Drugs and law enforcement

Speech presented at the Drugs, Rehabilitation and the Criminal Justice System Conference 2002, Sydney, March 1, 2002, by Adam Graycar, Director, Australian Institute of Criminology, and co-authored by Kiah McGregor and Toni Makkai. This speech is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/The overwhelming majority of those who use illicit drugs do not commit property crime or violent crime. There is however, a strong link between predatory crime and illicit drug use and the focus of this paper is on law enforcement and the reduction of crime associated with illicit drug use. This includes two key groups: those whose "drug" crimes are directly associated with drugs (such as possession, dealing, trafficking and manufacturing) and those whose "drug-related" offences are to support a drug habit (that is acquisitive crime) or while intoxicated (that is violent crime). Police activities are examined as well as the targets, programs and strategies used, and how to assess the effectiveness of drug law enforcement

Drugs and law enforcement

Speech presented at the 'Winter School in the Sun Conference', Carlton Crest Hotel, Brisbane, July 2-5, 2001, by Adam Graycar, Director, Australian Institute of Criminology. Co-authored by Kiah McGregor and Toni Makkai. This speech is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/The overwhelming majority of those who use illicit drugs do not commit property crime or violent crime. There is however, a strong link between predatory crime and illicit drug use and the focus of this paper is on law enforcement and the reduction of crime associated with illicit drug use. This includes two key groups: those whose "drug" crimes are directly associated with drugs (such as possession, dealing, trafficking and manufacturing) and those whose "drug-related" offences are to support a drug habit (that is acquisitive crime) or while intoxicated (that is violent crime). Police activities are examined as well as the targets, programs and strategies used, and how to assess the effectiveness of drug law enforcement

Drugs and law enforcement: actions and options

Speech given at the South Australian Drugs Summit 2002, Adelaide, 26 June 2002, by Adam Graycar, Director, Australian Institute of Criminology, and co-authored by Kiah McGregor, Toni Makkai and Jason Payne. This speech is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/The overwhelming majority of those who use illicit drugs do not commit property crime or violent crime. There is however, a strong link between predatory crime and illicit drug use and the focus of this paper is on law enforcement and the reduction of crime associated with illicit drug use. This includes two key groups: those whose "drug" crimes are directly associated with drugs (such as possession, dealing, trafficking and manufacturing) and those whose "drug-related" offences are to support a drug habit (that is acquisitive crime) or while intoxicated (that is violent crime). Police activities are examined as well as the targets, programs and strategies used, and how to assess the effectiveness of drug law enforcement

Towards a 'smart' cost-benefit tool: using machine learning to predict the costs of criminal justice policy interventions

BACKGROUND: The Manning Cost–Benefit Tool (MCBT) was developed to assist criminal justice policymakers, policing organisations and crime prevention practitioners to assess the benefits of different interventions for reducing crime and to select those strategies that represent the greatest economic return on investment. DISCUSSION: A challenge with the MCBT and other cost–benefit tools is that users need to input, manually, a considerable amount of point-in-time data, a process that is time consuming, relies on subjective expert opinion, and introduces the potential for data-input error. In this paper, we present and discuss a conceptual model for a ‘smart’ MCBT that utilises machine learning techniques. SUMMARY: We argue that the Smart MCBT outlined in this paper will overcome the shortcomings of existing cost–benefit tools. It does this by reintegrating individual cost–benefit analysis (CBA) projects using a database system that securely stores and de-identifies project data, and redeploys it using a range of machine learning and data science techniques. In addition, the question of what works is respecified by the Smart MCBT tool as a data science pipeline, which serves to enhance CBA and reconfigure the policy making process in the paradigm of open data and data analytics.This project was funded by the Economic & Social Research Council grant (ESRC Reference: ES/L007223/1) titled ‘University Consortium for EvidenceBased Crime Reduction’, the Australian National University’s Cross College Grant and the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science

The blameworthiness of health and safety rule violations

Man-made disasters usually lead to the tightening of safety regulations, because rule breaking is seen as a major cause of them. This reaction is based on the presumptions that the safety rules are good and that the rule-breakers are wrong. The reasons the personnel of a coke factory gave for breaking rules raise doubt about the tenability of these presumptions. It is unlikely that this result would have been achieved on the basis of a disaster evaluation or High-Reliability Theory. In both approaches, knowledge of the consequences of human conduct hinders an unprejudiced judgement about the blameworthiness of rule breaking