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The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has announced important new funding that will support Australian academics to undertake cutting edge crime and justice research.

The First Nations 'In-Community' Protective Services Officer Program today received a silver award in the police-led category of the 2023 Australian Crime and Violence Prevention Awards (ACVPAs).

The ACVPAs recognise best practice in the prevention or reduction of violence and other types of crime in Australia and play a vital role in highlighting effective community-based initiatives to prevent crime and violence before it occurs.

Today the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) released the latest findings from the National Homicide Monitoring Program. This includes both the Homicide in Australia 2021–22 and Homicide in Australia 2022–23 reports following enhanced processes to ensure timely release of these important figures.

Foreword | In this paper, an overview is presented of recent data on the carriage and use of knives. Analysis of the data indicated an increase in the use of knives as a proportion of all homicides, although the number of homicides remained relatively constant. The proportionate use of knives in robberies, by contrast, remained fairly constant, while the number of robberies decreased dramatically.

Foreword | Research from Australia and overseas consistently demonstrates that the effectiveness of many crime prevention initiatives is reduced by a continual lack of access to adequate crime prevention knowledge and technical skills. In particular, the internationalisation of crime has highlighted the need for renewed effort aimed at increasing the efficiency of knowledge transfer, skills development, project and program management ability, and performance measurement and evaluation capacity.

Foreword | Courts in the United States, Europe and Australia have in recent years experimented with sanctions which require the computer of an offender convicted of high tech crimes to be forfeited, or which seek to prohibit the offender from undertaking certain, or all, computer-related activities like possessing or using computers or gaining access to the internet.

Today the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has released updated statistics to the deaths in custody dashboard. The dashboard presents quarterly deaths in custody data for the April–June quarter, the year to date (January–June) and the last five years.

Foreword | Public policy initiatives to manage parental child sexual offending have been hindered by the absence of risk instruments sensitive to unique factors associated with the distinctive profile of this core group of offenders. Using an Australian sample of 172 male parental offenders referred to community-based treatment designed for low-risk offenders, this study retrospectively compared risk levels and reoffence rates of offenders accepted into treatment (46%) with those who returned to court for standard criminal prosecution (54%).

Contents

About the editor

List of contributors

Introduction

Part A: COVID-19

1. The prevalence of domestic violence among women during the COVID-19 pandemic (Statistical Bulletin no. 28)
Hayley Boxall, Anthony Morgan and Rick Brown

Foreword | It is well-documented that crime rates and the prevalence of mental illness are both higher in areas with pronounced levels of social disorganisation. Far less is known about the association of disadvantaged community conditions with criminal behaviour and mental illness.

Foreword | Despite significant reductions in recent years, acquisitive property crime remains the single largest crime category, with over 700,000 offences recorded annually by police in Australia. There is potential to further reduce the scale of such offending and the subsequent costs to society by focusing attention on the design of frequently stolen consumer products in order to reduce their vulnerability to theft. While there is a variety of ways of engaging with manufacturers, government regulation may ultimately be required if other approaches prove unsuccessful.

Foreword | In some countries, collecting statistics about the occurrence of homicide is not possible, either because of a lack of resources or because of the sheer volume of incidents. Fortunately in Australia there are three main data collection systems that produce largely independent sets of statistics on homicide: the National Homicide Monitoring Program at the Australian Institute of Criminology, and the Recorded Crime Australia and Causes of Death collections managed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Copyright

This brief looks at high tech copyright offending. Information and communications technologies (ICT) make it increasingly easy to copy, swap and trade in copyrighted material such as software, and audio and video content in digital format. It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider the additional problem of the use of the internet to create a worldwide marketplace for the exchange of counterfeited goods.

Fraud against the Commonwealth is defined as ‘dishonestly obtaining a benefit or causing a loss, by deception or other means’. This definition is set out in the current Commonwealth Resource Management Guide (no. 201) Preventing, detecting and dealing with fraud, issued by the Australian Government Minister for Justice (2014).

Foreword | In Australia, crime prevention is primarily the responsibility of state and territory governments. What is less well understood is the significant role of local government in developing and delivering crime prevention at the community level, although councils have long been involved in helping to create safer communities.