Force In Australia Research Articles

Policing Hate Crime: Exploring the Issue with a Cohort of Sworn Police Officers

AbstractGlobally, there has been a trend in rising levels of hate crime that scholars have argued is reflective of significant social problems within society. Research into hate crime has typically focused on the police and their subsequent response to this crime type, with many findings reporting that the police are racist, homophobic and Islamophobic, to name but a few. However, existing research seldom captures the insights and experiences of sworn police officers, as much of the data is gathered from third parties. This paper presents the empirical findings from a Delphi study conducted with one police force in Australia, sampling sworn New South Wales (NSW) police officers between October 2020 and October 2021. The findings focus on four overarching areas: defining hate crime, perpetrators of hate crime, victims of hate crime, and responses to hate crime. These themes capture the perspectives of NSW police officers in relation to operational and organisational practice in respect of hate crime. Drawing on a Delphi method, the research outlines police perceptions of the nature of hate crime, as well as capturing how hate crime can be effectively reported, recorded, and responded to. Conclusions and implications are considered. These include the requirement for a clearer definition and targeted education strategies aimed at improving knowledge and understanding relating to hate crime. Future directions include the development of a standardised approach to reporting, recording, and responding to hate crime.

The Influence of Guardian and Warrior Police Orientations on Australian Officers’ Use of Force Attitudes and Tactical Decision-Making

Concerns about excessive use of force by U.S. police have led to calls for agencies to move from ‘warrior’ to ‘guardian’ policing. ‘Warrior’ policing embodies an aggressive or coercive approach to law enforcement, while ‘guardian’ policing prioritises communication, procedural justice and citizen safety. Associations between guardian and warrior policing orientations and use of force attitudes in the U.S. have been found, however the influence of these orientations on police use of force in Australia has not been examined. This study examined the association of guardian and warrior policing orientations with use of force attitudes, threat perceptions and tactical decision-making among Australian officers, through a survey of 183 police officers in Queensland. Regression analyses indicated that warrior policing was associated with greater support for use of force and greater perceived threat in an ambiguous threat scenario, while guardian policing was associated with more restraint in tactical decision-making among Australian police officers.

Our Father who art in Town Hall: Do local councils have power to pray?

Many local councils in Australia commence their meetings with prayer. Case law in the United Kingdom holds that English local councils do not have power to commence their meetings with prayer. This article argues that the reasoning of the UK case law applies with equal force in Australia with the result that the practice of many Australian local councils of incorporating prayers into their formal meetings is unlawful.

More than a trivial pursuit: Public order policing narratives and the ‘social media test’

Social media has transformed public discourse on policing and the contest of control over the police image. This article draws on original, empirical research to conceptualise the phenomenon of the ‘social media test’ – the evolution of social media into a legitimate measure of police performance. Through in-depth interviews with police and non-police respondents the article maps the genealogy of, and provides perspective on, one of the first viral cases of bystander video of police excessive force in Australia filmed and uploaded to YouTube. The study shows the video’s impact on hegemonic mainstream and police news media narratives, processes of criminalisation and police accountability and the merit of narrative criminology in unpacking these phenomena. Police alluding to the ‘social media test’ in in-depth interviews shows that digital media in general and social media in particular can no longer be dismissed as peripheral or subsidiary to public discourse on policing in a digital society.

Exploring Consumer Information-Security Awareness and Preparedness of Data-Breach Events

The continuous increase of digital connectivity has improved the capability that businesses have for the collection, manipulation, and distribution of data. Due to shortfalls in security, this capability has resulted in data-breach events being a weekly occurrence globally. Notification of these events is becoming commonplace, in part fueled by notification legislation in many jurisdictions. As of February 2018, mandatory reporting of data breaches came into force in Australia (Australian Notifiable Data Breaches scheme [NDB]), and this was followed by European legislation (GDPR) coming into force in May of the same year. This study aims to establish current levels of information-security awareness within typical consumers in Australia, their awareness of these legislative changes, and their ability to respond to such a notification of their personal information being leaked from a service or system. The research results suggest that consumers had a high level of information-security awareness, yet low awareness of notification legislation. The discussion revealed that expected outcomes primarily drove stakeholder behavior in relation to data-breach and legislation preparedness.

