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Foreword | Legal threshold quantities for drug trafficking, over which possession of an illicit drug is deemed ‘trafficking’ as opposed to ‘personal use’ are used in most Australian states and territories. Yet, in spite of known risks from adopting such thresholds, most notably of unjustified conviction of users as traffickers, the capacity of Australian legal thresholds to deliver proportional sanctioning has been subject to limited research.

Foreword | The Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) program is a crime monitoring program that focuses on illegal drug use amongst police detainees. It involves the collection of self-report and urinalysis data from people detained in police watchhouses, and the timely output of this data to police, policy-makers, criminal justice practitioners and other professionals every three months.

High tech crime (HTC) tools are programs, devices or services that facilitate HTC. A brief overview of these tools is presented in High tech crime brief no. 12.

Foreword | Once a trafficked person has exited an exploitative situation, they may require support to return and reintegrate into their chosen community. Using data contained in the International Organization for Migration Counter Trafficking Module, the recovery, return and reintegration experiences of Indonesian victims of human trafficking are examined in this paper. Understanding these experiences has important benefits in developing a better understanding of what assists returnees to recover and may decrease the likelihood of re-trafficking.

Foreword | Using data from the Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) program, this paper explores involvement in intimate partner violence, and provides first-time results from face-to-face interviews with a group of 1,597 police detainees. The study found that the levels of intimate partner violence are much higher among this group (49%) than is found from general population surveys. More than two-thirds of the detainees who were involved in partner violence reported being both a victim and a perpetrator in the past 12 months.

Throughout history, consumers have been targeted by deceptive and misleading practices that have ranged in subtlety and complexity from the barely plausible to the refined and sophisticated. Grabosky, Smith & Dempsey (2001: 105-129) proposed a simple classification of the extensive range of illegal practices perpetrated against consumers, in the traditional marketplace and the electronic environment of the 21st century (Table 1).

Foreword | Wadeye is one of the largest Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. Over the past decade, the community has attracted much negative media attention because of the amount of violence that has occurred. This violence has often been portrayed as the result of gang activity.

This paper examines how gangs operate in the Wadeye community and provides some insight into the perceptions of gang members on their relationships with community authority structures and family support mechanisms.

Foreword | The National Deaths in Custody Program contains a dataset spanning 25 years with details of every death occurring in prison custody, police custody and custody-related operations, and in juvenile detention facilities across Australia. This report summarises the trends in these deaths between 1990 and 2004. Compared with the period 1980-1989 in which the majority of deaths in custody occurred in police custody, prison custody deaths have accounted for the overall majority of deaths since 1990.

Foreword | Another Trends & Issues paper (Prenzler 2011) identified key dimensions of welfare fraud in Australia and some of the social issues associated with efforts to reduce fraud. The present paper makes a more detailed examination of detection and prevention strategies, reporting on a range of initiatives that have been introduced progressively over the last three decades. These initiatives appear to be consistent with trends in comparable jurisdictions.

Foreword | Seizing drugs and arresting those who import, manufacture, grow and/or distribute these drugs is often viewed as the most important purpose of drug law enforcement. This view is certainly strong in popular media depictions of organised drug criminals. Unfortunately, the reality is perhaps far less entertaining or straightforward, although just as, if not more, important.

Online fraud poses a substantial threat to the financial and overall wellbeing of Australians. An estimated $8m to $10m is sent overseas every month by Australians as a result of dishonest online invitations (Bradley 2013). The latest report of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC 2015) indicates that Australians reported the loss of almost $82m to consumer fraud in 2014; this estimate is based only on reports made to the ACCC and excludes reports made to other organisations and the many cases that are not officially reported.

Foreword | As part of the Australian Institute of Criminology's commitment to building
an evidence base on the effects of Australian policing initiatives this paper
explores the impact of a targeted policing operation to reduce property crime.
By comparing property crime data for the ACT and surrounding areas of NSW, the
paper finds no evidence for displacement, either spatially or by crime type
following a significant burglary reduction strategy conducted in the ACT in

Foreword | Arsonists and bushfire arsonists cause a considerable amount of damage to property, flora and fauna, endanger lives, and tie up the resources of the fire services. However, little research has been done on these offenders in Australia. This paper reports on data obtained on 1,232 arson defendants (133 of whom were known to be appearing for a bushfire arson offence), who appeared before NSW courts between 2001 and 2006.

Foreword | This paper reports on a face-to-face survey conducted with 337 small businesses in two ethnically-concentrated communities. Interviews were conducted in Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese and English. Controlling for other factors, Chinese businesses were at greater risk of shoplifting and Vietnamese businesses were at greater risk of burglary and vandalism compared with English speaking businesses, while English speaking businesses were at greater risk of robbery and/or verbal abuse and/or physical assault.

Foreword | There is emerging evidence that the Pacific Island region is vulnerable to the crime of trafficking in persons. Using information from a range of Pacific Island stakeholder forums and consultations conducted by the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC), together with a review of the literature, key issues relevant to trafficking in persons in the Pacific Islands region are identified in this paper.