Chronic Involvement with Canadian Policing Services Beyond Criminal Offending

Abstract Prior research has extensively discussed the issue of chronic offending, where a small group of individuals are repeatedly charged by police and are involved in large numbers of criminal offences. Considerably less research explores individuals who are chronically involved with the police for non-criminal reasons. Using police records data, the current study describes the chronic police involvement for both criminal and non-criminal police involved populations. Using a prospective longitudinal design, a baseline sample of 31,755 individuals who were involved with police in 2015, were followed through the police record until 2020. Chronic offenders made up 3.3% of the overall police involved population and were involved in close to one third of all police interactions and over half of all criminal offences. A second group, chronic non-offenders, were also shown to be chronically involved with policing services, but for non-criminal matters. These individuals made up 3.5% of the overall police involved population and were involved in approximately ten percent of all police interactions. Both the chronic offending and chronic non-offending groups differed on measures of demographics and non-criminal police involvement. Policy and practice implications surrounding the use of police data for improved service coordination and prevention insights are discussed.