Violence And Police Culture

Tony Coady, Steven James

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780522847888
• eBook ISBN: 9780522863444
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Violence and policing are inevitably associated. Criminals use violence not only against innocent members of the public, but also against the police themselves. For our own protection and theirs, we have given police a licence to use force, sometimes with lethal consequences.
But the exercise of this licence is fraught with risk to the community. The disturbing record of police shootings in Victoria, and irresponsible police violence elsewhere in recent years, vividly illustrate this risk. The public outcry against such events is understandable. To find a solution, we need to analyse the contexts and the cultural background of the use of police violence, and to think hard about its causes and proper limits.
In Violence and Police Culture, eminent contributors offer valuable insights and experience to the growing debate. While Australian in origin and emphasis, the book addresses a public issue that resonates as far afield as London, New York, Tokyo and Belfast.
Violence and Police Culture argues that there are features of police culture which foster abuse of the right to use violence. The book makes positive suggestions about institutional changes that might alleviate the problems bedevilling what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes called 'the right of the sword'.

Violence and Police Culture

Ethics in Public Life

Violence and Police Culture is part of the Melbourne University Press series, ‘Ethics in Public Life’, edited by Professor C. A. J. (Tony) Coady. Professor Coady is Director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Philosophy and Public Issues (now incorporated into the ARC Special Research Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics), and is an Australian Research Council Senior Research Fellow.

Previous publications in the series were Codes of Ethics and the Professions, eds Margaret Coady and Sidney Bloch, published in 1996, and All Connected: Universal Service in Telecommunications, ed. Bruce Langtry, published in 1998.

The series aims to provide intellectually challenging treatments of the ethical dimensions of issues of public importance. The perspective is broadly philosophical, in that the issues are examined with a view to their basic presuppositions and underlying fundamental values. As with previous books in the series, Violence and Police Culture is a collection of papers by diverse authors, some of whom are professional philosophers, some academics from other disciplines, and some practitioners in fields relevant to the particular topic. Other formats, including single-author works, will be considered for inclusion in the series.

Violence and Police Culture

Edited by TONY COADY, STEVE JAMES, SEUMAS MILLER and MICHAEL O’KEEFE

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PO Box 278, Carlton South, Victoria 3053, Australia

[email protected]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2001

Selection and arrangement © Tony Coady 2001

Individual chapters © the respective contributors 2001

Design and typography © Melbournd University Press 2001

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Typeset by Syarikat Seng Teik Sdn. Bhd., Malaysia,

in New Baskerville 10.5 point

Printed in Australia by RossCo Print

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Violence and police culture.

Bibliography.

Includes index.

ISBN 0 522 84788 9.

1. Violence—Australia. 2. Police—Australia—Attitudes.

3. Police—Australia. I. Coady, Tony.

363.220994

Contents

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

C. A. J. Coady, Steve James and Seumas Miller

1 Historical Influences on Australian Policing

John Blackler

2 The Police Use of Force: Contexts and Constraints

Ian Warren and Steve James

3 Positive Police Culture: Correcting Perceptions

Neil O’Loughlin and Peter Billing

4 Backstage Punishment: Police Violence, Occupational Culture and Criminal Justice

Janet Chan

5 An Impotent Conceit: Law, Culture and the Regulation of Police Violence

Andrew J. Goldsmith

6 Legal Regulation of the Police Culture of Violence: Rhetoric, Remedies and Redress

Ian Freckelton

7 Keeping the Peace and Making War: The Police and Military—Rhetoric and Reality

Jude McCulloch

8 Shootings by Police in Victoria: The Ethical Issues

Seumas Miller

9 Police Violence and the Loyal Code of Silence

John Kleinig

10 Dirty Harry and Dirty Hands

Andrew Alexandra

11 What Dirt?

C. A. J. Coady

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Contributors

Andrew Alexandra is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and a Senior Research fellow in the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, Charles Sturt University. His recent publications include Police Ethics (Allen & Unwin, 1997) with Seumas Miller and John Blackler.

