Thank you, Mr. Garrison.
Absolutely. Police officers are aware of what's going on when they respond to different situations, but they have the tools they are working with and they are called risk assessment tools.
In Canada, one of those risk assessment tools is called ODARA. In many places, they are going to use this particular risk assessment tool. This assessment tool is used when there is physical violence or a threat of physical violence. They perform an assessment when they see that, when there is evidence of physical violence. If there is evidence of other things, it's not necessarily going to be assessed.
I did a survey in New Brunswick with police forces. We were asking about their perceptions around intimate partner violence. I had two camps: those who are more traditional in their way of viewing IPV, and those who are more progressive. Those who are more conservative and more traditional are going to use the terminology from the Criminal Code of Canada, so they talk about assault and sexual assault, while those who are more progressive are going to talk about coercion, jealousy and oppression in the relationship or even isolation.
Police officers know that something is happening, but they do not necessarily have the leverage to really do something about the situation besides sending a victim to a shelter, or maybe to issue an 810 so that there will be a distance between the two partners. There's not much they are going to be able to do in terms of intervening. They can separate the parties, they can arrest a party, but there will be no charges that are going to be laid toward this particular person.
You need to find some evidence. In order to find that evidence about coercive control, we need to give them the tools to be able to identify what is coercive control. That's what I would say.