Strategic intelligence in law enforcement : anticipating transnational organised crime

This thesis is an explorative study of four national level law enforcement agencies' applications of strategic intelligence against transnational organised crime. The thesis develops a hybrid conceptual model for strategic intelligence in law enforcement, which explains how strategic intelligence influences police management. Dr Coyne explored case studies of strategic intelligence in the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, Serious and Organised Crime Agency United Kingdom, Australian Crime Commission and the Australian Federal Police. The research provides an understanding of the impact of strategic intelligence across strategic responses to transnational organised crime and the implications this has for police management and intelligence theory.

Challenges of responding to online fraud victimisation in Australia

Online fraud occurs when an individual or a business responds in some manner to an unsolicited invitation received via the internet and suffers financial or other detrimental effects as a result. In 2010–11, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2012) found that over 1.2 million Australians (6.7% of the population aged 15 years and over) had been a victim of personal fraud, losing approximately $1.4b in the preceding 12 months. More than half of these victims (55.7%) were contacted via the internet or email (online victimisation). In addition to monetary losses, victims of online fraud suffer serious psychological, emotional, social and even physical problems as a consequence of their victimisation. This paper explores the challenges of responding to online fraud victimisation in Australia and describes some of the specific support services that have recently emerged to support victims of this crime.

Crime, Justice and Social Democracy: Proceedings of the Second International Conference, 2013, volume 2

The refereed papers contained in this volume of conference proceedings were among those presented at the 2nd International Conference on Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, hosted by the Crime and Justice Research Centre, Faculty of Law, QUT, from 8 – 11 July 2013. The conference attracted an impressive list of speakers from Australasia, Europe, North America and Latin America. These seven papers can be viewed at the Crime and Justice Research Centre’s website at http://crimejusticeconference.com/publications/ as can Volume 1 representing another 26 selected papers from the conference. As with the papers contained in the first volume, this set of papers raises important questions about the links between crime, justice and social democracy, and continues the contribution that the Crime and Justice Research Centre makes towards engaging with these topics. We thank all those who submitted papers for review for this second volume of proceedings, as well as the peer reviewers for taking the time to review the papers, often within very tight timelines.

Explaining lower rates of sexual abuse in China

Accumulating research suggests that rates of child sexual abuse are comparatively low in China. This commentary is an effort to evaluate whether it reflects a true lower prevalence or alternatively the effect of inhibited disclosure by victims. We conclude that while some estimates have almost certainly been affected by inhibited disclosure, the overall magnitude of the contrast between Chinese and international rates, particularly for girls, and its consistency with other indicators do suggest a true lower prevalence, although the evidence is equivocal. We discuss some factors that could account for such lower rates including Confucian family values, definitions of masculinity and a collectivist culture that may be protective.

Global Human Trafficking : Critical Issues and Contexts

Human trafficking has moved from relative obscurity to a major area of research, policy and teaching over the past ten years. Research has sprung from criminology, public policy, women’s and gender studies, sociology, anthropology, and law, but has been somewhat hindered by the failure of scholars to engage beyond their own disciplines and favoured methodologies. Recent research has begun to improve efforts to understand the causes of the problem, the experiences of victims, policy efforts, and their consequences in specific cultural and historical contexts. Global Human Trafficking: Critical issues and contexts foregrounds recent empirical work on human trafficking from an interdisciplinary, critical perspective. The collection includes classroom-friendly features, such as introductory chapters that provide essential background for understanding the trafficking literature, textboxes explaining key concepts, discussion questions for each chapter, and lists of additional resources, including films, websites, and additional readings for each chapter. The authors include both eminent and emerging scholars from around the world, drawn from law, anthropology, criminology, sociology, cultural studies, and political science and the book will be useful for undergraduate and graduate courses in these areas, as well as for scholars interested in trafficking.

Occupational Health and Safety, Courts and Crime: the legal construction of occupational health and safety offences in Victoria

This book reports on an empirically-based study of the manner in which the Magistrates' Courts in Victoria, construct occupational health and safety (OHS) issues when hearing prosecutions for offences under the Victorian OHS legislation. Prosecution has always been a controversial element in the enforcement armoury of OHS regulators, but at the same time it has long been argued that the low level of fines imposed by courts has had an important chilling effect on the OHS inspectorate's enforcement approaches, and on the impact of OHS legislation. Using a range of empirical research methods, including three samples of OHS prosecutions carried out in the Victorian Magistrates' Courts, Professor Johnstone shows how courts, inspectors, prosecutors and defence counsel are involved in filtering or reshaping OHS issues during the prosecution process, both pre-trial and in court. He argues that OHS offences are constructed by focusing on "events", in most cases incidents resulting in injury or death. This "event-focus" ensures that the attention of the parties is drawn to the details of the incident, and away from the broader context of the event. During the court-based sentencing process defence counsel is able to adopt a range of techniques which isolate the incident from its micro and macro contexts, thereby individualising and decontextualising the incident.

Safety, courts and crime: occupational safety and health prosecutions in the Magistrates' courts

This paper reports on an empirically based study of occupational safety and health prosecutions in the Magistrates' courts in the State of Victoria, Australia. It examines the way in which the courts construct occupational safety and health issues during prosecutions against alleged offenders, and then theorises the role of the criminal law in health and safety regulation. The paper argues that courts, inspectors, prosecutors and defence counsel are involved in filtering or reshaping occupational safety and health issues during the prosecution process, both pre-trial and in court. An analysis of the pattern of investigation of health and safety offences shows that they are constructed by focusing on 'events', in most cases incidents resulting in injury or death. This 'event focus' ensures that the attention of the parties is drawn to the details of the incident and away from the broader context of the event. This broader context includes the way in which work is organised at the workplace and the quality of occupational safety and health management (the micro context), and the pressures within capitalist production systems for occupational safety and health to be subordinated to production imperatives (the macro context). In particular, during the court-based sentencing process, defence counsel is able to adopt a range of 'isolation' techniques that isolate the incident from its micro and macro contexts, thereby individualising and decontextualising the incident. The paper concludes that the legal system plays a key role in decontextualising and individualising health and safety issues, and that this process is part of the 'architecture' of the legal system, and a direct consequence of the 'form of law'.

