Regulating crime prevention design into consumer products: learning the lessons from electronic vehicle immobilisation

Foreword Despite significant reductions in recent years, acquisitive property crime remains the single largest crime category, with over 700,000 offences recorded annually by police in Australia. There is potential to further reduce the scale of such offending and the subsequent costs to society by focusing attention on the design of frequently stolen consumer products in order to reduce their vulnerability to theft. While there is a variety of ways of engaging with manufacturers, government regulation may ultimately be required if other approaches prove unsuccessful. This paper examines the lessons that can be learned as a result of the regulation of motor manufacturers to install electronic immobilisers on all new cars from July 2001, which has contributed to significant reductions in vehicle crime over the past decade. Eight generic lessons for future regulation of crime prevention design in consumer products are outlined. These lessons should assist policymakers to identify how the costs incurred by the criminal justice system in dealing with acquisitive property crime could be shifted to manufacturers, who arguably contribute to the problem by the way they design and market their consumer products

Explaining the property crime drop: the offender perspective

Foreword: For more than a decade, Australia has witnessed a sustained reduction in property crime. Yet relatively little is known about what may have caused this decline. This study aimed to explore plausible explanations for the property crime drop by ‘going to the source’ and interviewing a sample of 994 police detainees as part of the Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) Program. The results showed that less than half of police detainees were able to offer a reason for the property crime drop, highlighting the difficulties with asking for retrospective explanations for an observed event. Among those who gave a response, nine key themes were identified as potential reasons for the property crime drop. The most frequent of these related to improved security, improved policing and ‘other’ reasons. Less frequent responses related to increased affluence, increased imprisonment, improved community responses, changes in drug use, changes in the market for stolen goods and changes in crime recording. These findings provide a basis for future testing of hypotheses that might explain the property crime drop in Australia

CCTV use by local government: findings from a national survey

This paper presents the findings from a national survey of local government to develop a national picture of the prevalence and characteristics of open-street CCTV systems in Australia managed by local councils. Introduction There has been considerable growth in the use of closed circuit television (CCTV) in public spaces as a crime prevention measure and, increasingly, as a tool to detect and identify offenders. In Australia, CCTV systems have become an increasingly common fixture in urban centres, in shopping centres and malls, individual shops and banks, on public transport and in car parks. There has been significant investment in CCTV systems as part of state, territory and Commonwealth government crime prevention programs, with CCTV accounting for a growing proportion of overall grant funding available to community-based organisations, particularly local councils. More than a decade ago, Wilson and Sutton explored the operation and management of 33 open-street CCTV systems in Australia. They found that, while open street CCTV systems were initially primarily located in central business districts of major metropolitan centres, there was a growing trend towards their installation in smaller regional and rural centres and in suburban locations. Around the same time, Iris Research conducted a survey of all local councils in Australia to assess the use of CCTV and characteristics of the systems in operation, finding that around one in ten councils had a CCTV system in operation. More recently, Carr examined the use of CCTV by 18 local councils funded by the Australian Government, finding that police were increasingly reliant on local government CCTV and that the ensuing additional cost to council was significant. Similarly, Edmonds found that nearly half of all councils in NSW (46%; n=70) had installed CCTV in public spaces, with urban councils more than twice as likely than rural councils to have a system in place. Given the continued investment in CCTV at all levels of government plus the significant advances in technology over the past ten years, it is timely to reassess the use of CCTV by local councils in Australia. This paper presents the findings from a national survey of local government. The overall aim of this research was to develop a national picture of the prevalence and characteristics of open-street CCTV systems in Australia managed by local councils

