Police

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To Serve and Protect?

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Sociologists and criminologists study topics about the law, criminal behaviours, deviance as well as the role of the police in contemporary society.

To see a list of department faculty researching and teaching in the area of the Sociology of Crime and Law.

Research by Sociologists

Gill, C., Campbell, M. A., & Ballucci, D. (2019). Police officers’ definitions and understandings of intimate partner violence in New Brunswick, Canada. The Police Journal, 0032258X19876974.

Gray, G., & van Rooij, B. (2020). Regulatory disempowerment: How enabling and controlling forms of power obstruct citizen‐based regulation. Regulation & Governance.

Gray, G., & Carroll, W. K. (2018). Mapping Corporate Influence and Institutional Corruption Inside Canadian Universities. Critical Criminology, 26(4), 491-507.

Gray, G., & Benning, B. (2019). Crowdsourcing criminology: social media and citizen policing in missing person cases. Sage open, 9(4), 2158244019893700.

Humphrey, T., & Vaillancourt, T. (2020). Longitudinal relations between bullying perpetration, sexual harassment, homophobic taunting, and dating violence: evidence of heterotypic continuity. Journal of youth and adolescence, 49(10), 1976-1986.

Humphrey, T., & Van Brunschot, E. G. (2018). Accumulating (dis) advantage: do social bonds mediate the relationship between multiple childhood adversities and persistent offending? Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology, 4(3), 297-321.

Humphrey, T. (2021). Deviance Management: Insiders, Outsiders, Hiders, and Drifters.

Humphrey, T., & Gibbs Van Brunschot, E. (2021). Measurement matters: offense types and specialization. Journal of interpersonal violence, 36(1-2), NP46-NP69.

News or Related Stories

Garry Gray Trust in Research

Finding Emma Fillipoff

Video: What’s the Role of Police in Canada? (CBC)

Sociology Courses at UVic

If you would like to explore police, law, crime and social justice in more depth, the Department offers a number of courses you might be interested in:

SOCI100A – Introduction to Sociology: Understanding Social Life
SOCI100B – Introduction to Sociology: Understanding Contemporary Society
SOCI103 – Settler Colonialism and Canadian Society
SOCI202 – Constructing Social Problems
SOCI204 – Self, Identity and Society
SOCI206 – Crime and Deviance
SOCI235 – Racialization and Ethnicity
SOCI312 – White–Collar Crime
SOCI313 – Sociology of Law
SOCI316 – Social Movements
SOCI318 – Social Change
SOCI346 – Sociology of Surveillance
SOCI430A – Issues in Racialization, Ethnicity and Decolonization
SOCI434 – Issues in Deviance, Crime and Law
SOCI436 – Issues in Sociology and Social Justice
SOCI438 – Issues in Contemporary Sociology