Inter-gender murder in NSW, 1901–1955: Reconsidering the laws of the fraternity

Contemporary studies that focus on intimate homicide assume that patterns of policing, prosecution and punishment were uniformly disadvantageous to women before feminist activists intervened in the 1970s. This article tests that assumption by drawing on the Prosecution Project’s digitisation of Australian criminal trial records. Using this resource, we selected all prosecutions ( n = 314) of men for murders of women and of women for murders of men in New South Wales, from Federation (1901) to 1955, the year the state abolished the death penalty. By coding victim–offender relationships and analysing them in relation to case outcomes, we found that men were far more likely than women to be convicted of murder, including seven men executed for intimate femicides. By contrast, women were more likely than men to be acquitted outright, rather than plead guilty to manslaughter of male intimates, a trend that feminist research has identified recently. This research provides new findings of use to critical appraisals of the charging and sentencing reforms that were meant to remedy ‘the laws of the fraternity’.

Linking body worn camera activation with complaints: The promise of metadata

With the introduction of body worn cameras, new data types have emerged, including activation metadata, which is information on the extent of the implementation of body worn cameras, by whom, and under what conditions. In this paper, we propose an avenue of methodological interest: linking activation metadata with police-recorded behaviour. We take the case of complaints to examine the use of these data for investigations of officers’ misconduct. We used an observational approach, analysing 1.73 million body worn camera activations by more than 3900 frontline officers, juxtaposed with professional conduct data. We find a heterogeneous distribution of implementation, despite a ‘blanket’ body worn camera policy requiring activation. Specifically, distinct types of officers disproportionally under-activate body worn cameras. We show that body worn cameras activation rates are inversely correlated with complaints, although minimally when observed at the population level. We discuss the use of metadata for research as well as for policy.

“Bad hombres” at the Southern US border? White nationalism and the perceived dangerousness of immigrants

As a candidate and as president, Donald Trump heightened the salience of immigration, portraying those crossing the nation’s Southern border as “bad hombres” and advocating building a wall blocking their access to the United States from Mexico. Based on a 2019 MTurk study of 465 White adults, the current study found that a clear majority of respondents rejected this stereotype of Southern immigrants as “bad hombres,” judging them to be just as law-abiding as Americans. Importantly, however, the analysis revealed that two innovative measures—Hispanic resentment and, in particular, White nationalism—were consistently related to perceptions of immigrants as criminogenic. Given the growing demographic diversity of the United States, future research should consider the increasing influence of racial/ethnic resentment and White group identity on public opinions about immigration and other justice issues.

Beyond the quantitative and qualitative divide: The salience of discourse in procedural justice policing research

The dominant methods of studying police have involved quantitative analyses of surveys and systematic social observations of police behavior or qualitative methods such as ethnographies and interviews. The same trend applies to procedural justice research in policing. In prior works, the question of how police officers and citizens interact in situ is absent. We argue that procedural justice police research should move beyond the quantitative/qualitative distinction and consider other ways to collect and analyze data. We begin by providing a methodological critique of procedural justice research, and demonstrate the assumptions of discourse in extant works before we provide a blueprint for how to incorporate discourse analytic methods in the study of procedural justice and policing.

‘African gangs’ in Australia: Perceptions of race and crime in urban neighbourhoods

Late in 2016, Melbourne experienced what was referred to in the media as the Moomba ‘riot’. This event led to a racialised political and media campaign regarding the problem of ‘African gangs’. Despite no evidence of actual gang activity, the backlash against black migrants in Melbourne was consequential with increases in reported racism and institutionalised forms of discrimination. In this study, we examine the neighbourhood context of exclusion against African Australians following the Moomba ‘riot’. Using census and crime data integrated with survey data from 2400 residents living in 150 urban neighbourhoods, we interrogate the relationship between sentiments (measured as anger) towards Africans and perceptions of neighbourhood crime and disorder. We further consider whether quality contact with Africans and neighbourhood cohesion mediates this relationship. We conclude with reflections on the significant and deleterious effects of the ‘black and criminal’ association on understandings of ‘Africanness’ in Australia.

The mediating roles of law legitimacy and police legitimacy in predicting cooperation with police in China

Public’s willingness to assist the police in preventing and fighting crime forms one of the fundamental pillars for implementing effective policing strategies and reforms. Despite widely supported by research conducted around the world, the process-based model of policing has received little research attention in authoritarian settings. Based on survey data collected from Shanghai, China, this study assesses the roles of law and police legitimacy in mediating the relationships between police fairness and effectiveness and willingness to cooperate with the police. We found that Chinese people’s greater senses of police fairness can lead to their higher levels of trust in and willingness to obey the police, but the total effect of police fairness on willingness to cooperate with the police is non-significant. Police effectiveness, meanwhile, directly promotes cooperation with the police. We also found that people who perceived the law as legitimate expressed greater willingness to cooperate with the police. Police legitimacy, compared to law legitimacy, is a more pronounced linking factor connecting police fairness to public cooperation. Implications for future research and policy are discussed.

Youth crime as a ‘way of life’? Prevalence and criminal career correlates among a sample of juvenile detainees in Australia

For more than 60 years, scholars have often likened chronic and persistent offending to ‘living a criminal way of life’, yet these evocative motifs have not received much empirical scrutiny. In particular, the so-called criminal life-style is often conceptualized as something the chronic young offender opts into as an alternative to other pro-social pathways. Whereas for older offenders, it is something into which they find themselves trapped and unable to escape. The idea that crime is a chosen ‘way of life’ among chronic young offenders has not yet received sufficient empirical scrutiny. In this study, we use archival data of nationally representative cohort ( n = 373) of young offenders in Australian custodial centers who were each asked whether crime was their ‘way of life’. From this, we estimate its prevalence and criminal-career correlates, finding that one in three strongly identify with crime as their way of life. Self-identification is also found to be strongly correlated with Indigenous status even after controlling for different features of the juvenile criminal career. In all, our data paint a vivid portrait of a criminal identity that, for the young offender, likely signals a perceived inevitability that evolves in the context of structurally and culturally conditioned opportunities. Understanding this phenomenon among youthful offenders is important if we are to be successful in our attempts to curtail criminal continuity through desistance informed interventions.

A gender-comparative exploration of women’s and men’s pathways to prison in Thailand

In feminist criminology, there is a growing body of research exploring gendered pathways into prison. However, this research has focussed predominantly on women. There are few gender comparative studies. Further, most feminist pathways research is western centric having, for the most part, been undertaken in the United States. Utilising categorical principal components analysis alongside descriptive statistics and illustrative case study examples, this paper adds to the feminist pathways research by describing and comparing women’s and men’s pathways to prison in Thailand. Three common pathways to prison emerged for both women and men: (1) peer group association/deviant lifestyle, (2) harmed and harming, (3) economically motivated. However, gendered variance was found within these common pathways. Further, two pathways emerged exclusively for women: (1) adulthood victimisation and dysfunctional intimate relationships, (2) naivety and deception. These results substantiate the notion that trajectories into prison are gendered, add empirical support to the feminist pathways perspective beyond the west, contribute to knowledge on how both women and men come to be in prison in Thailand, and in doing so, have utility for the development of gender-informed prison policies, and practices as per the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-Custodial Measures for Women Offenders (the Bangkok Rules).