Policing's ‘meme strategy’: understanding the rise of police social media engagement work

ABSTRACTIn 2017, the New South Wales Police Force in Australia embarked on a bold new social media strategy, harnessing humorous Internet memes and cute images of police animals to increase ‘user engagement’ with their posts. Provoked by changes to Facebook's News Feed Algorithm, this self-described ‘meme-strategy’ generated a surge of new followers for the organisation’s social media accounts, with NSW Police's Facebook page reaching one million followers in August 2017 – a record for an official police Facebook page. This article examines the social media logics underpinning NSW Police's ‘meme strategy’ and similar police PR strategies that have employed humour and cute content to increase social media engagement. Through analysing the content and ‘active’ engagement metrics of NSW Police's ‘meme strategy’, in this article I critically examine this approach to police public relations, focusing in particular on its weaponisation of cute content to generate engagement. NSW Police's meme strategy, I argue, exemplifies what we might term social media ‘engagement work’: strategies intended to increase the reach of police messaging on social media and promote horizontal engagement spillover and vertical legitimacy spillover.

“Men, money, and motors”: The motor car as an emerging technology in Australian Federal Election Campaigns, 1903–31

The appearance of the car in early twentieth-century Australia significantly re-shaped election campaigns. Political parties used cars to bring voters to polling places, and some voters took advantage of elections by making their voting contingent on these free rides. Politicians and other campaigners took exception to the cost of supplying cars and to the attitudes evident in demands for rides. Some saw compulsory voting as a way of forcing voters to provide for their own transportation. Introduced mostly in the 1920s, compulsory voting’s impact was initially muted. But over time it did change how cars were used in Australian politics. One hundred years on compulsory voting remains in force in Australia, and cars are still seldom used on election day. This serves as an enduring example of how new technologies could have a disruptive impact on campaigning prior to the advent of radio and television.

De-legitimising complementary medicine: framings of the Friends of Science in Medicine-CAM debate in Australian media reports.

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has developed into a complex and formidable commercial, sociocultural and political force in Australia, and given its influence, it is a relevant subject for scholars, health practitioners, health communicators, journalists, policy-makers, and consumers of healthcare products and services. This research will consider a relative newcomer to the claims-making space about CAM in the Australian health media-scape; the Friends of Science in Medicine (FSM), an activist group of medical practitioners, researchers, and scientists, founded in late 2011. Using content analysis supported by NVivo, I searched for articles specifically referring to FSM and measured the patterns and frequencies of media frames, intonation and sources that are featured in Australian mainstream news reports between December 2011 and April 2017. The negative headlining and intonation of reports predominated, along with framing CAM as part of a lucrative, undisciplined and unethical industry as well as an illegitimate healthcare approach, more broadly. The findings offer insight into how journalists respond, replicate or reconstruct the framings that are provided by an influential and elite group of medical practitioners and scientists, and readdresses issues surrounding the need for more critical health reporting in Australia.

Innovation as an Economic Driving Force in Australia

Australia has vitally identified the benefits of innovation in past few years. The Country is ranked among the top nations in OECD. They are currently working on developing the infrastructure of Research and Development sector of the Country as well as reinforced themselves in developing their Information and Communication technology. Thus, the Country has identified the importance of innovation and how its components can help in achieving increased economic growth. Innovation is the inventive or new ways a company or country adopt to carry out its processes in a more efficient manner.The incorporation of innovation in the processes of economic development through production or other ways lead to higher profitability and broader use of the available resources in an efficient and advanced way. Thus, the purpose of the following research is to analyze innovation as an economic driving force in Australia. For the fulfillment of this purpose, the researcher carried out a quantitative research under which 5-points Likert scale was designed that include questions relating to the various identified components of innovation as the independent variable and economic growth as the dependent variable. The survey was circulated among 219 executives that are working in different sectors of Australia to understand their opinion. The results through multi-regression model depicted that innovation and technology have a significant impact on the growth of Australian economy.

