Dr. Sara Thompson (Ryerson) under took Community Resilience Fund (Public Safety Canada) funded research entitled “Design and Performance: Developing Canadian Partnerships from Countering Violent Extremism”. This workshop was culmination of that work.
This workshop itself was co-hosted by Dr Sara Thompson, Canada Centre for the Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence (Public Safety Canada), and TSAS. It brought together representatives from each of the police services involved in this research, academic researchers from Canada, the UK and Australia, and number of senior policy advisors from:
- Public Safety Canada
- Global Affairs Canada
- Department of Justice Canada
- Citizenship and Immigration Canada
- Correctional Service of Canada
- PCH (Heritage Canada)
- Employment and Social Development Canada
- Office of the Provincial Security Advisor, Ontario
- Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands
- Department of Homeland Security (US).
Purpose of the workshop was threefold:
(1) to bring together and work with our partner police organizations to develop research questions and methodologies for the new project;
(2) to organize an international panel of researchers (including myself and representatives of my partner police services) to provide an overview of “what we know” about identifying, assessing, and attending to radicalization to violence and violent extremism; and
(3) to engage in dialogue with the Canada Centre that will inform the development of a national CVE/CRV strategy. The police partners I brought to Ottawa discussed their experience working on countering radicalization to violence, hate crime and hate incidents, and doing community outreach/engagement work. Areas of focus included current priorities and needs in areas like training, information resources, performance measures, and the resources required to effectively address radicalization to violence and hate motivated incidents. One of the “take home messages” from this event was the need for more and better education/training on the Hate Crime/CVE-RTV nexus, particularly in the policing context; I, together with several of my police research partners decided to build-in an additional component to this research (which I subsequently discussed with Brett Kubicek, who approved its inclusion), discussed below.