Red Alert: The Future of the RCMP

Red Alert is a timely exploration of a national institution that has lurched from crisis to crisis. Once a mainstay of the nation’s image, the future of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has become increasingly uncertain with Alberta and British Columbia proposing the establishment of provincial services to replace them and Justin Trudeau calling for the force to be reduced by two thirds to focus on national security. 

Policing and legal expert Kent Roach highlights the increasing challenges the RCMP faces as underlined by the 2020 massacres of twenty-two people in rural Nova Scotia and the underexamined 2022 mass murder of eleven people on James Smith Cree Nation. Red Alert explains how the RCMP’s insistence on boot camp training helps it retain its colonial and paramilitary nature, making it an incompatible fit for the specialized and dynamic world of modern policing. Roach emphasizes the need for restorative approaches to community safety including Indigenous peacekeeping and having police work with communities in both national security and local policing.

A compelling portrayal of the pressures facing the RCMP, and the prospects for meaningful reform within and without it, Red Alert is essential for understanding the troubling state of law enforcement.

Kent Roach is professor of law at the University of Toronto. He is a former law clerk to Justice Bertha Wilson of the Supreme Court of Canada and has been editor-in-chief of the Criminal Law Quarterly since 1998.