Whose Speech Is It Anyway? Ownership, Authorship, and the Redfern Address

Whose Speech Is It Anyway? Ownership, Authorship, and the Redfern Address

Metadata Retention as a Means of Combatting Terrorism and Organised Crime: A Perspective from Australia

On October 13, 2015, new laws came into force in Australia requiring telecommunications service providers to retain and store their ‘metadata’ for 2 years so that it remains available for analysis by anti-terrorism strategists and organised crime fighters. But there are ongoing issues associated with this legislative approach, including the threats to privacy thereby, and concerns that the retention system can be circumvented entirely. This paper will outline the legal and criminological questions that need to be explored in order to help policymakers work through these issues so that an appropriate balance can be struck between forestalling crime and terrorism using all available electronic means, and not unduly curtailing the legitimate rights to privacy that citizens in modern democracies currently expect to enjoy.

Hysteretic Poisson INGARCH model for integer-valued time series

This study proposes a new model for integer-valued time series—the hysteretic Poisson integer-valued generalized autoregressive conditionally heteroskedastic (INGARCH) model—which has an integrated hysteresis zone in the switching mechanism of the conditional expectation. Our modelling framework provides a parsimonious representation of the salient features of integer-valued time series, such as discreteness, over-dispersion, asymmetry and structural change. We adopt Bayesian methods with a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling scheme to estimate model parameters and utilize the Bayesian information criteria for model comparison. We then apply the proposed model to five real time series of criminal incidents recorded by the New South Wales Police Force in Australia. Simulation results and empirical analysis highlight the better performance of hysteresis in modelling the integer-valued time series.

Procedural justice and frontline policing: the effects of the police complaints system

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present results from a qualitative study exploring the complaints system within New South Wales Police Force in Australia. The stories shared illustrate the impact of the complaints system on officers currently serving in this force. The study reveals how the complaints system impacts on both the working conditions and workplace environment of police officers, as well as impacting on the professional relationships amongst each other. Design/methodology/approach – The study is qualitative in design, in which in-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of 14 rank and file police officers. The qualitative analysis draws upon a thematic approach and a direct reference to police officer comments and perspectives are illustrated and used to inform the framework of the discussion and implications for further research in this area. Findings – The findings yield three central themes – “police perceptions of accountability”; “the complaints tool – a question of intra institutional justice”; and “performance impact”. These are discussed in direct relation to what police officers revealed about their experiences and thoughts on the current complaints process in New South Wales. Practical implications – To review the complaints process in order to develop a more transparent process; to recognise the critiques of the complaints process, both by the general public and police officers, as valuable information to be used to inform improving the process; to consider restorative justice practices employed by other police forces as a means of finalising some complaint processes; to develop a more swift complaints process with more timely conclusions in order to minimise long-term issues such as sustained sick leave. Originality/value – This paper examines the link between accountability and performance, and the unintended consequences the complaints process has on police officers at work. This examination is conducted by drawing on current rank and file police officers lived experiences.

Analysis of the Paternalistic Justification of an Agenda Setting Public Health Policy: The Case of Tobacco Plain Packaging.

This article analyses the paternalistic justification of the world's first mandatory tobacco plain packaging policy, which came into force in Australia in 2012. The policy is setting international precedence, with a range of developed and developing countries planning and implementing similar policies. Understanding the paternalistic dimension of the policy is therefore of imminent international importance. The policy meets important ethical benchmarks such as respect for citizens' self-interests and protection of others against harm. However, plain packaging faces a number of ethical challenges: the policy is a controversial type of paternalism; it runs partially against the harm principle; and it fails to meet key operational criteria.

Autoregressive conditional negative binomial model applied to over-dispersed time series of counts

Integer-valued time series analysis offers various applications in biomedical, financial, and environmental research. However, existing works usually assume no or constant over-dispersion. In this paper, we propose a new model for time series of counts, the autoregressive conditional negative binomial model that has a time-varying conditional autoregressive mean function and heteroskedasticity. The location and scale parameters of the negative binomial distribution are flexible in the proposed set-up, inducing dynamic over-dispersion. We adopt Bayesian methods with a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling scheme to estimate model parameters and utilize deviance information criterion for model comparison. We conduct simulations to investigate the estimation performance of this sampling scheme for the proposed negative binomial model. To demonstrate the proposed approach in modelling time-varying over-dispersion, we consider two types of criminal incidents recorded by New South Wales (NSW) Police Force in Australia. We also fit the autoregressive conditional Poisson model to these two datasets. Our results demonstrate that the proposed negative binomial model is preferable to the Poisson model.

