Research Hub. Her research has made significant contributions to understanding how police respond to missing persons cases, particularly those that involve complex challenges like criminal connections, vulnerable populations, and cold/long-term cases. She has educated, trained, and partnered with over forty police services and several individual officers to enhance police practices and policies and officer knowledge on missing persons. While her specialization is police responses to missing persons, Dr. Ferguson conducts research in various areas related to policing, including incident command, evidence-based policing, technologies, calls involving persons with mental illness, cybercrime, police data, and police reform. Dr. Ferguson’s scholarly work has been published in top peer-reviewed journals in the field and has been the subject of many local, national, and international presentations. Her recent research has appeared in Criminology & Criminal Justice, Crime & Delinquency, Policing & Society, and Policing: An International Journal, among others. She has written four books, e.g., The Wicked Problems of Police Reform in Canada with Routledge and Police Search and Rescue Response to Lost and Missing Persons with Springer Nature.

Dr. Judith Andersen is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. As the Director of the Health, Adaptation, Research on Trauma (HART) Lab, her research focuses on the impact of severe stress on health and occupational functioning among law enforcement professionals, including Incident Commanders. Her research has informed the development of interventions to enhance first responder’s health and occupational effectiveness. She has served as an expert contributor to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, the Canadian Mass Casualty Committee and the Royal Society of Canada's Mental Health and Policing Working Group. Her work, recognized by both the federal and provincial governments, is being used to shape police training practices in North America and Europe. Her work has been published in journals such as Nature Reviews Psychology, Archives of General Psychiatry, Police Practice and Research, Policing and Society, and Psychological Science. She is an Associate Editor for the British Journal of Health Psychology and co-author of the textbook Health Psychology.