New public management and the ‘business’ of policing organised crime in Australia
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895816671384 |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895816671384
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2017, Vol. 17(4) 382 –400
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895816671384
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New public management
and the ‘business’ of policing
organised crime in Australia
Monique Mann
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Abstract
The globalisation of new public management (NPM) across OECD countries had a profound
impact on the administration and management of policing policy and practice. The ideologies of
NPM were enthusiastically embraced in Australia in response to high-level corruption with mixed
results. This article draws on interviews with senior Australian federal police to explore the
policing of organised crime in the context of NPM. Emerging themes concerned the requirement
to make the ‘business case’ for resources on the basis of strategic intelligence, recognition of
the complexities associated with performance measurement and institutional competition as
agencies vie for limited public resources. This article questions the discursive practices of NPM
policing and raises questions about notions of ‘accountability’ and ‘transparency’ for effective
police approaches to organised crime.
Keywords
Intelligence-led policing, new public management, organised crime, police leaders, police
managerial practices, police performance measurement, surveillance
Introduction
There has been a paradigm shift from public administration to new public management
(NPM) in government-funded sectors starting since the mid-1980s (Dixon et al., 1998;
Gray and Jenkins, 1995). According to NPM, the public sector should adopt a result driven
method to management, borrowing principles and practices from the private sector (Dixon
et al., 1998). These principles relate to accountability and transparency in the allocation of
resources, and the measurement of performance as a means to achieving greater efficiency
Corresponding author:
Monique Mann, School of Justice, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George Street,
Brisbane, Queensland, 4000, Australia.
Email: m6.mann@qut.edu.au
671384CRJ0010.1177/1748895816671384Criminology & Criminal JusticeMann
research-article2016
Article
Mann 383
(Noordegraaf and Abma, 2003). For many leading scholars NPM represents ‘one of the
most striking international trends in public administration’ (Hood, 1991: 3).
NPM is premised on neoliberalism that both ‘frames our understanding of crime’ and
‘shapes the governance techniques’ to deal with it (Nieto, 2012: 140). One of the distin-
guishing features of neoliberalism is ‘an emphasis on cost-effective, pragmatic, results-
based government, coupled with accountability at all levels’ (O’Malley, 2008: 57).
O’Malley (2008: 57–58) further argues that ‘crime control has been refocused in terms
of “stronger” and more “efficient” state agencies responsive to populist demands’, neces-
sitating the police to adopt managerial practices closely aligned with a ‘business environ-
ment’. These developments are ‘part of a more general developing neo-liberal logic
within late modern Western polities’ (Hogg, 2008: 285). Police are faced with the chal-
lenge of responding to organised crime in a highly politicised environment. As a result of
demands introduced under neoliberalism, senior police managers operate in incentive-
based systems of accountability with an emphasis on performance measurement. This
article draws attention to how police reconcile their role responding to crime while work-
ing in systems of bureaucratic accountability.
In 2009 the annual global turnover of transnational organised crime1 and drug traf-
ficking was estimated to be US$870 billion (£670 billion) (United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime, 2011). The minimum annual cost for police responses to organised
crime in the European Union is €210 million (£180 million), and this figure excludes the
annual budgets of national police agencies (Levi et al., 2013). In 2013–14 it was esti-
mated organised crime cost Australia AUD$36 billion (£21 billion), and this figure
included AUD$15 billion (£9 billion) in spending on police and criminal justice responses
(Australian Crime Commission, ACC, 2015a). In Australia, organised crime encom-
passes criminal activities including enabler activities (money laundering, identity crime,
public sector corruption), trafficking in illicit commodities (drugs, firearms) and crimes
against the person (human trafficking, child sex offences) (ACC, 2015b). Aligned with
international trends, there has been a shift from hierarchical and ethnic crime groups to
more flexible and entrepreneurial forms of organising across criminal markets and juris-
dictions (ACC, 2015b; Ayling and Broadhurst, 2014). This means organised crime is
multifaceted and presents numerous challenges for police (Harfield, 2008). Police
responses to organised crime are important to study because organised crimes can be
sophisticated, extending across time and place. This is likely to make it harder for police
to demonstrate immediate outcomes and their responses are, therefore, more likely to be
deemed unsatisfactory. Under the demands introduced by NPM, police must attest to
their ability to manage this complex phenomenon, and consequently the practices of
NPM are intensified. While there is an extensive literature that reviews NPM and perfor-
mance management in policing and criminal justice (Butler, 1984; Butterfield et al.,
2004; Hoque et al., 2004), little has been written on the experience of policing organised
crime in the era of NPM. This research addresses this imbalance.
Development of federal agencies to respond to organised crime in
Australia
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Criminal Intelligence
Commission (ACIC) are currently the two federal agencies with a mandate to respond to
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