Search

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.

Foreword | This study examines whether seizures of heroin, cocaine or amphetamine-type substances (ATS) or supplier arrests for heroin, cocaine or ATS trafficking affect emergency department admissions related to, or arrests for, use and possession of these drugs. Two strategies were employed to answer the question. The first involved a time series analysis of the relationship between seizures, supplier arrests, emergency department admissions and use/possess arrests.

Foreword | Current town planning and housing policies suggest that in the very near future, housing density in major Australian cities will be much higher than current levels. To date, little attention has been paid to how these policy shifts will impact levels of crime and fear of crime. The aim of this research is to contribute to the development of strategic policy for the secure management of high-density housing.

Foreword | Children's 'witnessing' or exposure to domestic violence has been increasingly recognised as a form of child abuse, both in Australia and internationally. Although it is difficult to accurately assess the scope of the problem, research has demonstrated that a substantial amount of domestic violence is witnessed by children. As this paper outlines, witnessing domestic violence can involve a range of incidents, ranging from the child 'only' hearing the violence, to the child being forced to participate in the violence or being used as part of a violent incident.

Foreword | Biometric technologies make use of an individual’s unique biological characteristics to identify them in their dealings with government and business. Common biometrics include fingerprints, iris recognition, voice pattern recognition and facial recognition, among others.

Foreword | Over the last few decades, understandings of the nature and causes of domestic violence have increased in sophistication. This has been influenced by, and led to, an influx of domestic violence typologies that have attempted to identify differences between groups of offenders and victims based on factors ranging from physiological reactions to specific stimuli through to historical experiences of violence and abuse.

The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC), in partnership with the Attorney-General the Hon Mark Dreyfus KC MP and state and territory police commissioners, has awarded 9 projects with an Australian Crime and Violence Prevention Award (ACVPA).

Foreword | Homicide is a multifaceted crime, and policies oriented to prevention must be built on solid data and a clear understanding of the various characteristics of homicide and situations in which it might occur. This paper focuses on one such situation: homicide incidents that occur in the course of other crime (for example, during a robbery or a sexual assault).

This paper presents an overview of some of the key emerging issues in Australian domestic and family violence (D/FV) research. In particular, the paper considers research in the context of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex (GLBTI) communities; among the elderly; those with disabilities and people from cultural and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds; family violence and Indigenous communities; the relevance of homelessness; the impact of D/FV on children; and issues around perpetrator programs.

Foreword | The low number of prosecutions in Indonesia for illegal logging may not offer a strong enough deterrent against engaging in what is a lucrative crime. However, the movement of offenders and proceeds tied to illegal logging through other countries in the region offers some opportunities to support Indonesia's law enforcement responses. Officials in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia may charge offenders in those jurisdictions with criminal money laundering offences for their involvement in corruption offences in Indonesia.

Information and communications technologies (ICT) have created a new space of opportunity where children can learn, play and develop, but may also risk becoming the victims of crime or engage in illegal behaviour themselves. The types of offences relevant to online child exploitation include producing, possessing and disseminating child pornography, grooming children for the purposes of sexual contact, and displaying live images of child sexual abuse.