Australian Policing

Critical Issues in 21st Century Police Practice

Philip Birch, Michael Kennedy, Erin Kruger, Philip Birch, Michael Kennedy, Erin Kruger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000258219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Jura
• Subtopic: Rechtstheorie & -praxis

This edited collection brings together leading academics, researchers, and police personnel to provide a comprehensive body of literature that informs Australian police education, training, research, policy, and practice. There is a strong history and growth in police education, both in Australia and globally. Recognising and reflecting on the Australian and New Zealand Policing Advisory Agency (ANZPAA) education and training framework, the range of chapters within the book address a range of 21st-century issues modern police forces face. This book discusses four key themes:

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• Education, training, and professional practice: topics include police education, ethics, wellbeing, and leadership

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• Organisational approaches and techniques: topics include police discretion, use of force, investigative interviewing, and forensic science

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• Operational practices and procedures: topics include police and the media, emergency management, cybercrime, terrorism, and community management

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• Working with individuals and groups: topics include mental health, Indigenous communities, young people, hate crime, domestic violence, and working with victims

Australian Policing: Critical Issues in 21st Century Police Practice draws together theoretical and practice debates to ensure this book will be of interest to those who want to join the police, those who are currently training to become a police officer, and those who are currently serving. This book is essential reading for all students, scholars, and researchers engaged with policing and the criminal justice sector.

SECTION 1

Education, training, and professional practice

CHAPTER 1

Police education in Australia

Colin Rogers and Emma Wintle

Introduction

The type and quality of police officers a society requires often reflects the relationship between the state and its citizens, and this process invariably begins with the education and training of those police officers. This chapter will critically evaluate current police education and training at the state and federal level in Australia. It will consider the way police officers are currently educated in a fast-moving and changing society, and examine whether this is enough for the needs of the community. It will also critically examine future challenges for the police and discuss how prepared police education and training is to meet these at this moment in time. As Dolling (2003) points out, policing does not exist in a vacuum. It is impacted daily and in the long term by changes in the social, political, economic, technological, environmental, and legal structures, in whatever country it is practised. It therefore follows that the education of police officers should be shaped by the future changes within these and other activities.

Policing is also, primarily, a social and information occupation, and is an aspect of the more general concept of social control (Bowling et al, 2019). As such, it involves interaction with people in a wide and diverse range of situations. This interaction involves, on many occasions, obtaining information about a particular community, incident or person, or the use of police intelligence to be found in police data sets (James, 2016). Therefore, those who are responsible for police education in all countries need to clearly understand how society changes, responding to strong currents within a given society. Further, there is a need to understand how information is gathered, exchanged, and utilised, and the consequences of these activities. Globalisation, and the global economy, is now characterised by the almost instantaneous flow and exchange of information, capital, and cultural communication (Castells, 2010). The increasing nature and scope of crime and substantial increases in immigration tend to demonstrate that what happens in one country can have an impact in others. It is in the face of these challenges that the police in Australia need to ensure their training and education provision are part of this process. Understanding the different types of challenges that lie ahead for the police will allow us to critically examine the readiness of training and education in Australia.

Future challenges

The world’s population will reach 8 billion by 2025, up from 6 billion in 2000 (National Intelligence Council, 2008). However, this increase will not occur evenly across all countries. Developed countries will see a decline in population, whilst those of developing countries will increase, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, which will have extremely youthful populations. Developed countries will witness an aging population rise, coupled with declining fertility rates, leading to less individuals of working age to support the population as a whole. Workers must come from somewhere; consequently, we may witness a large expansion in immigration and shifts in population from one country to another. Such a population shift – which increases both migration and immigration – will bring with it the attendant risk of internal and external change within different societies. For example, the above population shift could bring about an expansion of the “middle classes” across different countries, which could lead to an expansion of the consumerist society already witnessed in most Western countries to the global stage (Spybey, 1996), and wider divisions within society. This in turn could lead to a higher demand from communities for more service-oriented, citizen/consumer-style policing (Clarke et al, 2009), rather than a law enforcement model of policing, as people come to understand their rights as consumers of private and public services.

Urbanisation is set to grow to about 60% in all countries (National Intelligence Council, 2008), which will require not only a concentration of policing services within those areas, but may also elicit a decline in social cohesiveness, which is required to support and promote “self-policing”, which reduces demand for formal public police activity. This has been part of a continuing responsibilisation strategy for most democratic governments for some time (Garland, 2001).

There are likely to be rapid political changes, coupled with wider social movements, which might produce serious governance difficulties. There may be wider democratisation, which will lead to greater calls for transparency and accountability in policing agencies across the globe, coupled with greater franchise. This could occur despite the possibility of increased nationalism, and the apparent rise in right-wing politics (Fukuyama, 2018). Clearly, the political landscape will be far more complicated in the future than it hitherto has been.

