Dean Wilson

Pre-crime: pre-emption, precaution and the future

1. Introduction: pre-crime: pre-emption, precaution and the future 2. Before pre-crime 3. Risking the future: pre-emption, precaution and uncertainty 4. Pre-empting justice: pre-crime, precaution and counterterrorism 5. Pre-crime science, technology and surveillance 6. Evidence to intelligence: justice through the crystal ball 7. Creating terror: pre-crime, undercover agents and informants 8. Pre-crime: securing a just future.

Australian biometrics and global surveillance

Following the events of September 11, 2001, biometric technologies have been widely deployed and promoted as a means of providing identity authentication and verification. This article uses the example of Australia to examine how global trends in biometric surveillance are played out within the boundaries of one nation-state. The article first examines the deployment of biometric technologies at the Australian border. It is suggested that although Australia follows global trends, these deployments are imbued with specific meanings in the local context. The discussion then examines new biometric databases being developed to collect and store information within the boundaries of the Australian state. The article concludes by suggesting that although the Australian experience bears specific local inflections, it nevertheless parallels global surveillance trends in the intensification of searchable databases engaged in processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Theorizing Surveillance in Crime Control

Surveillance is conventionally perceived as a key component of the crime control apparatus. This editors’ introduction to a Special Issue of Theoretical Criminology on ‘Theorizing Surveillance in Crime Control’ outlines both the need for new theorizing on surveillance and some of the difficulties in doing so. It also introduces the seven pieces in the Special Issue.

Policing poverty: Destitution and police work in Melbourne, 1880–1910

This paper examines the historical importance of police welfare functions. Historians have too often neglected this area of police work, which represented a crucial interface between local communities and the police institution throughout the nineteenth century. While American studies suggest there was a transformation in policing from class control to crime control, Australian evidence indicates an alternative trajectory in the evolving welfare role of police. Despite the growth of new professionals and agencies of government in the later nineteenth century, the police remained a vital conduit in relationships between the destitute and the State. This was largely due to the police organisations unrivalled bureaucratic and archival capacity and its pervasive street presence. This ensured that, while police interactions with the poor became more bureaucratised and formalised, police retained a significant welfare role into the twentieth century.

(Un)controlled Operations: Undercover in the Security Control Society

Writing more than three decades ago, Gary Marx noted that undercover policing, ‘traditionally viewed as a relatively marginal and insignificant weapon used only by vice and “red squads” has become a cutting-edge tactic’ (1988, p. 1). Over the subsequent decades, the deployment of covert policing tactics and operations continued to expand, particularly in the arena of drug law enforcement but also into a wide variety of areas including abalone poaching, motor vehicle theft, corporate fraud, and money laundering (Marx, 2003). After the September 2001 (hereafter 9/11) attacks on the United States (US), the engagement of covert policing increased significantly in the context of the ‘War on Terror’. Covert policing includes a range of clandestine police operations and tactics, traversing a spectrum from passive surveillance to police participation in criminal activities. Between these two poles resides the use of informers, false identities, and ‘sneak and peek’ searches carried out without the knowledge of the target. Covert operations rest at a juncture between law enforcement activities designed to gather evidence for criminal prosecutions, and security/ intelligence agency activity aimed at monitoring and disrupting the activities of those considered potential security risks or threats (Roach, 2010).

Police-based victim services: Australian and international models

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an outline of the strengths and weaknesses of selected models of police‐based victim services. It aims to provide an overview of the current predominant models of police‐based victim support in the USA, Canada, UK and Australia. It also aims to advance a typology of police‐based victim services as a useful analytic tool for understanding the varying models.Design/methodology/approach – The research was based on extensive documentary analysis supplemented by semi‐structured interviews with 17 practitioners in the USA, Canada and Australia. Sites were selected for interview based on documentary research which indicated that they had developed police‐based victim services in their organization that were either particularly representative or innovative.Findings – Police‐based victim services can be categorized into three broad models: unit services, dedicated liaison officer services, and referral services. Each model has strengths and weaknesses in terms of s...

Care Bears and Crime-Fighters: Police Operational Styles and Victims of Crime

Over the last two decades victims’ rights and victims’ needs have gained traction as a key concern for policing agencies internationally (Hoyle and Young 2003). A range of developments have seen a shift in police protocols regarding their interactions with victims of crime — often based on research with victims and/or successful advocacy by victims’ rights organisations. These shifts range from expanding the curriculum of police recruit training (to include more detailed recognition of victims of crime) to increasing contact protocols with victims during the course of investigations and to the development of systems of referral to connect victims of crime with support services provided by agencies in the broader community.

Policing intimate partner violence in Victoria (Australia): Examining police attitudes and the potential of specialisation

The adequacy of police responses to intimate partner violence has long animated scholarly debate, review and legislative change. While there have been significant shifts in community recognition of and concern about intimate partner violence, particularly in the wake of the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence, it nonetheless remains a significant form of violence and harm across Australian communities and a key issue for police, as noted in the report and recommendations of the Royal Commission. This article draws on findings from semi-structured interviews (n = 163) with police in Victoria and pursues two key inter-related arguments. The first is that police attitudes towards incidents of intimate partner violence remain overwhelmingly negative. Despite innovations in policy and training, we suggest that this consistent dissatisfaction with intimate partner violence incidents as a policing task indicates a significant barrier, possibly insurmountable, to attempts to reform the policing of intimate partner violence via force-wide initiatives and the mobilisation of general duties for this purpose. Consequently, our second argument is that specialisation via a commitment to dedicated intimate partner violence units – implemented more consistently and comprehensively than Victoria Police has to date – extends the greatest promise for effective policing of intimate partner violence in the future.