Search results

This paper aims to assess COVID-19 as presenting both a crisis and opportunity for police trust and legitimacy by considering the role of police in delivering the legislative requirements of government and enforcing various health orders across Australia and New Zealand.

The research relies on a mixed-methods analysis of national, commonwealth, state and territory policy, corporate police reports, academic commentary and media coverage throughout the pandemic. Survey data gathered during the pandemic relevant to trust and legitimacy in police and government is also analysed.

Five findings relating to police trust and legitimacy are identified. They reveal that police mostly did seize the pandemic as an opportunity to implement practices that enhanced perceptions of trust and legitimacy. However, even where police were able to leverage COVID-19 as an opportunity, the protracted nature of the pandemic posed a challenge for maintaining trust and legitimacy gains. The findings also underscore the importance of a continued focus on building trust and legitimacy post-pandemic to counter any lingering consequences.

The applicability of the findings outside the Australian and New Zealand context may be limited, given differences in jurisdictional legislative frameworks and policing operational environments.

This study identifies good community engagement practice for pandemic policing, contributes to communication strategies for managing trust decay during an emergency, forecasts ongoing trust and legitimacy challenges to policing’s post-pandemic operational environment and enhances aspects of post-pandemic recruitment approaches.

The findings contribute to emerging police practice and research on building and sustaining trust and legitimacy during periods of uncertainty and volatility, such as during and after a pandemic.

This study's aim was to systematically review available literature related to the establishment, purpose, operation, and effectiveness of civilian police oversight entities in the United States and to gain a deeper understanding of support, opposition, academic, public, and police expectations concerning their utility.

A Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) was used to analyze police civilian oversight literature published between 1992 and 2022.

The authors find racially biased policing, political investment, police resistance, oversight structure, scope, and authority are key components that determine how oversight is perceived.

Based on the methodology, the results may not be generalizable. Future researchers should consider expanding public oversight research beyond the parameters, which constrained this paper.

This article contains implications that should be considered by jurisdictions seeking to develop, restructure, or eliminate public oversight entities and for recognizing the concerns of advocates and opponents of public oversight.

Civilian oversight has long been considered a potential method for public inclusion if not a means for greater public control of police. Over the past few decades, a resurgence of interest in civilian oversight has emerged.

This article synthesizes literature that spans 30 years of research on public oversight.

Inquiries, commissions, reviews and the promise of broader data collection about racial and gender disparities are now the reflex defensive responses from state institutions charged with grievous social harm, particularly in the UK. Recommendations from these exercises are rarely implemented. As criminologists, our ability to produce and analyse data that evidences or better illuminates social harm has long been a key offer of the discipline to activism.

How are we to respond to the very institutions activist criminologists seek to challenge immediately offering this very activity, invariably protracted and ineffectual, as a reflex response to activist challenge? This chapter explores this tension. Grounded in the work of groups struggling to end police stop and search, it considers the strategy impasse around research and data production that faces grassroots activists and their accomplice researchers. The chapter proposes new routes for collaboration and action across activist and criminologist communities that may help move past the ‘data trap’. In short, it seeks to answer: do activists need more evidence?

To construct effective compliance programmes, the phenomenon of non-compliance and variations in its abidance must be elucidated. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the social reality of ethical decision making, which examines the internalisation of moral norms and realities of social behaviour and, therefore, the general non-compliance with everyday laws (Tyler, 2006).

This paper makes use of several social theories, including social proof theory, traditional social theory and social control theory. Humans are social beings, and decision-making in ethics is strongly influenced by herding behaviour (Roy, 2021). The behaviour of others and normative ethical standards inform the compliance of behaviour to an undiminishable degree.

Although there is a host of factors to consider, the success of compliance can largely be attributed to people’s perception and reception of authority. The perception of authority and legitimacy plays a vital role in appreciating the complexity of rule following. Legitimacy, and its embodiment by persons in public roles, is a cornerstone of the subsequent discussion.

This paper uncovers the underlying motivations of non-compliance as well as the social psychology involved in the ethics of compliance. Cross-disciplinary connections are made between the private and public sector and practical compliance recommendations. The significant impact of integrity culture and value-based compliance emerges from the dissection of the social reality.

This chapter argues that the Americanisation of online policing has questionable impacts in Australian prosecutions involving drugs obtained and distributed through dark web cryptomarkets. The authors describe several Australian prosecutions of mid- and low-level dealers who have accessed drugs through the dark web and contrast these with the United States (US) case against the cryptomarket, AlphaBay. The discussion in this study emphasises how Australian police and courts view the relative weight of dark web activity associated with the domestic and transnational supply of illicit drugs that result in formal prosecutions. The authors suggest that large-scale forms of online and dark web police surveillance undertaken by US enforcement agencies reflect Ethan Nadelmann’s (Cops across borders: the internationalization of US criminal law enforcement, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) thesis on the Americanisation of global policing through transnational communications networks. The authors then explain how key elements of transnational dark web drug supply appear to have a marginal bearing on criminal investigations into low- and mid-level traffickers in Australia, which rely on conventional surveillance tactics to identify clandestine mail pickups, physical distribution methods, and irregular money trails. However, the authors then illustrate how the Americanisation of online policing that targets high-level entrepreneurs and seeks to dismantle or eliminate dark web cryptomarkets has important implications on Australian reforms aimed at enhancing online surveillance powers to target a range of crimes that are often wrongly associated with illicit drug cryptomarkets. The authors conclude by demonstrating how intensive dark web surveillance has limited direct impact on routine drug policing in Australia, with dark web communications simply another medium for facilitating the physical detection of illicit transnational drug transactions.

This study examined the effects of organizational justice and citizen respect to support for democratic policing through self-legitimacy among South Korean police officers.

The authors used survey data from 467 South Korean police officers in 2022. Structural equation model analysis was used to examine relationships between each variable.

This study found a positive relationship between organizational justice and self-assessed legitimacy. Also, citizen respect had a positive relationship with both police officers' self-assessed legitimacy and audience legitimacy. Self-assessed legitimacy had a significant effect on support for democratic policing, while perceived-audience legitimacy did not have a significant effect on support for democratic policing.

The current study provides evidence that self-legitimacy affects supporting democratic policing in a non-Western democracy. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to examine the role of police self-legitimacy as a link between organizational justice and citizen respect and the intended behaviors of police officers toward citizens.