The biggest area of potential change for Australian policing will be seen in the greater use and expansion of more and more sophisticated technology. Not only will it influence organisational behaviour and crime trends, but it will also impact individual and personal lifestyles. Developments in technology will further enhance the potential for greater and swifter communication between groups of people who are able to organise themselves for dealing with such activities as political protest, whilst the potential for global crime, such as terrorism, will increase exponentially. Schafer et al (2012) suggest the following major challenges for the police in terms of the current trends in technology:

• New types of crime will come into being;
• Traditional crime will become enhanced by new technologies; and
• There will develop a technology gap, with the police falling further behind the private sector in understanding and acquiring new technologies.

Whilst new technology provides challenges for police, it can also provide benefits. For example, improvements in data analysis tools, biometrics, and less-lethal technologies provide enhancements for police activities.

One cannot ignore the fact that increased problems for policing agencies may occur as a result of environmental and climate change. The recent large-scale bush fires in Australia and long periods of drought may indicate that natural disasters could increase in scale and intensity. Furthermore, the recent COVID-19 pandemic illustrates that increased opportunities for global travel have heightened the possibility of worldwide pandemics. These potential environmental problems and widespread health concerns will, in turn, require different and varied responses at a national and international level, and a greater need and demand for closer cooperation between police agencies with more and wider services across the world.

Possibly, more crime prevention activities will need to be in place, with the greater use of surveillance and situational crime prevention techniques, rather than costly social interventions. The challenge for Australian policing agencies will be that of providing and stimulating a need for greater social cohesion/community involvement (Rogers, 2012; Wedlock, 2006) in the delivery of policing services. This enhanced cooperation and partnership approach with communities will be vital in order to maintain the very legitimacy that allows for policing in democracies.

Organisational challenges

Like most modern organisations, police agencies in Australia trace their origins to the country’s industrial and social evolution. Consequently, their structures are similar, with workers being supervised by an overseer within a hierarchical structure that separates front-line officers from strategic policy-makers (Hebdon & Kirkpatrick, 2006). The hierarchical model of policing does not adapt well to external demands for change or accountability, and there is still a tendency to adhere to historical ideas regarding management practices. Therefore, policing agencies in Australia may need a “revolution” in their organisation, leadership, and management models in order to deal with the future issues that they will have to face (Batts et al, 2012). The fundamental tool in achieving this will be the education of police officers. The concept of community policing, whether rhetoric or reality, (Greene & Mastrofski, 1988) is an appealing one for countries seeking to legitimise their policing process, especially when tourism or leisure economics are a way of developing growth and security.

Previously, police organisations were considered experts in their field, and were standalone agencies who dealt with all crime-related matters. Over the past decade or so, there has been a drive to involve many other agencies in policing, particularly in the field of crime prevention (Rogers, 2012). This has meant police officers at all levels of the organisation having to become involved in more and complex partnership working arrangements. In particular, police officers now have to work with many other professionals who are, in the main, all degree or higher educationally qualified. The partnership approach to policing means that the police organisation has, in many instances, to improve its performance alongside other professionals. This also encapsulates a different form of thinking about how policing should be carried out with partners. The rise of the Problem Oriented Policing approach (Goldstein, 1990), for example, has introduced sometimes complex theory directly into mainstream policing activities. In support of more focused activities of policing and partnership working, evidence-based policing has gained momentum. Here, the utilisation of information and intelligence to focus police and partner agency resources has meant that a deeper and more scientific understanding of the knowledge gathered by police and other groups is required. In many senses, police officers and staff are becoming knowledge workers, (Gottschalk, 2007), as more complex uses of information and intelligence are developed by the police.

Police education in context

The earliest stages of police education are generally linked to the work of August Vollmer, who started his University of California at Berkeley police school in 1916. In fact, police higher education was introduced prior to the wider availability of systematic police training (Cordner, 2016). Even at its earliest stages, Vollmer wanted the police to study the social sciences and natural sciences, not just technical police subjects.

Paterson (2011) suggests there have been two distinct models of police education in Australia since the 1990s, one being based upon a traditional method of liberal education with students studying social science subjects, and the other focused upon partnerships between universities and the police. These partnerships invariably involved the police having control and the development of the police discipline. This has been adjudged that this posed a problem for the relationship because the police and university educators have different perceptions about the aims of police education (Mahoney & Prenzler, 1996). However, Wimhurst and Ransley (2007) suggest the incorporation of higher education into police education in Australia has been seen to improve public support for the police and to drive organisational reform into a perceived culture of corruption.

Despite this, for over 20 years, police leaders, ministers, and commissioners have discussed and debated the need to professionalize the police through university education (Trofymowych, 2008). Research into the impact of unive...