Drugs and police

Discusses the corruption-cloud hanging over the Victoria police drug squad. What does it mean for criminal investigations and trials? And, speaking more generally, what is it about the drugs-trade and the way the law deals with it - that can lead law enforcers down the wrong path?

Prevention of suicide : police powers, parliamentary intent and judicial interpretation

While in most countries suicide is no longer a crime, it is also acknowledged that the state has an interest in the preservation of human life, prevention of suicide, and protection of vulnerable persons from harming themselves. In a civil, secular and democratic society, however, the public law principle of state protective powers has to be balanced against the private law principle of personal autonomy (personal self-determination). Under the doctrine of autonomy, competent adults of sound mind can make legally binding voluntary choices, including the so-called ‘death-choice’ (refusal of life-sustaining or life-prolonging treatment as well as suicide). To add to the complexity, whereas the powers of the state in relation to suicide and its prevention have been codified, the concepts of personal autonomy and personal liberty are grounded in common law. Stuart v Kirkland–Veenstra [2008] VSCA 32, which is at present being considered by the High Court of Australia, exemplifies tensions that arise in the suicide-prevention area of jurisprudence. This article explores powers and duties of police officers in relation to suicide prevention and the notion of mental illness by reference to the Kirkland–Veenstra case, the relevant statutory framework and the common law.

Children's conception of police authority when responding to requests for assistance

Children (five to six and seven to eight years old) were presented with scenarios in which various adults (a police officer, a teacher, and an unspecified adult) requested assistance from a child. Six scenarios were presented (two per adult) with half involving a reasonable request (requiring little effort from the child) and the others unreasonable. For each scenario, the participants stated: (i) whether the child in the story should comply with the adult's request, (ii) the reason for the compliance decision, (iii) the consequences of non-compliance, and (iv) the legitimacy of the adult's request. Compliance and perceived legitimacy of the request was highest for the police officer compared to the teacher, with both figures commanding greater compliance than the unspecified adult. Children's justifications suggested that the positive relationship between obedience and social status was due (albeit in part) to fear of punishment for non-compliance, particularly in the younger age group.

A qualitative examination of police officers' questioning of children about repeated events

For an offender to be convicted in relation to repeated child abuse, most jurisdictions require that each separate act be identified with reasonable precision with reference to time, place, or some other unique contextual detail (S v. R, 1989). The current study provided a qualitative examination of the way in which police officers assist children to identify and distinguish between occurrences of a repeated event. Field, as well as mock interviews (about an innocuous staged event) were examined, with child witnesses' ages ranging from 3 to 16 years. Overall, several problems in the questioning were highlighted. These included: over-reliance on specific questions, use of 'labels' for occurrences without inquiring as to whether these were unique, and frequent shifting of the focus between occurrences. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Children's perceptions of the role of police: a qualitative study

A qualitative methodology, using open-ended questions, was employed to explore the perceptions of 112 children regarding the role of police. The children, aged 5 to 6 and 7 to 8 years, were asked to comment on what police officers do when they go to work, what direct and indirect experiences they have had with the police, and the positive and negative aspects of being a police officer. The findings revealed that children emphasise the punitive role of police; very few children identified with non-punitive roles. This punitive theme was evident irrespective of the children's experiences, age, and whether they could recall television shows involving police. The practical implications of our findings for police relations with children, particularly in a forensic interview context, are discussed.

Distributed protocol for communications among underwater vehicles

Underwater surveying by swarms of autonomous underwater vehicles presents problems in communication among the robots. These problems involve the bandwidth, power consumption, timing, processing power, and other issues. This paper presents a novel approach to communicate and coordinate effectively among underwater vehicles to accomplish this task successfully. The proposed approach solves issues by reducing the number of hops to conserve power, while reducing computation time and bandwidth, effectively utilizing resources to reduce the load on each node. Finally, the simulation results are presented, in order to prove that the proposed approach improves efficiency and effectiveness in communicating among underwater vehicles.

Visual tracking of vehicles using multiresolution analysis and neural network

This paper describes the procedure for detection and tracking of a vehicle from an on-road image sequence taken by a monocular video capturing device in real time. The main objective of such a visual tracking system is to closely follow objects in each frame of a video stream, such that the object position as well as other geometric information are always known. In the tracking system described, the video capturing device is also moving. It is a challenge to detect and track a moving vehicle under a constantly changing environment coupled to real time video processing. The system suggested is robust to implement under different illuminating conditions by using the monocular video capturing device. The vehicle tracking algorithm is one of the most important modules in an autonomous vehicle system, not only it should be very accurate but also must have the safety of other vehicles, pedestrians, and the moving vehicle itself. In order to achieve this an algorithm of multi resolution technique based on Haar basis functions were used for the wavelet transform, where a combination of classification was carried out with the multilayer feed forward neural network. The classification is done in a reduced dimensional space, where principle component analysis (PCA) dimensional reduction technique has been applied to make the classification process much more efficient. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

Subtle sexism : re-informing intergroup bias and regulating emotion in an Australian police organization

From a liberal feminist perspective, we argue that gender can both inform and should continue to be informed by social identity studies in efforts to understand and manage subtle sexism in contemporary workplaces. We investigated the presence of a form of subtle sexism, affective aversive sexism, in an Australian male-dominated organization: a police force. To do this we surveyed 159 policemen and examined relationships between individual emotional experience, emotional intensity and emotion regulation. Results indicated that, in a subtle display of intergroup bias, policemen experienced both higher positive and higher negative emotions in the presence of other policemen than of policewomen who, we argue, may be less central in the men's identities and relationships at work. Implications for research, training, and emotion management in the workplace are discussed and it is suggested that liberal feminist research can contribute much to understanding the dynamics that reproduce structural segregation in the workplace.

Public satisfaction with police : the importance of procedural justice and police performance in police-citizen encounters

A large body of literature has demonstrated that when authorities use procedural justice with those they regulate, people will be more satisfied with those authorities and will be more willing to cooperate and comply with their directions and rules. In the context of policing, procedural justice has also been shown to be important for shaping citizens’ views about police legitimacy, their satisfaction with police and also in fostering cooperation with police. What remains largely unexamined, however, is whether the positive effect of procedural justice varies across different types of police–citizen encounters. Using survey data collected from a national sample of 1,462 Australians, the present study will examine the relative importance of procedural justice on overall ratings of police satisfaction across two types of police–citizen encounters (citizen-initiated contacts and police-initiated contacts). It will be shown that procedural justice is most important in police-initiated contacts, while police performance is most important in citizen-initiated contacts.

Encouraging public cooperation and support for police

This paper explores how to increase public cooperation and support for police. To date, only a few studies have attempted to explore the role that procedural justice plays in shaping the public's willingness to assist police in crime control. The present study explores this much neglected field of research using both crosssectional survey data and panel data. The study finds that views about police legitimacy do influence public cooperation with the police, and that those who view the police as more legitimate are more likely to assist police to control crime. The key antecedent of legitimacy is procedural justice; those who are more likely to believe police use procedural justice in their dealings with the public are more likely to perceive police as legitimate.