Campus Climate for LGBTQ Students

As institutions of higher education have become increasingly cognizant of the need to ensure a welcoming campus climate for all members of their student populations, they have begun to undertake campus climate studies to assess student experiences and perceptions. While the majority of studies have been quantitative in nature, in-depth qualitative studies have been conducted in recent years. These studies have started to provide institutions with opportunities to really hear and understand the experiences of their students. The purpose of this study was to hear and understand the reported experiences of LGBTQ college students with campus climate at a mid-sized Mid-Atlantic university, with the hope that the institution will be able to utilize the data to help ensure as welcome a campus climate as possible. Four themes emerged from the interviews with the students: “I choose to disclose my identity (ies);” “I refuse to be bound by gender binaries;” “Can’t I be LGBTQ and religious;” and, “The importance of a physical and a symbolic space.” Based upon the themes, other findings, and the students’ descriptions of their experiences, recommendations for best practices are offered

SLIDES: Statewide Water Supply Initiative and Colorado River Compact Development

Presenter: Rick Brown, Colorado Water Conservation Board. 29 slides

SLIDES: Statewide Water Supply Initiative and Colorado River Compact Development

Presenter: Rick Brown, Colorado Water Conservation Board. 29 slides

Identity crime and misuse in Australia: results of the 2014 online survey

Misuse of personal information lies at the heart of identity crime and continues to affect all sectors of the Australian community. Abstract To understand the trends associated with identity crime and misuse in Australia, the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) was, in 2014, commissioned by the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department to undertake a national survey of the problem for the second time. The study is one of a series of initiatives being implemented as part of the National Identity Security Strategy, Australia’s national response to enhancing identity security, which seeks to prevent identity crime and misuse, contribute to national security and facilitate the benefits of the digital economy

A method for investigating binocular rivalry in real-time with the steady-state VEP

AbstractUnder conditions in which the visual system cannot reconcile dissimilar images from the two eyes, perception typically alternates between the two half-images-a process known as binocular rivalry. We report a real-time, steady-state VEP method that is a sensitive detector of the continuous alternations in perceptual dominance across the eyes. This method works by labeling each half-image with a slightly different temporal frequency so that the record generated by each can be recovered from the EEG by spectrum analysis. In this way, one can track the “waxing” and “waning” of the VEP amplitudes for each eye simultaneously during spontaneous rivalry, permitting an analysis of the relative physiological dominance of each eye in real-time. Such alternations were clearly observed in the VEP amplitudes generated by each half-image during rivalry (the amplitudes for the two eyes correlated negatively). In contrast, VEP amplitudes for the two eyes varied either synchronously or randomly when the half-images were allowed to fuse. The instances of physiological dominance of each eye as evidenced by the VEP correlated well with the subjects' report of perceptual dominance. This purely electrophysiological method appears to be suitable for measuring rivalry in non-verbal human or animal subjects, as it does not require active participation from them

Bayesian Techniques for Surface Fuel Loading Estimation

In previous work, researchers compared three sampling techniques for estimating the biomass of surface fine woody fuels by using them on known distributions. An important result was that precise estimates of fuel biomass required intensive sampling for both planar intercept and fixed-area methods. This study explores Bayesian statistical methods as a means to reduce the sampling effort needed to obtain a desired precision. We examined how initial estimates of the minimum and maximum fuel loading at a site could be used as prior information in a Bayesian framework. We found that, under certain scenarios, Bayesian techniques dramatically increased the precision of the estimator compared to using no prior information from the site.Faculty Sponsor: Kathy Gra

Liver transplantation for type IV glycogen storage disease

TYPE IV glycogen storage disease is a rare autosomal recessive disorder (also called Andersen's disease1 or amylopectinosis) in which the activity of branching enzyme alpha-1, 4-glucan: alpha-1, 4-glucan 6-glucosyltransferase is deficient in the liver as well as in cultured skin fibroblasts and other tissues.2,3 This branching enzyme is responsible for creating branch points in the normal glycogen molecule. In the relative or absolute absence of this enzyme, an insoluble and irritating form of glycogen, an amylopectin-like polysaccharide that resembles plant starch, accumulates in the cells. The amylopectin-like form is less soluble than normal glycogen, with longer outer and inner chains. © 1991, Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved