Regional police

In Canada, there are three main types of regional police force.

[1] Many Indigenous communities are too small to sustain independent police forces — the Canadian reserve system operated on the assumption that Indigenous families required less land than settler families and routinely gave away reserve lands to settlers without Indigenous consultation or consent[2] — and several instead maintain regional police agencies, either by contracting police services out to a neighbouring municipal police force or by sharing police services with several other First Nations or Indigenous communities.

While regional municipalities in Ontario and Quebec form an "upper tier" (county level) of government, coordinating services like police and roads for several constituent municipalities (making those forces equivalent to US county sheriff departments), Nova Scotia regional municipalities are "single tier," handling all of the municipal services for a large area.

The adoption of regional policing in Canada has been controversial.

A 2016 review of nine mid-sized and large Canadian police services found no significant differences existed in cost or service quality between regional and non-regional police forces,[6] and a literature review in 2015 found that larger police services are less effective and more expensive compared to mid-sized forces.