Reviews
Author | Mark Halsey,Deborah Ambery,Steve James,Tiffany Bodiam,David Dixon |
DOI | 10.1375/acri.36.3.379 |
Published date | 01 December 2003 |
Date | 01 December 2003 |
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THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 36 NUMBER 3 2003 PP.379–399
REVIEWS
Police Reform: Building Integrity
Edited by Tim Prenzler and Janet Ransley
(2002) Sydney: Hawkins Press,xiv + 234 pp., ISBN 1 8676067152
The editors present this collection of essays as being concerned with “the recur-
ring problem of police corruption, and contemporary efforts to find effective
strategies to maximise ethical conduct”. It seeks to provide an overview of develop-
ments in Australia which, they say, are marked by “the combination of advanced
democratic processes, exposés of serious police corruption, and extensive —
sometimes radical — experimentation with prevention strategies” (p. viii).
The first half of the book, Challenges to Reform, includes six chapters. Tim
Prenzler’s introduction surveys definitions of corruption, recent corruption scandals
and inquiries, explanations of corruption, and preventative methods and strategies.
Janet Ransley comments on miscarriages of justice which have often been products
of process corruption, and includes useful summary reminders of the Button and
Anderson cases. She concentrates on formal means of challenging and reviewing
miscarriages, saying unfortunately little about the campaigners and investigative
journalists who have played such crucial roles in challenging miscarriages — and
will continue to do so, whatever institutional mechanisms are in place. Crim-
inology usually gives journalists bad press: the vital contribution made by dogged
investigators from Paul Foot to Satish Sekar should be recognised. The latter’s
extraordinary work on the case of the Cardiff 3 puts academic criminology to
shame (Sekar, 1997). There are also contributions on public order policing (by
David Baker), on the policing of Aboriginal people (by Rick Sarre and Syd
Sparrow), and on sex discrimination (by Tim Prenzler).
The contributions in Part 1 are rather pedestrian, the (perhaps inevitable)
result of trying to provide overviews of large topics in short chapters. The exception
— because it has an argument to make — is Jenny Fleming and Colleen Lewis’s
essay on the politics of police reform. In a useful corrective to the tendency of
administrative criminology to focus only on nuts and bolts, the authors insist that
we have to look up and out: “it is the nature of the political environment that is
fundamental to the progress of reform” (p. 84). While this is not an original insight,
they make their case well, contrasting the fate of the reform processes in
Queensland and New South Wales. While the Fitzgerald Inquiry (in Queensland)
showed that police corruption was part of a broader pattern of political corruption,
the Wood Royal Commission (in New South Wales) largely ducked the issue of
political and judicial responsibility for process corruption. Reform continued to be
a priority in Queensland, but it was suffocated by NSW’s law and order politics. In
particular, Fleming and Lewis contrast the excessive reliance on Commissioner
Ryan in NSW with Queensland’s institutionalisation of reform in the Crime and
Misconduct Commission or, as it was at the time of writing, Criminal Justice
Commission (CJC), which provides a vital “buffer” between police and govern-
ment (p. 88). When Ryan put his agenda for crime fighting above the Wood
Commission’s agenda for reform, there was neither will nor capacity in the political
process to stop him. In a most unfortunate episode, warnings from the Qualitative
and Strategic Audit of the Reform Process — the Wood Commission’s attempt to
ensure that its recommendations would be implemented — were ignored by the
Government and most commentators on policing (Dixon, 2001).
Fleming and Lewis’s chapter provides a good introduction to the second half of
the book, Innovations in Creating Ethical Police Departments, in which the more
significant contributions concern Queenland’s CJC. David Brereton’s chapter
provides an account of the CJC’s role in monitoring integrity in the Queensland
Police. Under his direction, the CJC’s Research and Prevention Division made a
significant attempt to measure changing perceptions of the police held by the
general community, police officers, and defendants. Brereton’s conclusion is that
this research provides “a consistent picture of gradual improvement in standards of
conduct within the Queensland Police Service” (p. 113). Next, and again drawing
on CJC research, Andrew Ede and Michael Barnes survey various alternatives to
formal complaints procedures, from mediation to informal resolution. It will be
interesting to see if such procedures have a long-term effect on attitudes to
complaining against police. A fundamental problem is the widespread distrust of
complaints procedures which are handled by the police, whether these are formal
or informal. This issue is taken up by Tim Prenzler’s brief but useful review of
independent investigation of complaints.
Another standard criticism of complaints procedures is that they are, by nature,
retrospective. Meredith Bassett and Tim Prenzler report on attempts to use data
about complaints in risk assessments for police units, officers, and complainants.
Police departments can no longer justify waiting until problems arise: it may be
possible to predict and prevent them. Another approach to the same problem is
screening out individuals predisposed to misconduct during the recruitment
process: this is the subject of a chapter by Michelle Karas.
Tess Newton Cain’s chapter is titled Changing Police Procedures, but it veers
off this important topic to comment on training, intra-organisational relations, and
the contexts of policing. Given the space constraints, the treatment of these is
inevitably shallow. Like some other contributions, some ruthless editing (and proof-
reading, e.g., to catch a spelling mistake in the running-head) would have been
beneficial. A study of the impact on Australian police practices of changes in
police powers and suspects’ rights remains a major gap in the literature. Jude
McCulloch’s chapter on civil litigation against police shifts the focus away from
Queensland to Victoria, surveying civil cases against police in the latter. Read in
conjunction with Ian Freckelton’s essay in Violence and Police Culture (Coady et al.,
2000), it provides a useful introduction to this potentially significant issue.
By contrast to some of the competent but uninspiring papers which make up
the bulk of this volume, Ross Homel’s chapter on integrity testing is smart, well-
written and theoretically grounded, providing a useful comparison between
integrity testing and random breath testing. Homel is also a co-author (with Ede
and Prenzler) of the book’s final chapter. In the tradition of some other work from
Griffith University’s criminal justice scholars, this seeks to apply insights from
situational crime prevention to another field, in this case, police corruption.
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REVIEWS
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
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