fourteen - Policing prejudice motivated crime: a research case study

Summary

Introduction

In 2009, police in the Australian state of Victoria were criticised for their handling of claims of racist violence against Indian students. The criticisms culminated in censure by the United Nations (Flitton, 2010). Media pressure and concern to protect Australia's political relationship with India as well as its reputation as a safe destination for students prompted a plethora of policy and legislative changes across government and private industry. At the same time Victoria Police (‘VicPol’) was already engaged in a range of initiatives designed to address what they refer to as prejudice motivated crime (PMC).

Early in 2010, VicPol's Chief Commissioner initiated a strategy to address PMC (Victoria Police Diagnosis Paper, 2010). The term prejudice was most likely adopted because the relevant existing Victorian legislation (in the areas of sentencing and racial and religious tolerance) used this term. In 2011 VicPol launched its PMC Strategy. The vision of the Strategy is to develop a ‘whole of organisation’ response to enable the police to tackle these crimes through sustained, integrated and coordinated capacity building (PMC Strategy, 2010: 3). The Strategy aims to address: low reporting rates; harm to individuals and communities; and gaps in organisational responses, including VicPol's engagement with key community, agency and government stakeholders (Victoria Police, 2010: 2).

This chapter sets out how our research is assisting VicPol to implement this strategy into everyday policing activities. As academics engaged in a research partnership with VicPol, we take a case study approach to describe how our research is responding to the shifting policing environment. In the research process, questions about how the police currently recognise and investigate instances of prejudice motivated crime came to fore. In the second section of the chapter, we set out our preliminary research findings on the collection of relevant evidence for the successful prosecution of PMC, with a particular focus on offence related ‘alerts’ for investigating police. The recognition by investigating officers that the offence might be a hate crime is crucial in realization of VicPol's PMC vision as well as for the realisation of legislative and social goals for civil conduct in multicultural societies.