Chief Inspector Peter Billing has been a member of Victoria Police for twenty-seven years. His police service has included general operational and supervisory duties at various police stations, investigative and supervisory duties at suburban Criminal Investigation Branches and at the (then) Internal Investigations Department (IID). At the time of writing this paper, he was Research, Planning and Training Officer at IID. Peter holds a Bachelor of Arts (Police Studies) and an Associate Diploma (Police Studies) from Monash University, together with a Graduate Diploma in Public Administration (Policing) from Charles Sturt University.

John Blackler was a New South Wales police officer for thirty-seven years. He holds the Australian Police Medal and other awards. He is currently a researcher and consultant with the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University. His publications include Development of Modern Policing (Keon, 1996) and, with Seumas Miller and Andrew Alexandra, Police Ethics (Allen & Unwin, 1997).

Janet Chan is Associate Professor and Head of the School of Social Science and Policy at the University of New South Wales. She teaches research methods, criminal justice policy and the Honours Thesis Workshop. Formerly Research Associate at the Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto, she has held various positions in Australia, including Director of the Institute of Criminology, University of Sydney; Research Director of the New South Wales Judicial Commission; and Senior Law Reform Officer at the Australian Law Reform Commission. In 1997 she was appointed the Walter S. Owen Visiting Chair at the Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia. Her research interest has been in reforms and innovations in criminal trials, sentencing, penal policy and policing. She has been research consultant to various organisations, including: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, NSW Ethnic Affairs Commission, National Crime Authority, NSW Juvenile Justice Advisory Council, Australian Institute of Judicial Administration, NSW Police Service and Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service.

C. A. J. (Tony) Coady is Australian Research Council Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively in academic journals and books as well as in a variety of non-technical magazines, newspapers and books. His influential book, Testimony: A Philosophical Inquiry (OUP), was published in hardback in 1992, and in paperback in 1994. He is currently writing a book to be titled Morality and Political Violence.

Ian Freckelton is a barrister in full-time practice in Victoria. He is also Adjunct Professor of Law and Legal Studies, La Trobe University, and Professor of Psychological Medicine and Honorary Associate Professor of Forensic Medicine, Monash University. Between 1986 and 1988 he was Counsel Assisting the Police Complaints Authority of Victoria. He is a member of the Mental Health Review Board and the Psychologists Registration Board in Victoria as well as the editor of the Journal of Law and Medicine, the editor-in-chief of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law and the international editor of Behavioural Sciences and the Law. He is the author and editor of some twenty books and has written extensively about policing and criminal justice.

Andrew Goldsmith is Professor of Law at Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, and was formerly Senior Research Fellow in the Law Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University.

Steve James is a Senior Lecturer in the Criminology Department at the University of Melbourne. He has specialised in research on policing, and has published in areas such as policing and young people, police recruitment and performance assessment, police personality, drug law enforcement and police culture. James currently lectures on policing and on illicit drug control.

John Kleinig is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Law and Police Science, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and Director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics. He is an editor of Criminal Justice Ethics. Among his publications are Punishment and Desert (1973), Paternalism (1984), Valuing Life (1991), Professional Law Enforcement Codes: A Documentary Collection (ed. with Yurong Zhang, 1993), The Ethics of Policing (1996), Handled with Discretion: Ethical Issues in Police Decision Making (ed., 1996), Teaching Criminal Justice Ethics: Strategic Issues (ed. with Margaret Leland Smith, 1997), and From Social Justice to Criminal Justice: Poverty and the Administration of Criminal Law (ed. with William Heffernan, 2000). He is currently editing a book on correctional ethics and undertaking research on loyalty.

Jude McCulloch has worked in various community legal centres over the past seventeen years. Her practice as a community lawyer has involved providing legal services to disadvantaged members of the community, running test cases, undertaking campaigns, participating in law reform, and developing legal policy at all levels. In particular she has been active around police issues. This activism has involved working with the families of several men shot and killed by the police in the late 1980s; campaigning for changes to police practice in relation to firearms, strip searches and family violence; and negotiating with police around changes to police standing orders on these issues. She has researched and published on a range of policing issues including police shootings, police and the media, women and policing, and family violence. Melbourne University Press will publish her book on paramilitary policing in 2001. She currently lectures in Police Studies at Deakin University.

Seumas Miller is Professor of Social Philosophy and Director of the Centre ...

Table of contents

• Violence and Police Culture