Research Program Summary

(Convenor – Professor Lorraine Mazerolle)

Chief Investigator: Professor Lorraine Mazerolle

Police responses to violent incidents, disorder and ethnically motivated disputes continue to challenge and drain police resources. In the post 9/11 era new types of public safety emergencies, coupled with a range of contemporary ethnic, religious, cultural and ideological issues, create new challenges for the police and raise public concern about the growing social isolation and marginalisation of particular groups. This project seeks to better understand the spatial and temporal dynamics of communities vulnerable to growing levels crime, disorder, inter-group violence and inter-group hostility. Our research will identify the various pathways and mechanisms leading not only to particular vulnerabilities, like inter-group violence, but those that lead to converging vulnerabilities. Additionally, this project will provide a framework from which to progress future research for other marginalised groups such as young people, Indigenous people and gays and lesbians across urban and non-urban settings.  

 This research will form the foundation of a long term research project that will progress a comprehensive longitudinal study into the ecology of crime in the Australia context. Our research aims to:

• Develop an integrated ecological theory of community regulation to account for the spatial, static and dynamic processes associated with social cohesion and trust, the exchange of material and social support, the willingness of residents to intervene and cultural tolerance;
• Determine whether or not there are differences in the importance of these community-level processes in predicting different types of vulnerability in different types of communities. For example, are the collective processes that create opportunities for general forms of violence (e.g. robberies, assaults) the same community-level processes that lead to inter-group violence more specifically?; and
• Identify the characteristics of communities that demonstrate a greater resilience to subtle social disruptions (such as population changes, increased immigration concentration and ethnic heterogeneity) and, conversely, identify the characteristics of communities that are vulnerable to the impact of these more subtle forms of social disruption. 

Chief Investigator: Professor Mark Western

Australian state and federal governments have introduced a wide variety of new laws and programs that seek to make Australia and Australians safer since the escalation of terrorism and political violence since 9/11, and particularly post the Bali bombings that affected so many Australians. Indeed, since 9/11 over 40 laws aimed at policing terrorism have been introduced or substantially amended at federal level, and dozens of counter-terrorism policies and programs have been implemented at state, national and international level.

This project will be a cooperative, five-year cross Centre undertaking that develops and uses broad-based, longitudinal indicators to monitor the economic, social and cultural wellbeing of Australians in the post 9/11 environment.

The project will gather and examine cross-sectional, panel and longitudinal indicators of economic, social and cultural wellbeing to assess community perceptions of community preparedness, resilience, vulnerability and their attitudes to key policing and security policies, laws and programs. The project will rely on new national surveys of attitudes, values, behaviours and distributional outcomes, and analyses of secondary data drawn from the holdings of the Australian Social Science Data Archive, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Australian Institute of Criminology. The University of Queensland Social Research Centre is a node in the Australian Social Science Data Archive.

Our surveys will track public attitudes and perceptions of Australian counter and anti terrorist initiatives. We will work with the US National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) to develop the survey instrument. Working with START will allow the Centre to contribute to the development of a comprehensive and comparative evidence base to better understand the impact of global counter- and anti-terrorism interventions.

We will conduct a representative probability sample of adult respondents with additional over-sampling of specific subgroups of interest. Questionnaire design will draw on validated items from existing surveys and seek to develop new measures through detailed consultations with START and through conducting a series of focus groups in Australia. The questionnaire will also be pre-tested. The questionnaire will cover a range of issues, including:

• Confidence and attitudes towards national security and policing measures
• Confidence and attitudes towards policing and national security agencies
• Relationships and interactions with national security and policing agencies
• Perceptions of personal security and national security
• Self reported impact on individual behaviours
• Emergency preparedness
• Community resilience

The results of our survey, in concert with a similar survey simultaneously being conducted in the US and possibly other countries that are part of the START consortium, will be useful to the range of government agencies involved in anti- and counter-terrorism initiatives. We expect our survey to understand better the way new counter and anti-terrorism initiatives are perceived in “at-risk” communities and whether or not the initiatives have altered routine behaviours either in a positive or negative way. Our survey results should be helpful to our Industry Partners in their development of new initiatives to reduce anomie and the risk of radicalisation within some vulnerable communities and at-risk sub-populations. 

Chief Investigator: Professor Lorraine Mazerolle 

Police responses to violent incidents, disorder and ethnically motivated disputes continue to challenge and drain their resources. In the post 9/11 era new types of public safety emergencies, coupled with a range of contemporary ethnic, religious, cultural and ideological issues, create new challenges for the police and raise public concern about the growing social isolation and marginalisation of particular groups. Incidents like the Cronulla riots in Sydney; feelings of social and political isolation amongst Australian Muslims; periodic violence between Pacific Islanders and Indigenous Australians in Brisbane’s “mortgage belt;” and the rapid in-migration of new arrivals from the “Horn of Africa” into suburban and regional communities across Australia potentially challenge and erode community perceptions of police legitimacy.

