Quality assurance and risk management in Canadian police services: Theory and practice

Quality assurance in the public sector presents interesting challenges and nowhere are these more obvious than in policing. While there was a high level of consensus around the aims of quality assurance in policing, this study of Canadian police services shows little consistency in approaches. A structured survey and open-ended interviews and surveys with management of law enforcement agencies, revealed a wide range of definitions, structures and tools. There was also a range of approaches to quality assurance, ranging from highly prescriptive compliance based approaches, which appear to have evolved from quality control and auditing functions through more process oriented approaches aligned with continuous improvement.