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1 – 10 of 619Victor Diogho Heuer de Carvalho and Ana Paula Cabral Seixas Costa
This article presents two Brazilian Portuguese corpora collected from different media concerning public security issues in a specific location. The primary motivation is…
Abstract
Purpose
This article presents two Brazilian Portuguese corpora collected from different media concerning public security issues in a specific location. The primary motivation is supporting analyses, so security authorities can make appropriate decisions about their actions.
Design/methodology/approach
The corpora were obtained through web scraping from a newspaper's website and tweets from a Brazilian metropolitan region. Natural language processing was applied considering: text cleaning, lemmatization, summarization, part-of-speech and dependencies parsing, named entities recognition, and topic modeling.
Findings
Several results were obtained based on the methodology used, highlighting some: an example of a summarization using an automated process; dependency parsing; the most common topics in each corpus; the forty named entities and the most common slogans were extracted, highlighting those linked to public security.
Research limitations/implications
Some critical tasks were identified for the research perspective, related to the applied methodology: the treatment of noise from obtaining news on their source websites, passing through textual elements quite present in social network posts such as abbreviations, emojis/emoticons, and even writing errors; the treatment of subjectivity, to eliminate noise from irony and sarcasm; the search for authentic news of issues within the target domain. All these tasks aim to improve the process to enable interested authorities to perform accurate analyses.
Practical implications
The corpora dedicated to the public security domain enable several analyses, such as mining public opinion on security actions in a given location; understanding criminals' behaviors reported in the news or even on social networks and drawing their attitudes timeline; detecting movements that may cause damage to public property and people welfare through texts from social networks; extracting the history and repercussions of police actions, crossing news with records on social networks; among many other possibilities.
Originality/value
The work on behalf of the corpora reported in this text represents one of the first initiatives to create textual bases in Portuguese, dedicated to Brazil's specific public security domain.
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This article reviews 69 press releases published by the Norwegian Økokrim from June 2022 to November 2023. The presented research applies the theory of focal concerns to identify…
Abstract
Purpose
This article reviews 69 press releases published by the Norwegian Økokrim from June 2022 to November 2023. The presented research applies the theory of focal concerns to identify the main themes in the press releases.
Design/methodology/approach
Serious fraud offices such as the Norwegian national authority for investigation and prosecution of economic and environmental crime (Økokrim) are facing many challenges when combating white-collar and corporate crime. Press releases represent an element of facing such challenges, as the messages are an important vehicle for the organization to disclose organizational activities to the public.
Findings
Three themes emerged: offender conviction, impression management and crime deterrence. Offender prosecution followed by offender conviction is at the core of Økokrim's business. Impression management serves the purpose of emphasizing the important role of the national authority in society. The subjective perception of detection and prosecution by potential offenders can be influenced by crime deterrence messages.
Research limitations/implications
Press releases are signals that may be interpreted in other ways.
Practical implications
When politicians are to review national authorities, they may want a slightly different serious fraud office.
Social implications
The deterrence effect is often not real for alleged white-collar crime.
Originality/value
Understanding a national authority in terms of its focal concerns based on press releases from the authority.
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Courtney Hammond, Ashleigh S. Thatcher and Dean Fido
British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, recently introduced a “whole life order” sentence in response to sexually motivated or sadistic homicide offences (Gov.uk, 2023). Effectively…
Abstract
Purpose
British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, recently introduced a “whole life order” sentence in response to sexually motivated or sadistic homicide offences (Gov.uk, 2023). Effectively, this condemns the recipient to the remainder of their life in incarceration and renders rehabilitative interventions redundant. The purpose of this paper is to explore the literature pertaining to public pedagogy, definitions and convictions, and rehabilitative interventions – all in relation to those considered to have committed sexuallymotivated or sadistic murders, with emphasis on the implications of such.
Design/methodology/approach
Through this commentary, this paper explores the following points in line with existing literature: (a) public knowledge of the criminal justice system and those who have committed homicide offences, (b) the manner of defining and convicting sexually motivated and sadistic murders and (c) current access to rehabilitation intervention programmes.
Findings
This paper closes by recommending future research initiatives to deliver forensic-specific education for the general public as well as qualitative studies into the discourse around retribution to enable a conjunction between public concern and academic underpinning. Wider implications concerning public understandings, convictions, rehabilitations and politics are discussed.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that explores the practical and theoretical implications of imposing a whole life order on those charged with sadistic or sexual-motivated murders.
