https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4734-9168
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ABSTRACT
Police officers’ work environment is continually changing, with new risks emerging quickly and unpredictably – increasing officer stress and anxiety in the process. The recent emergence of the synthetic opioid fentanyl as an illicit recreational drug has introduced into police work new, potentially life-threatening, but also somewhat ambiguous risks. Police organizations have modified their policies and practices to manage the dangers posed by these potent opioids. Questions remain, however, about how front-line officers themselves perceive these new dangers and if they are altering police practice as a result. Based on interviews and survey data with two major police departments in Canada which are at the epicenter of Canada’s overdose crisis, our study empirically examines how police officers perceive the risks of fentanyl and how they might be altering their work practices due to their beliefs about the risks associated with handling and processing fentanyl and interacting with people who sell and consume these drugs.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For the purposes of this paper we use the term ‘fentanyl’ to refer to fentanyl and its derivatives such as carfentanyl and furanylfentanyl.
2 While many areas in Canada are policed by the Royal Canadian Mountain Police (RCMP), these two cities—like most larger Canadian cities—are policed by police services solely responsible for their respective cities and that are completely independent of the RCMP.
3 A 2017 online article titled ‘[p]olice office overdoses just from brushing fentanyl off his uniform’ (Rinkunas Citation2017) now has a caveat titled ‘[y]ou can’t overdose on fentanyl by touching it.’
4 Our research was approved in 2018 by both policing services, as well as the research ethics boards at the University of Alberta and McMaster University.
5 The other possible response options were ‘significant problem,’ ‘slight problem,’ and ‘not a problem at all.’
6 The third response option was ‘not concerned at all.’
7 Officers told us that, prior to fentanyl being on the market, they would sometimes sniff or taste drugs to confirm the substance. Some officers we interviewed continue with this practice when a substance is labeled as something other than fentanyl. Hence, Max’s practice may result in officers inadvertently inhaling/tasting fentanyl.
8 While the officers in our sample understood users as impure, they did not stigmatize users as not being worthy of interventions or care and did not generally position themselves against harm reduction measures in the same way as a growing body of literature from the United States suggests (Green et al., Citation2013; Murphy and Russell, Citation2020; Saunders et al., Citation2019; Selfridge et al., Citation2020). Interestingly, officers by and large supported harm reduction initiatives designed to provide users with access to services. This suggests that there are likely cross-national differences between American and Canadian police officers’ attitudes on drug users and harm reduction strategies that should be explored in future research.