Blood Pressure, Sleep Quality and Fatigue in Shift Working Police Officers: Effects of a Twelve Hour Roster System on Cardiovascular and Sleep Health.

Background: Police officers have been reported to exhibit a high incidence of pathologies, which present prematurely in an otherwise healthy population. Shift work has also been associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular and sleep disorders, attributable to its propensity for circadian rhythm dysfunction. However, contention exists as to whether shift work has a direct effect upon blood pressure (BP) regulation. Methods: This cross-sectional study sought to determine changes in BP and associations with the overall sleep quality and fatigue in 206 general duties police officers (n = 140 males) of the New South Wales Police Force in Australia. The subjects’ BP was assessed before and after their twelve hour shift, during which time they also completed the Lifestyle Appraisal Questionnaire, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Epworth Sleepiness Scale and Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS). Results: Poor sleep quality (PSQI) and fatigue severity (FSS) were found to predominate in the sample (69% and 51% respectively). Although there was no change in BP for male participants, female officers’ systolic blood pressure (SBP) was found to increase significantly across the shift (p < 0.001), but with no change found in females’ diastolic blood pressure (DBP). Finally, higher pre and post-shift SBP (r = −0.26, p = 0.001; r = −0.25, p = 0.001, respectively) and DBP (r = −0.26, p = 0.001; r = −0.26, p = 0.001, respectively) were significantly correlated with lower FSS scores after accounting for age, waist-hip ratio and lifestyle risk factors. Conclusions: Based on these preliminary findings, there was a significant increase in SBP of female police officers after shift work, while BP and fatigue levels in all police officers were strongly related. Moreover, the predominating poor sleep quality and impact of fatigue in this sample remain a concern. Further research is required to ensure the physiological welfare of police officers, while strategies must be implemented to manage the detrimental effects shift work may be having upon their cardiovascular and sleep health.

The Panopticon Effect: the surveillance of police officers

Purpose – Police officers from a police force in Australia were interviewed about the types and level of surveillance they experience in their work, with the recognition of technology contributing to an increased level of such. The concept of the Panopticon and the Looking-Glass Self offer useful frameworks for understanding the experiences of those police officers interviewed. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Based on 14 in-depth unstructured interviews with police officers, this study is an exploratory piece of research. Findings – This study presents findings in which police officers spoke of the surveillance they encounter from the perspective of the police organisation; their own self-surveillance as well as being monitored by other police officers. This paper argues that the Panopticon Effect can negatively impact on individual officers as well as overall police practice. Originality/value – This paper is an exploratory study based on the experiences of rank and file police officers currently in service. The paper considers the surveillance and scrutiny of police officers from within the organisation and recognises the impact of technology.

The New National Quality Framework: Quantifying Some of the Effects on Labour Supply, Child Care Demand and Household Finances for Two-Parent Households

New regulations to improve the quality of early childhood education and care came into force in Australia in 2012. Using a simultaneous, structural model of labour supply and child care demand we predict the effects on the labour supply of partnered women, on demand for child care and on household finances for two-parent households in Australia. Using estimated cost impacts of this new National Quality Framework from government and non-government sources, we find modest effects on household behaviour. For a mid-range cost scenario, we find that partnered women's labour force participation will decrease by just over one-half of one percentage point, a change of less than 1 per cent. Working hours for partnered women decrease by 20 minutes or approximately 2 per cent. Household disposable income decreases by $12.50, a 0.6 per cent decrease. Given widespread agreement about the benefits of investing in children, these quantitatively small effects for two-parent households strengthen the case for the National Quality Framework.

Waiting for the domino effect

This month, landmark legislation comes into force in Australia, making it the first country to ban branded cigarette packaging. Mike Daube talks to Fiona Fleck about how public health campaigning has come a long way since the 1970s.

Truck driver scheduling in Australia

In September 2008 new regulations for managing heavy vehicle driver fatigue entered into force in Australia. According to the new regulations there is a chain of responsibility ranging from drivers to dispatchers and shippers and thus, carriers must explicitly consider driving and working hour regulations when generating truck driver schedules. This paper presents and studies the Australian Truck Driver Scheduling Problem (AUS-TDSP) which is the problem of determining whether a sequence of locations can be visited within given time windows in such a way that driving and working activities of truck drivers comply with Australian Heavy Vehicle Driver Fatigue Law.