“The Greatest Man-Catcher of All”: The First Female Mounties, the Media, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police1

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie Reilly Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Canadian Society ◽  
Royal Canadian Mounted Police ◽  
Broadcast Media ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

The arrival of the first female Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers disrupted the highly masculinized image of a police force that was closely connected to ideal Canadian manhood and the formation of the nation. The absence of women from the historical record allowed the figure of the manly and heroic male Mountie to continue its dominance in official, academic, and popular histories of the police force. Both the print and broadcast media were complicit in disseminating these representations. When the first female Mounties were hired in 1974, editorial cartoonists and journalists frequently portrayed them in highly gendered terms that reflected understandings of femininity in operation in broader Canadian society at the time. The RCMP also articulated the arrival of the first female RCMP officers in gendered terms, reinforcing beliefs about manliness and masculinity as essential attributes for police officers. In contrast to these depictions, the oral histories of female RCMP officers present an alternative perspective that challenged and contested these gendered assumptions, establishing female Mounties as equal participants in the policing activities, and the history, of the RCMP on their own terms.

Karnu's Message and the ‘War of the Hoe Handle’: Interpreting a Central African resistance movement

Africa ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Burnham ◽  
Thomas Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Central African Republic ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
East Central ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Resistance Movement

IntroductionIn writing the history of the Gbaya-speaking peoples, a group of some half-million population inhabiting east-central Cameroon and the western third of the Central African Republic, we are seldom able to recount the careers of famous individuals, and genealogical charters which link present leaders with long-dead heroes are uncommon. For the most part, in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods, the Gbaya were not organized politically at a level greater than very localised, clan-based groupings, and political leadership was more a matter of competition for short-lived political powers among locally influential men than of formally institutionalised chieftaincy (see Burnham, 1980a: 19 et seq.). However, in some cases during the late pre-colonial period, particularly in the westernmost parts of the Gbaya region, certain leaders began to consolidate their positions as a result of political and economic relations with the neighbouring Fulbe states of Adamawa and their associated Hausa and Kanuri traders (Burnham, 1980b). The names of men like Dogo Lokoti, Bafio and Mbartua (Bertoua) then occasionally figure in the oral histories and colonial documents, and we obtain glimpses of their personalities and careers. It is all the more striking, therefore, when we encounter a Gbaya figure who stands out clearly in the historical record. Without a doubt, Karnu, the inspiration behind the movement that has been called the Karnu Rebellion or the ‘War of the Hoe Handle’ in the Gbaya language, is the most widely known name in Gbaya history.

Coercion and Control in Nyasaland: Aspects of the History of a Colonial Police Force

1986 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McCracken
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Technical Requirements ◽  
Colonial Authority ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Disproportionate Number ◽  
Colonial Police ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
And Control

This article examines the changing function of the Nyasaland police force between the 1890s and 1962. Initially, the police consisted of small groups of armed ex-soldiers, totally untrained in conventional police duties and employed by district officers in pressing labour and enforcing the payment of hut tax. In 1920, however, the authorities responded to the threat seemingly posed by the emergence of ‘dangerous classes’ – particularly labour migrants returned from the south – by forming a trained, centralized force, commanded in the Shire Highlands, though not elsewhere, by European police-officers. In the reorganized districts the police succeeded in protecting urban property. But so limited was the size of the force that the prevention and detection of crime was hardly attempted over the greater part of the country, while campaigns such as that against the Mchape witchcraft eradication movement foundered in the face of popular opposition.Substantial changes began in the mid-1940s in response to urbanization and the increasing complexity of police duties, coming to a climax in the 1950s as the colonial government struggled to maintain authority. At first the emphasis was on raising educational standards and improving conditions of service. But following the crisis of 1953, it switched to expanding police numbers and increasing the coercive power of the force; this process was accelerated in the aftermath of the 1959 emergency.Recruitment policies were influenced by the technical requirements of the authorities and by the ethnic stereotypes they evolved – a combination which resulted in the recruitment of a disproportionate number of Yao policemen in the first few decades and of more Lomwe and Chewa later. Policemen were attracted less by the rates of pay than by the privileges on offer. An inner corps of policemen spent their lives upholding colonial authority, but most could not be placed in a distinctive category of ‘collaborator’.

scholarly journals National Security & Emerging Threats to The West Coast

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
CASIS
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
National Security ◽  
West Coast ◽  
The West ◽  
Royal Canadian Mounted Police ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
Canadian Association ◽  
Intelligence Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media

On February 21st, 2019, the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies hosted its twelfth roundtable focusing on “National Security & Emerging Threats to the West Coast.” The presentation was hosted by Inspector Benoit Maure, a serving Peace Officer for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with over 30 years of police experience. Inspector Maure highlighted various emerging and continuing terror threats in British Columbia, highlighting their similarities to other global issues. He discussed the history of terror threats in British Columbia (BC) and the role of symbolic targets in terrorism. The following roundtable discussion centred on a case study describing the Yellow Vest Canada movement and its proclivity toward soft violence. Audience members then brought into question whether or not the media downplays soft violence and if this arguable disposition places Canadians into instances where it may be difficult to detect escalation of groups approaching hard violence.

