Summary
In 2012, provincial, territorial and federal governments of Canada reached consensus on an important policy issue: public policing costs were escalating and something needed to be done about ‘the economics of policing’. They also discovered that, as a result of the federal government’s chronic defunding of policing research, they had very little Canadian knowledge upon which to draw. The focus of the present paper is on how both the ‘economics of policing’ crisis, and policy-makers’ inability to utilize domestic research to resolve it, were generated by successive governments sharing an ideologically-informed view of the relative importance of criminal justice research.