Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

• Understanding the Role of Verbal and Textual Hostility in Hate Crime Regulation: Interim Report.

  Asquith, Nicole (London Metropolitan Police Service, 2009-08)

  Verbal-textual hostility plays a significant role in victims¿ subjective perceptions of hatred and police officers¿ assessment of a hate crime. Yet, to date, the role of hate speech in hate crime has been largely uninterrogated. The aim of this research project is to assess and evaluate the forensic possibilities contained in a closer reading of the words used in hate crimes. Through a critical discourse analysis of incident characteristics and officers¿ narratives of incidents, this report maps out how key hate speech-text indicators may assist to better evaluate the force and effects of hate crimes. It is expected that this type of contextual analysis will lead to the development of more sophisticated risk assessment tools for use in frontline policing, and more targeted service-enhancements for victims of hate crimes.
• Recruitment and Retention of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Background Officers.

  Asquith, Nicole; Dimopoulos, M.; NSW Police (Australasian Police Multicultural Advisory Bureau, 2005-05)

  Implicit in the current dialogue on community policing in Australia and New Zealand, is the assumption that the people who comprise our policing organisations need to respond efficiently and competently to changing demographics, crime, terrorism, increasing community and government expectations. It is timely for Australian and New Zealand police jurisdictions to take a lead role in policy and practice of policing in a culturally, linguistically, politically and religiously diverse environment. In order to facilitate this, focus and organisational commitment must be given to developing leadership and recruitment and retention initiatives which enhance the internal diversity of our workforces.
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  Cycles of Police Reform in Latin America.

  Macaulay, Fiona (2012)

  Over the last quarter century post-conflict and post-authoritarian transitions in Latin America have been accompanied by a surge in social violence, acquisitive crime, and insecurity. These phenomena have been driven by an expanding international narcotics trade, by the long-term effects of civil war and counter-insurgency (resulting in, inter alia, an increased availability of small arms and a pervasive grammar of violence), and by structural stresses on society (unemployment, hyper-inflation, widening income inequality). Local police forces proved to be generally ineffective in preventing, resolving, or detecting such crime and forms of “new violence”3 due to corruption, frequent complicity in criminal networks, poor training and low pay, and the routine use of excessive force without due sanction. Why, then, have governments been slow to prioritize police reform and why have reform efforts borne largely “limited or nonexistent” long-term results? This chapter highlights a number of lessons suggested by various efforts to reform the police in Latin America over the period 1995-2010 . It focuses on two clusters of countries in Latin America. One is Brazil and the Southern Cone countries (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), which made the transition to democracy from prolonged military authoritarian rule in the mid- to late 1980s. The other is Central America and the Andean region (principally El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and Colombia), which emerged/have been emerging from armed conflict since the mid- 1990s. The chapter examines first the long history of international involvement in police and security sector reform in order to identify long-run tropes and path dependencies. It then focuses on a number of recurring themes: cycles of de- and re-militarization of the policing function; the “security gap” and “democratization dilemmas” involved in structural reforms; the opportunities offered by decentralization for more community-oriented police; and police capacity to resist reform and undermine accountability mechanisms.