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This report was funded by the Australian Research Council's Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (Bushfire CRC) as part of Program C3.

Community policing is a term firmly ensconced in the lexicon of Australian policing. But what exactly is it? Although a phrase commonly used within both the criminal justice system and the public domain, it remains many things to many people. This paper examines the origins and central tenants of community policing and identifies pertinent issues for consideration regarding the future of community policing as a mechanism for crime control.

Proceedings of a conference held 4-6 April 1989

Contents

• Opening address
  David Malcolm
• Sources of confusion in the alcohol and crime debate
  Don Weatherburn
• Prisoners' experience with alcohol
  David Indermaur
• At court: the alcohol factor
  Jeff Giddings
• Alcohol, violent crime and social power
  Stephen Tomsen
• Domestic violence: alcohol and other distractions: a grassroots perspective
  Heather McGregor
• Crime on the roads: drinking and driving
  Ross Homel

In recent years finding a 'what works' catalogue for crime prevention action has become of prime importance for practitioners and professionals in the field. If we can just work out what crime prevention tools work best when and where, then we can successfully apply these to similar problems.

Indigenous people are over-represented at all stages of the criminal justice system in Australia. There are many suggested explanations for this, ranging from enduring institutionalised racism and differential treatment across the criminal justice system, to the effects of significant socio-economic disadvantage and actual higher levels of offending behaviour. This CRM summarises a number of the most important contemporary suggestions for helping to reduce offending in Indigenous communities.

Foreword | Three-dimensional virtual environments (3dves) are the new generation of digital multi-user social networking platforms. Their immersive character allows users to create a digital humanised representation or avatar, enabling a degree of virtual interaction not possible through conventional text-based internet technologies.

The annual Australian Bureau of Statistics publication Recorded crime - victims, Australia provides a breakdown of selected offence categories by location in which the recorded offence took place. Residential locations include dwellings, outbuildings and residential land; community locations include streets, footpaths and public transport; other locations include retail premises, recreational areas and all other locations. The data below exclude victims where the offence location was not specified. This ranges from 1.2 to 4.6 per cent, depending on offence category.

Contents

About the editor

List of contributors

Introduction

1. Towards an understanding of Indigenous arrest
Don Weatherburn, Michael Doyle, Tegan Weatherall and Joanna Wang

2. Prevalence of recorded family and domestic violence offending: A birth cohort study
Jason Payne and Anthony Morgan

Our aim is to increase public awareness of the research the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) undertakes to inform crime and criminal justice policy and practice.

The AIC has researchers to comment on a range of criminology issues such as:

Second edition

Note: Earlier edition of this title published in 1987.

In November 2002, the Australian Institute of Criminology released its annual Facts and Figures publication, a quick reference booklet that details the major crime statistics for the preceding year. The statistics on violent crime include homicide, assault, sexual assault and robbery. Rates of violent crime in 2001 were higher than in previous years. The rate of assault has increased steadily from 563 victims per 100,000 people in 1995 to 779 per 100,000 people in 2001. In 2001 the rate of robberies reached 136 per 100,000 people which is the highest recorded since 1995.

The ABS reports on weapons use in serious offences. These include murder, attempted murder, kidnap/abduction and robbery, with robbery defined as occurring against persons and not organisations. The figure below shows that weapons were more likely to be used in the most serious offences of murder (64%) and attempted murder (73%) than in kidnapping (19%) and robbery (44%). In terms of type of weapons used, around one-third involved knives, while more firearms (25%) were used in attempted murders than in completed murder cases (17%).