Police and Vietnamese-Australian communities in multi-ethnic Melbourne

This paper explores practical solutions to sensitive community policing issues, drawing on an Australian case study of relations between police and Australian-Vietnamese communities. The paper summarizes initial research on the attitudes of Australian-Vietnamese community members and police to one another and to security and crime. Despite three decades of community policing, there is only limited communication flow between Vietnamese-Australian citizens including offenders and victims and police. The question is whether partnership policing can fill the gap. For police, this involves understanding not only ethnic distinctiveness but also intergenerational issues, tensions within cultural groups, and changing complex forms of membership and affiliation.

Surfing the crime net : policing, crime prevention and community safety in Australia

There can be no doubt that the Internet offers the possibility of increasing access to a range of sources of available information in a timely manner. This is particularly so as we increasingly seek to engage with information from outside our jurisdictional boundaries. While this hints at the effects of globalisation, it is also meant to be suggestive of the practical realities involved in researching (or simply following) developments occurring within emergent federal structures (for instance the European Union) or longer-standing federations such as the United States and Australia. Of course, a department or agency having a homepage and various links is only the start of the process of making information accessible. As will be indicated below, there remain significant limitations in the electronic material available from many agencies. Fortunately, there are also a number of organisations that enable the researcher to access original data and research publications.

Blue army : paramilitary policing in Australia

Examination of how Victoria's Special Operations Group and their tactics have contributed to the extraordinary number of police shootings in Victoria. Looks at how these tactics have been passed on to the ordinary police. Based on author's research into the paramilitarisation of the police. Exposes the risks of allowing Australia's police forces to move away from their original charter of keeping the peace with the use of minimum force. Author lectures in Police Studies at Deakin University. She has represented the families of several men shot and killed by police in the late 1980s in her work as a community lawyer.

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.

Simmel, the police form and the limits of democratic policing

© 2015 The Author. I argue that the social theory of Georg Simmel can be used to illustrate certain limitations to the potential of democratic policing. Simmel makes a number of claims about trust, secrecy and accountability that are shown to have immediate relevance to my empirical case study of police-public consultation forums in Edinburgh, Scotland. Two particular aspects of the 'form' of the police-public relationship-the police's command of non-negotiable force and inequality in the reciprocity of information-play a key role in limiting some of the principal aspirations of democratic policing theory. There are permanent barriers to improving the democratic credentials of the police I argue, yet positive and progressive change is still achievable.