Flood inquiry : Grantham victims’ patience wears thin

"Grief and loss are giving way to anger and frustration among flood survivors of the rural towns in the Lockyer Valley as the Queensland Flood Commission hears from senior police, disaster management staff and flood survivors. For bereaved families in the public gallery waiting for answers to why 22 people died in the catastrophic flash flooding in the Lockyer Valley on January 10, patience is wearing thin."

Flood victim’s heartbreak : ‘don’t be complacent about the risk’

"No one had higher stakes in the findings of the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry than Grantham father Matthew Keep, whose mother, mother-in-law and baby daughter, Jessica, died at Grantham that terrible day in January. For seven months he has read every statement, submission, running log, disaster management plan and media article available. As he has comforted his grieving wife, Stacy, helped care for his two young children Madison, 5, and Jacob, 4, who amazingly survived the flood, and welcomed a new baby into the family, Matthew has searched for answers for himself and his community. Why were authorities not able to warn people in seven towns in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley that the worst flash flooding in at least a century was about to strike, killing 22 people? How could such a sudden and catastrophic flood claim three members of his family within minutes?"

One year on and flood victims pick up the pieces

"For many Australians, January 10 last year is just a media memory — a vision of cars surfing down inner-city creeks in Toowoomba CBD and houses floating across farm paddocks in the Lockyer Valley. But for the people of the Lockyer Valley who were clinging to life, the terrifying visions of that day remain every time they close their eyes."

Queensland flood inquiry recalled as victims left in limbo

"The recalling of the Queensland Flood Commission of Inquiry for another nine days of hearings from today has renewed fears of Grantham residents that the review has not had sufficient time to properly investigate the causes of the 12 deaths in the town on January 10 last year. Grantham businesswoman Lisa Spierling, who has been liaising with the families of the flood victims, says recalling the inquiry to determine what operational strategy was being used by Wivenhoe Dam managers in the days before Ipswich and Brisbane flooded last year, is more than four times the entire sitting time that was allocated to the Lockyer Valley. The inquiry heard less than two days of evidence in April last year about the events in the Lockyer Valley, including Grantham."

Crime in rural Australia

As an academic who has spent a quarter of a century living, lecturing and researching in a rural community, I am often impressed by the discrepancies between the reality of rural life and its image in the public consciousness. At least two aspects of this are the most striking. First, there is often - especially, but not exclusively in English-speaking societies - the idea that rural communities represent the "real" or "true" aspects of a society's culture. For example, judging by the representations of rural Australia in the media, rural life is where we find the true Australian, the laconic, taciturn, but decent everyday man and woman, the "battlers", who are not corrupted by urban life. Such an attribution of genuineness to rurality is especially interesting given that the vast majority of contemporary Australians live in cities and that Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Second, and following from the first point, is the idea that rural areas remain somewhat behind the times, that somehow they are not quite part of the contemporary world. This is a mixed image as it combines both the negative idea of backwardness with the more positive one of a society that has not lost the virtues of stability and civility that we often feel is missing in the city. Both of these ideas combine in the popular image of rural communities as safe places in an increasingly dangerous world. In the popular mind it seems that there is an idea that whatever rural communities may lack in conveniences and sophistication, they remain places where you might walk down the street safely, leave your doors unlocked at night and raise your children confident that they will not be exposed to drugs, gangs and violence. Unfortunately, all of these ideas are fantasies. There is no reason to believe that the residents of rural communities are anymore the truer representations of Australian culture than the average suburbanite.

Young People and Crime in Rural Communities

Because childhood and adolescence are crucial phases in psycho-social development and the formation of responsible citizens, an unusual degree of attention and supervision is directed at the young (Bittner, 1976; Rose, 1989). Such is the moral frailty of youth that mere presence or 11 doing nothing" (Corrigan, 1979) can, under certain circumstances, excite adult anxieties as a harbinger of immediate or later danger. Delinquency and adolescent antisocial behaviour are not, therefore, a matter of objective, positivistic measurement and control, but are bound up with larger patterns of intergenerational relationships. These relationships are also conditioned by social and spatial environments.

Introduction - There's crime out there, but not as we know it: Rural criminology - the last frontier

The idea that crime is a predominantly urban phenomenon has been pervasive in criminology, so much so that Australian criminology textbooks do not recognise rural crime as a distinct phenomenon worthy of scholarly attention (see Chappell & Wilson, 2000; Goldsmith et al, 2003; White & Haines, 2004; White & Habibis, 2005). There are no chapters or sections in Australian texts which specifically examine rural crime, despite the inclusion of a range of topics that appear to provide a broad coverage of crime in its many temporal and spatial dimensions. Nor is there so much as an index reference to "rural" issues in criminology textbooks. The standardised syllabus for crime texts provides coverage of topics such as violent crime, public crime, delinquency, race and crime, gender and crime, and crime and social class. This canon is mirrored in international texts, most of which also fail to address the issue of rural crime, but make abundant reference to crime in various urban contexts (see Carrabine et al, 2004; Conklin, 2004). This is not to suggest that Australian texts fail to localise their subject matter.