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The paper aims to provide a critical review of how variations in the conceptualization and contextualization of hate crime across US cities might impact how their individual law…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to provide a critical review of how variations in the conceptualization and contextualization of hate crime across US cities might impact how their individual law enforcement agencies collect hate crime data. Media reports and political discourses present hate crime as a prevalent problem in the USA. However, this representation of hate crime in the public sphere is not reflected in the relatively low national numbers of hate crimes published annually by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing primarily on the national hate crime data for the period 2008–2018, this author conducted a secondary research study of the concept, context, extent and law enforcement collection of hate crime data in five cities in the USA.
Findings
This paper is a product of some of the findings of the study, which include the definition of hate crime at the federal, state and city levels and the contextualization of hate crimes at these levels. The findings show inconsistencies in how the five cities and associated law enforcement agencies conceptualize hate crime and in how they collect and report hate crime data at local and national levels.
Originality/value
Through its analysis of how five US cities and the associated law enforcement agencies interpret and respond to hate crime data collection, with recommendations of best practices for hate crime data collection by law enforcement agencies, the paper contributes to the academic and nonacademic debate on hate crime.
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Simona Strungaru and Jo Coghlan
In March 2020, the Australian Government restricted the entry of travelers into Australia by closing its international borders in an effort to contain the spread of the…
Abstract
In March 2020, the Australian Government restricted the entry of travelers into Australia by closing its international borders in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19). While Australian citizens who were resident overseas could return to Australia under certain conditions, the border closures significantly affected their ability to return to Australia and as a consequence had a dramatic impact on their lives and the lives of their families. This chapter explores the effects of the Australian government’s decision to close the national border by presenting the lived experiences of Australian citizens adversely affected by the government’s decision. The research is based on an online survey conducted in late 2021 and early 2022. Based on the findings, this chapter explores notions of Australian citizenship rights and privileges in the context of the pandemic, and the profound impacts the national lockout had on Australians as individuals, family members and on their sense of national identity. A central finding of this research reveals how citizens’ separation from family during the lockout placed considerable stress on the family as a social institution and caused significant impacts on Australians’ physical and mental health.
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This study aims to investigate Bangladesh’s e-commerce regulations in light of the growing criticism that they are insufficient to curb predicate crimes like fraud and money…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate Bangladesh’s e-commerce regulations in light of the growing criticism that they are insufficient to curb predicate crimes like fraud and money laundering in the online marketplace.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used the exploratory design to examine the latest ministerial directives and laws governing e-commerce in Bangladesh to determine why they cannot prevent fraudulent activities in this promising sector and identify potential solutions.
Findings
Bangladesh’s regulatory responses to e-commerce fraud prevention and detection are reactive and inadequate. Regulators are unwilling and unable to enforce available legal provisions for various reasons, including a lack of knowledge and coordination among the agencies.
Research limitations/implications
This paper focuses solely on the legal and regulatory framework in place to combat e-commerce fraud. Other critical issues, such as consumer rights, privacy and data protection in e-commerce, are not addressed.
Practical implications
The findings of this study will assist policymakers in revising current regulatory approaches to e-commerce to protect this sector from criminal abuse.
Originality/value
This study looked into the possibility of using a proactive risk-based approach in the e-commerce sector, similar to what the Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit does in the financial sector.
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Racial stigma and racial criminalization have been centralizing pillars of the construction of Blackness in the United States. Taking such systemic injustice and racism as a…
Abstract
Racial stigma and racial criminalization have been centralizing pillars of the construction of Blackness in the United States. Taking such systemic injustice and racism as a given, then question then becomes how these macro-level arrangements are reflected in micro-level processes. This work uses radical interactionism and stigma theory to explore the potential implications for racialized identity construction and the development of “criminalized subjectivity” among Black undergraduate students at a predominately white university in the Midwest. I use semistructured interviews to explore the implications of racial stigma and criminalization on micro-level identity construction and how understandings of these issues can change across space and over the course of one's life. Findings demonstrate that Black university students are keenly aware of this particular stigma and its consequences in increasingly complex ways from the time they are school-aged children. They were aware of this stigma as a social fact but did not internalize it as a true reflection of themselves; said internalization was thwarted through strong self-concept and racial socialization. This increasingly complex awareness is also informed by an intersectional lens for some interviewees. I argue not only that the concept of stigma must be explicitly placed within these larger systems but also that understanding and identity-building are both rooted in ever-evolving processes of interaction and meaning-making. This research contributes to scholarship that applies a critical lens to Goffmanian stigma rooted in Black sociology and criminology and from the perspectives of the stigmatized themselves.
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