Global policing and the case of Kim Dotcom

In early 2012, 76 heavily armed police conducted a raid on a house in Auckland, New Zealand. The targets were Kim Dotcom, a German national with a NZ residency visa, and several colleagues affiliated with Megaupload, an online subscription-based peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing facility. The alleged offences involved facilitating unlawful file sharing and United States federal criminal copyright violations. Following the raid, several court cases provide valuable insights into emerging ‘global policing’ practices (Bowling and Sheptycki 2012) based on communications between sovereign enforcement agencies. This article uses these cases to explore the growth of ‘extraterritorial’ police powers that operate ‘across borders’ (Nadelmann 1993) as part of several broader transformations of global policing in the digital age.

Book review : In the shadow of Gallipoli: the hidden history of Australia in World War I

Review of: In the Shadow of Gallipoli: the hidden history of Australia in World War I, by Robert Bollard. (Sydney: New South Wales, 2013)

Policing services with mentally ill people : developing greater understanding and best practice

Although it is now well known that there is a disproportionate number of people with mental illnesses in the criminal justice system, surprising little attention has been paid to the challenges faced by policing people with mental illnesses in the community. This article provides an overview of some of the key findings from a programme of research undertaken in Victoria to further understand and develop a best practice model at this interface. The areas covered will include the prevalence of psychiatric symptoms and mental illnesses among police cell detainees; the existing knowledge base and attitudes of police towards mentally ill people; the relationship between mental illness and offending; the frequency and nature of police apprehensions of mentally ill people under the Mental Health Act; the association among mental disorder, police shootings, and other injuries to people as a result of these encounters; and police interactions with victims of crime. The work highlights the need for ongoing improvements in policing people with mental illnesses, and particularly the need for improved inter-agency practices for dealing with them.

'Shadow-lands' : the suffering image

"Folio X documents the exhibition '"Shadow-lands': the suffering image" held at Dennys Lascelles Exhibition Gallery, Alfred Deakin Prime Ministerial Library, Deakin University, Waterfront Campus, Geelong, Victoria, Australia, April 18-May 18, 2012. The project was part and parcel of the author's PhD study, "Visual agency in art and architecture" .... and an experimental representation of the values embedded in the photography and film-essays of Chris Marker..."

The police and punishment: understanding the pains of policing

This article argues that police studies should draw on the sociology of punishment to better understand state pain-delivery. Whereas penal theorists commonly assess the pain and punishment of inmates in relation to wider social sentiments, police theory has yet to regard police violence and harm in the same fashion. As a result, police scholars often fail to address why the damage caused by public constabularies, even when widely publicized, is accommodated and accepted. Adapting the idea of ‘punitiveness’ from penal theory allows some explanation of how the public views injury and suffering caused by the police by illuminating the emotions and sentiments their actions generate.

'The police are rottenly corrupt': Policing, scandal, and the regulation of illegal betting in Depression-era Sydney

One groundbreaking aspect of the Wood Royal Commission into police corruption in New South Wales was to recognize the importance of the historical dimension of corruption. The historical consensus is that systemic police corruption emerged in NSW only after the Second World War but, as Wood acknowledged, there has been little detailed research into earlier periods. One window into policing in the 1930s is provided by the Markell Royal Commission, which investigated allegations of police misconduct in relation to illegal bookmaking in 1936. This article explores the evidence gathered by Markell, and argues that his inquiry uncovered a system of entrenched police corruption at a level of complexity previously thought not to have appeared for another decade. It is argued that poor management contributed to the growth of systemic corruption from the early 1930s, and that a defensive and negative reaction to the exposure of this corruption caused an historic opportunity for
reform to be lost.

The shadow economy as an equilibrium outcome

We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of tax evasion where agents choose to report some of their income. Unreported income requires using a payment method that avoids recordkeeping in some markets-cash. Trade using cash to avoid taxes is the 'shadow economy' in our model. We then calibrate our model using money, interest rate and GDP data to back out the size of the shadow economy for a sample of countries and compare our measures to traditional reduced form estimates. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.

The photographer's shadow

The 'Photographer's Shadow' was acquired by the Auckland City Art Gallery (Chartwell Collection)

A shadow-like task migration model based on context semantics for mobile and pervasive environments

Pervasive computing is a user-centric mobile computing paradigm, in which tasks should be migrated over different platforms in a shadow-like way when users move around. In this paper, we propose a context-sensitive task migration model that recovers program states and rebinds resources for task migrations based on context semantics through inserting resource description and state description sections in source programs. Based on our model, we design and develop a task migration framework xMozart which extends the Mozart platform in terms of context awareness. Our approach can recover task states and rebind resources in the context-aware way, as well as support multi- modality I/O interactions. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can migrate tasks by resuming them from the last broken points like shadows moving along with the users.

Comparing bargaining solutions in the shadow of conflict: how norms against threats can have real effects

In many economic environments agents make costly and irreversible investments (in ``guns'') that may enhance their respective threat payoffs but also shrink the utility possibilities set. In such settings, with variable threats and a variable utility possibilities set, it becomes possible to rank different bargaining solutions in terms of efficiency. We compare bargaining solutions within a class in which the influence of the threat point on the bargaining outcome varies across solutions. Under symmetry, we find that the solution in which the threat point is least influential the equal sacrifice solution Pareto-dominates the other solutions. Since the equal sacrifice solution puts the least weight on the threat point, norms against threats (that can be seen in many seemingly rhetorical pronouncements in adversarial relations) can mitigate some of the costs of conflict and therefore have efficiency- enhancing effects.