What's Keeping the Chiefs and Senior Executives Up at Night?

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) Research Advisory Committee (RAC) recognizes that the ability of research, science, technology, innovation, and collaboration to address policing challenges depends on a clear understanding and definition of those challenges from the outset. While police services across Canada face many common operational and organizational issues, there is currently no national mechanism to systematically identify, prioritize, and share these challenges across jurisdictions and with policing partners.

To address this gap, the RAC is conducting a survey of Chiefs of Police and senior policing leaders across Canada to identify your top three to five operational, strategic, and organizational challenges. The results will inform the development of a Canadian Policing Problem Book, providing a national perspective on the issues most affecting Canadian policing and establishing a foundation for coordinated research, innovation, and solution development. This will mirror the UK's Policing Problem Book.

The findings will support the development of CACP priorities, inform efforts by the CACP Ethics Committee to establish and validate Canadian National Principles of Policing, help guide targeted funding and investments through Defence Research and Development Canada's Canadian Safety and Security Program (CSSP) and federal research agencies, and be shared with the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) to contribute to broader policing research and innovation efforts.

The Canadian Policing Problem Book will also support several key outcomes:

Enhance Collaboration and Capability by bringing together policing organizations, researchers, governments, industry, and community partners to address shared challenges, reduce duplication of effort, and co-develop evidence-informed solutions.

Identify Current and Emerging Challenges across short-, medium-, and long-term horizons to better inform research priorities, innovation initiatives, policy development, and future capability investments.

Develop a National Policing Problem Dataset that provides clear demand signals, supports the identification and prioritization of common challenges, informs research agendas, and enables targeted investments in high-priority policing issues.

Understand Regional and Organizational Variations in Policing Challenges by identifying and analyzing issues across geographic regions, jurisdictions, agency types, and service sizes. This will help distinguish challenges that are national in scope from those affecting specific communities or policing environments, enabling more targeted research, policy development, resource allocation, and solution development.

Establish a National Police Research Community of Practice to facilitate the continuous exchange of knowledge, research findings, best practices, and innovative solutions. This community will connect police services across Canada, accelerating the identification, testing, evaluation, implementation, and sharing of approaches that address common policing challenges.

The following survey is to be completed by senior executives within Canadian police services and will only take 10 minutes to complete.

Please note that information provided in this survey, including the name of the responding agency, will not be shared with third parties and is only intended to determine how representative the responses are of police services in Canada, as well as determine how Canadian policing problems vary across regions and services, given that some problems may be more dominant in different parts of the country.

Please do not include any protected or otherwise confidential information.