Policing without a badge: a scoping review of civilian personnel experience and impact in law enforcement agencies
Mousseau, Morin and Charbonneau (2025), Policing: An International Journal, Vol. 48(6), Emerald Publishing. The authors work with ENAP’s Canada Research Chair in Comparative Public Management, with co-affiliations at the University of Technology Sydney and the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières.
Described by its authors as the first systematic scoping review to consolidate research on police civilianization, it analysed 60 peer-reviewed studies spanning 25 years through both AI-assisted and manual methods, organising the findings into five themes: police–civilian integration, personnel policies, well-being, policing impact, and diversity.
How Evidano fit the workflow
- 1Structured data extraction
The study reports that the first step of extraction was carried out with Evidano, described as an AI-powered conversational assistant for systematic and scoping reviews, working from a predefined coding grid.
- 2Researcher review and validation
Two independent coders reviewed entries and cross-checked flagged studies against the original material, with a semantic-similarity comparison used to surface and resolve discrepancies.
- 3Consolidated themes
Findings were organized through inductive thematic analysis into five themes, producing a single consolidated version of the review.
“It draws on a scoping review of sixty peer-reviewed studies analyzed through both AI-assisted and manual methods to examine the methodological characteristics of existing research and provide a thematic analysis of findings and practical recommendations across key areas.”
“AILYZE has made it possible to systematically structure data extraction while leaving room for researchers’ expertise to inspect, validate and integrate the results into a coherent theoretical framework.”
“[The] process, combining task-specific artificial intelligence and human supervision, ensured that data extraction was systematic, transparent and faithful to the information reported in the studies.”
The AI-assisted step was reported openly in the study’s methods section.
Researchers inspected, validated and integrated results. AI supported the work, it did not replace judgment.
The authors describe a process that stayed faithful to the information in the source studies.
Structured extraction against a coding grid works for scoping and systematic reviews as well as interview data.