Contacts with, and attitudes toward, the mentally ill in the New Zealand police : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

Irregular pagination: pg 56 missingDeinstitutionalisation and changes to the Mental health Act (1992) relating to committal and treatment for those with a mental illness has resulted in increased numbers of people with a mental illness living in the community. Internationally these changes in the care of mentally ill people have resulted in increased contacts between the police and the mentally ill. The present study investigated the amount, and nature of, contacts between the New Zealand police and the mentally ill and the attitudes of the police toward mentally ill persons using Cohen and Struenings Opinions about Mental Health (OMI) scale. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to all police stations within region three of the New Zealand police districts and a total of 261 sworn police participated. The results show that New Zealand police, like their international colleagues, experience regular contacts with the mentally ill that are time consuming, stressful and largely non-criminal in nature. While the police expressed a dislike to attending call outs involving the mentally ill, their attitudes as measured by the OMI were overall positive and accepting of mentally ill people. The participants expressed a desire for additional training and education to better prepare themselves to deal with the mentally ill

"No time for a solicitor": implications for delays on the take-up of legal advice

A study of police custody records highlighted variations between police stations both in the take-up of legal advice and also in the average length of time people were held in custody. To further explore unobserved factors which might impact on such variations a qualitative study has been undertaken of four large police stations. While there were found to be factors in common between police stations which related to delays, there were other factors which were specific to one or two stations only. There were also found to be implications for delays creating potential barriers to legal advice. Such factors raise questions about the extent to which PACE continues to provide sufficient legal safeguards for those held in police custody

Creating regional crime statistics from administrative data

Abstract: The only publicly-available information on the geographical distribution of crime in New Zealand is offence statistics for police administrative units. We investigate whether existing data can be used to construct geographical crime statistics that correspond to regional councils, territorial authorities, and urban areas. Methods We build experimental output geographies from police stations, the smallest administrative unit for which there are long time series of offence statistics. We develop three rules for assigning police stations to the new geographies: one based on population, one based on land area, and one based on both. We assess the performance of these rules by calculating the proportion of national land area and population that is misclassified, and the number of target units that do not receive at least one police station. We also look at whether regional statistics on serious assaults are sensitive to the choice of allocation rule. Findings The new output geographies approximate the target geographies well. For instance, our preferred rule assigns 96 percent of the national population to the correct territorial authority. Moreover, a case study of serious assaults suggests that most regional crime statistics are not sensitive to the choice of rule. Conclusion The new output geographies perform sufficiently well that they could, if required, be used to produce regional crime statistics

Children, young people and requests for police station legal advice: 25 years on from PACE

Informed by data extracted from 30,921 police electronic custody records, drawn from 44 police stations across four police force areas and including 5153 records of juveniles aged 10 to 17 years, this article examines the take-up of legal advice by children and young people in police stations in England and Wales. There are wide variations in the extent to which juveniles request and receive legal advice when compared to adults but also between juveniles of different ages. Such variations are explored both in relation to the age of detainees and the type and seriousness of offence and case disposal. Also examined are variations based on different police force areas. The implications emanating from children’s differential access to legal advice at police stations are considered in relation to children’s rights

Legal interpreters in the news in Ireland

This article consists of a review of court reports from national and provincial newspapers in Ireland from 2003 to 1st August 2010. The reports provide an insight into the attitudes of judges, lawyers and police officers to defendants who are not proficient in English. The issue of defendants’ proficiency in English is a recurrent one. Coverage suggests that interpreters are not always provided in police stations or in the courts and that some judges continue to allow friends and family members to act as interpreters. Meanwhile, some solicitors consistently request interpreters for their clients. Other salient issues are cost, interpreter competency and interpreter ethics

