The status of women police officers: an international review

This paper reports on a survey of English-language police department websites, annual reports and other reports in order to identify key aspects of the status of women police internationally. Findings are reported for England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Eire, the United States, Canada, Australia (eight departments), New Zealand, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji. Data on the proportion of female officers were available from 18 of 23 locations, with a range between 5.1% and 28.8%. Recruit numbers were available for six locations, and ranged between 26.6% and 37.0%. Limited data on rank and deployment indicated overall improvements. Available longer-term trend data suggested that growth in female officers was slowing or levelling out. Overall, the study showed an urgent need to improve gender-based statistics in order to better inform strategies aimed at maximising the participation of women in policing

Trends and offending circumstances in the police use of drug detection dogs in New South Wales 2008–2018

New South Wales (NSW) was the first Australian state to introduce drug detection dogs as a street-level policing strategy. In 2006, the NSW Ombudsman released damning evidence that challenged the dogs’ effectiveness. Over a decade later, drug detection dogs remain a core policing policy in NSW, and the powers surrounding their use have expanded. This study provides the first comprehensive analysis of drug dog deployment since the NSW Ombudsman Review. Specifically, it analyses unit-record data on all recorded criminal incidents and persons of interest (POIs) involving drug detection dogs that led to a formal police response in NSW from June 2008 to June 2018. The analysis shows that the main target group has remained young males detected for use/possession offences, albeit that the dogs have detected a small but potentially significant population of drug suppliers, and that the circumstances for their detection differ markedly to that for consumers. The results further show that there has been a small reduction in the number of overall detections recorded by police. However, this trend has not been driven by a decrease in use/possession offences detected, and thus large numbers of use/possession offenders, as opposed to drug suppliers, continue to be policed via this policy each year. This paper discusses the implications of these findings for policy and practice

A federation of clutter: the bourgeoning language of vulnerability in Australian policing policies

The policing of vulnerable people has long been a topic of operational uncertainty and political sensitivity. On the one hand, governments have accepted that police officers require special mechanisms to cater for disadvantaged social groups and should interact with members of these groups in such a way that vulnerability attributes are acknowledged (Bartkowiak-Théron and Asquith 2012). On the other hand, agencies disagree on a variety of technical issues relating to the policing of vulnerable people, such as collaborative logistics, leadership, ownership and resource sharing. The policing of vulnerability has been under close scrutiny for over 30 years, with an increasing array of government and non-government services contributing their own areas of expertise to assist in solving these ‘wicked’ issues (Fleming and Wood 2006: 2). Yet, the burgeoning lists of who constitutes a vulnerable person, and the haphazard and localised development of strategies, have left little room for policy and practice transfer across vulnerability attributes, let alone jurisdictions. In this chapter, we reverse the policy transfer lens from the UK and US to consider the valuable policy and practice innovations developed in one Australian jurisdiction that may resolve some of the operational barriers to policing vulnerability in other jurisdictions.The interagency collaboration of government departments such as police, housing, education and health is now de rigueur and epitomised in the language of ‘whole of government’ protocols. However, such collaboration is not without its problems (Bartkowiak-Théron 2011). Some of the much-debated issues include policy and practice silos (Boxelaar et al. 2006), core business (Millie 2014) and specialised training (Bartkowiak-Théron and Lieutier 2014). In addition, a critical issue that continues to shape policing responses to vulnerability is the vernacular used to determine whether someone is vulnerable, and how such a person is identified. Not all agencies talk about the same people in the same way; nor do they necessarily talk about the same people at all. In this chapter, we explore what has become terminological clutter. We analyse not only divergence and disagreement in terms and expressions but also how this semantic clutter can contribute to operational ambiguity and uncertainty in policy development