scholarly journals The Masculine Mountie: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police as a Male Institution, 1914-1939

2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Police Force ◽  
Royal Canadian Mounted Police ◽  
Provincial Level ◽  
Great Uncertainty ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Police

Abstract 1914 to 1939 was a very important period in the history of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The Force found its very existence threatened. It also was transformed as it lost and then regained a role at the provincial level of policing, found itself amalgamated with the Dominion Police in 1920, and experienced widely fluctuating personnel levels throughout the period. Finally, it took on a security/intelligence role that would last until 1984. “The Masculine Mountie” looks at the Mounted Police in this era. Specifically the paper uses gender and ethnic analysis to explore the values and characteristics of the RCMP and how they affected the work it performed. Who Mounties were leads directly into what they did. These two aspects are very related, a reality that is too often ignored in much of the writing about Canada's national police force. Finally, the paper connects these various threads in an effort to deal with the important question of why the RCMP survived and prospered in its era of great uncertainty.

Policing the British Empire on the Bund: The Origin of the Sikh Police Unit in Shanghai

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-73
Author(s):  
Cao Yin
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
British Colonies ◽  
Modern Shanghai

Red-turbaned Sikh policemen have long been viewed as symbols of the cosmopolitan feature of modern Shanghai. However, the origin of the Sikh police unit in the Shanghai Municipal Police has not been seriously investigated. This article argues that the circulation of police officers, policing knowledge, and information in the British colonial network and the circulation of the idea of taking Hong Kong as the reference point amongst Shanghailanders from the 1850s to the 1880s played important role in the establishment of the Sikh police force in the International Settlement of Shanghai. Furthermore, by highlighting the translocal connections and interactions amongst British colonies and settlements, this study tries to break the metropole-colony binary in imperial history studies.

Autobiographies of Three Surviving Branch Davidians

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-197
Author(s):  
Catherine Wessinger
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Human Dimensions ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Initial Report ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Branch Davidians ◽  
The Bible ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Media ◽  
Federal Agents

This article provides an initial report on oral histories being collected from three surviving Branch Davidians: Bonnie Haldeman, the mother of David Koresh, Clive Doyle, and Sheila Martin. Their accounts are being made into autobiographies. Interviews with a fourth survivor, Catherine Matteson, are being prepared for deposit in an archive and inform the material gathered from Bonnie Haldeman, Clive Doyle, and Sheila Martin. Oral histories provided by these survivors humanize the Branch Davidians, who were dehumanized and erased in 1993 by the application of the pejorative ‘cult’ stereotype by the media and American law enforcement agents. These Branch Davidian accounts provide alternate narratives of what happened in 1993 at Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas, to those provided by American federal agents, and flesh out the human dimensions of the community and the tragedy. Branch Davidians are differentiated from many other people primarily by their strong commitment to doing God's will as they understand it from the Bible. Otherwise they are ordinary, intelligent people with the same emotions, loves, and foibles as others.

Empowering Women in Blue Uniforms—Gender and Police in South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shanta Singh ◽  
Sultan Khan
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Police Work ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Police Culture ◽  
The South ◽  
South African Police Service ◽  
Female Police Officers ◽  
South African Police ◽  
Female Officers

Gender in the police force has received scant attention by researchers, although there are complex social dimensions at play in how male and female law enforcement officers relate to each other in the workplace. Given the fact that males predominate in the police force, their female counterparts are often marginalised due to their sexual orientation and certain stereotypes that prevail about their femininity. Male officers perceive female officers as physically weak individuals who cannot go about their duties as this is an area of work deemed more appropriate to men. Based on this perception, female officers are discriminated against in active policing and often confined to administrative duties. This study looks at how female police officers are discriminated against in the global police culture across the globe, the logic of sexism and women’s threat to police work, men’s opposition to female police work, gender representivity in the police force, and the integration and transformation of the South African Police Service to accommodate female police officers. The study highlights that although police officers are discriminated against globally, in the South African context positive steps have been taken to accommodate them through legislative reform.

Selfi es

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
Ramon Reichert
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Digital Communication ◽  
Role Expectations ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Human Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Front Stage

The history of the human face is the history of its social coding and the media- conditions of its appearance. The best way to explain the »selfie«-practices of today’s digital culture is to understand such practices as both participative and commercialized cultural techniques that allow their users to fashion their selves in ways they consider relevant for their identities as individuals. Whereas they may put their image of themselves front stage with their selfies, such images for being socially shared have to match determinate role-expectations, body-norms and ideals of beauty. Against this backdrop, collectively shared repertoires of images of normalized subjectivity have developed and leave their mark on the culture of digital communication. In the critical and reflexive discourses that surround the exigencies of auto-medial self-thematization we find reactions that are critical of self-representation as such, and we find strategies of de-subjectification with reflexive awareness of their media conditions. Both strands of critical reactions however remain ambivalent as reactions of protest. The final part of the present article focuses on inter-discourses, in particular discourses that construe the phenomenon of selfies thoroughly as an expression of juvenile narcissism. The author shows how this commonly accepted reading which has precedents in the history of pictorial art reproduces resentment against women and tends to stylize adolescent persons into a homogenous »generation« lost in self-love

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