Unspeakable Suspicions: Challenging the Racist Consensual Encounter

[Excerpt] In recent years, law enforcement officials have honed a new technique for fighting the War on Drugs: the suspicionless police sweep of stations and vehicles involved in interstate mass transportation. Single officers or groups of officers approach unfortunate individuals in busses, trains, stations and airline terminals. A targeted traveller is requested to show identification and tickets, explain the purpose of his or her travels, and finally, at times, to consent to a luggage search. As long as a reasonable person would understand that he or she could refuse to cooperate, the encounter between the law-enforcement official and the traveller is deemed consensual, not subject to the constraints of the Fourth Amendment

The justice lottery?: police station advice 25 years on from PACE

January 2011 marks the 25th anniversary of the introduction of the unequivocal right of police station detainees to obtain advice from a solicitor. However, while this right is a fundamental safeguard to procedural propriety, no large-scale investigation of the rates at which advice is requested or received has been undertaken in over a decade. This study, the most extensive yet undertaken, draws on data extracted from 30,921 custody records, across 44 police stations in 4 police force areas. We find the advice request rate has risen less than recent studies indicate. We also find substantial variation in request rates between police stations and police forces, after accounting for other factors, and a sharp drop in the request rate between ages 16 and 17. This drop supports proposals to extend requirements around appropriate adults to 17 year olds. We argue that, at a time of change in police station operation and advice provision, further monitoring of, and investigation into, the operation of the right to advice is required. © 2011 Thomson Reuters (Legal) Limited

Police stations for instant reaction: a maximal homicide coverage location problem

The probability of facing prison is one of the major factors that deters individual from committing crimes -- The degree of impact of this variable is affected both by the severity of penalties, and by the probability of being caught, which largely depends on the level of police coverage in the jurisdiction -- Thus, we consider a maximal covering location problem where the objective is to provide maximal coverage of weighted potential homicide spots through the construction of police stations for instant reaction, subject to a budget constraint -- Our empirical application is performed in Medellín (Colombia), one of the cities with the highest homicide rate in the World -- Specifically , we call the Google Maps Application Programming Interface (API) to estimate average travelling time between police stations and criminal spots, then we use a Simulated Annealing algorithm to find the best feasible allocation of stations subject to a set of suggested budgets -- We confirm that the maximum coverage follows a diminishing marginal process over the budge

Can Institutions Be Reformed From Within? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment with the Rajasthan Police

Institutions in developing countries, particularly those inherited from the colonial period, are often thought to be subject to strong inertia. This study presents the results of a unique randomized trial testing whether these institutions can be reformed through incremental administrative change. The police department of the state of Rajasthan, India collaborated with researchers at U.S. and Indian Universities to design and implement four interventions to improve police performance and the public’s perception of the police in 162 police stations (covering over one-fifth of the state’s police stations and personnel): (1) placing community observers in police stations; (2) a freeze on transfers of police staff; (3) in-service training to update skills; and (4) weekly duty rotation with a guaranteed day off per week. These reforms were evaluated using data collected through two rounds of surveys including police interviews, decoy visits to police stations, and a large-scale public opinion and crime victimization survey—the first of its kind in India. The results illustrate that two of the reform interventions, the freeze on transfers and the training, improved police effectiveness and public and crime victims’ satisfaction. The decoy visits also led to an improvement in police performance. The other reforms showed no robust effects. This may be due to constraints on local implementation: The three successful interventions did not require the sustained cooperation of the communities or the local authorities (the station heads) and they were robustly implemented throughout the project. In contrast, the two unsuccessful interventions, which required local implementation, were not systematically implemented

Interpreting in Northern Ireland

This article examines how interpreter provision in Northern Ireland developed in a very different way from Ireland or indeed England, Scotland or Wales. In general terms, interpreter provision in Northern Ireland is very good in that interpreters are routinely provided for hospitals, social welfare, schools and of course police stations and courts. The majority of interpreters have undergone training, and instead of outsourcing interpreting services to a translation agency, the authorities have opted for an in-house service for health and social welfare, a social economy enterprise for legal interpreting and a community development organisation for other types of interpreting. Each organisation has a register of interpreters