Our research aims to understand more about:

• The role of individual police in building citizen trust;
• The role of collectivities of police (ie police teams, police divisions and other operational groupings) in building citizen trust and perceptions of legitimacy;
• The dynamic community-level processes that facilitate or constrain the establishment of institutional legitimacy;
• How interventions designed to improve citizen trust in individual police, as well as perceptions of agency-wide legitimacy, impact on citizen compliance, cooperation, levels of inter-group conflict, inter-group violence, crime and disorder more generally, citizen reporting of incidents, complaints against police, and citizen satisfaction with police; and
• How these outcomes vary across different types of communities (e.g. Pacific Islanders, Vietnamese etc.).

(Convenor – Professor Bill Tow)

Chief Investigator: Professor Bill Tow

Structural changes in the international system are evolving rapidly and in unpredictable ways. The forces of globalisation, nationalism and identity politics have blurred international boundaries and have created the need for closer international understanding and cooperation on security issues in a time of heightened international uncertainty. As the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) intensifies, the resources and infrastructures available for fashioning regional security and facilitating order-building are becoming increasingly finite. It is therefore critical that policy-makers apply established security relationships and infrastructures more creatively and more effectively to face emerging security challenges in the Asia-Pacific and beyond. Australia is responding to these challenges at the local, regional and international levels of operation. These include re-shaping alliances, identifying and implementing policy responses to ‘non-traditional’ security challenges and engaging with human security initiatives.

The Project will have three general and interrelated strands:

• The ways in which the new prominence of transnational threats have affected international alignments and enmities;
• The new and familiar forms of coordination of international responses to traditional and non-traditional security challenges; and
• The initiatives and options Australia should pursue for bridging traditional (state-centric) and non-traditional (asymmetrical) security policy. 

Chief Investigator: Professor Paul Boreham

This project will develop and evaluate performance measures for overseas policing missions in post-conflict or troubled states. The project focuses on peace operations and capacity building by Australian Federal Police missions particularly in terms of their contribution to the Australian government’s commitment to enhancing regional stability. The project will develop an effective means of measuring the International Deployment Group’s impact on Australian interests and international peace and security through its participation in peace operations and capacity building. These measures will allow the AFP to examine what it is delivering, improve future delivery, and demonstrate return for investment.

Generating new knowledge and a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of Australia’s attempts to strengthen weak governance as part of its larger strategy to implement greater stability throughout our turbulent region is the central goal of this project.

This project will map variations in state function and weakness in Australia’s region, with a particular view to undertake a review of Australia’s efforts at state building in the so-called “arc of instability” in such countries as the Solomon Islands and East Timor since 1999. The goal of the project is to create new knowledge and a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of Australia’s attempts to strengthen weak governance as part of its larger strategy to implement greater stability throughout this turbulent area.

Corruption is regarded as one of the major obstacles to promoting growth and reducing poverty. The work of Dani Kaufmann and his collaborators, for example, has shown that regardless of how development is measured (eg. GDP per capita, infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy, and so on), the level of corruption in more developed countries is generally lower than the level of corruption in less developed countries.

Scholars, practitioners and international organisations have developed the belief that corruption is a symptom of institutional weakness. Hence they regard strengthening institutional capacity as a way to fight corruption, promote development and reduce poverty and inequality.

This project will examine the following research questions:

• What are the different types of state weakness in Australia’s region?
• Which types of governance shortfall precipitate threats to Australia reflecting both transnational and state-centric dimensions?
• In what ways has Australia made significant efforts at state building since 1999?
• In what ways has Australia made inroads into enhancing security in our region through international deployments?
• How can this information be used to gain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of Australia’s attempt to strengthen weak governance?
• Has Australia been successful at implementing greater stability in turbulent regional areas?

Chief Investigators:

Professor Lorraine Mazerolle, CEPS

Professor Gary La Free, START, University of Maryland, College Park

Project Summary

The current terrorist threat in South East Asia is substantial, severe, and dynamic. The continual rise of radical Islam, coupled with separatist claims for autonomous governance, create complicated challenges for existing counter-terrorism strategies in the region. Our proposal would create a model, utilising our partnership between U.S. and Australian researchers in order to improve understanding of terrorist activity and the effectiveness of a range of anti- and counter-terrorism strategies in three countries in South East Asia critical to regional security (Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand). Using open-source intelligence, and drawing on advanced statistical methods including social network analysis, hazard modelling and trajectory analysis, the model will examine the impact of key anti- and counter-terrorist strategies on terrorist threats in these countries. The proposed research would provide an important and independent foundation to augment government intelligence threat assessments and evaluations of the impact of counter-terrorism strategies in South East Asia.

Specifically, our research seeks to address research questions in the following areas:

Trajectory of Terrorist Groups

• What are the long-term trajectories of terrorist groups currently operating in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines?
• To what extent have terrorist organisations operating in these countries targeted U.S. and Australian assets, including attacks directed at the homeland of either country?

Tactical Evolution and Target Selection

• Where are the key terrorist targets in these countries and what spatial factors create opportunities for terrorist attacks over time?
• How do tactics and weapons diffuse across South East Asian terrorist organisations over time?
• What is the relationship between terrorist attacks in South East Asia and other violent extremist activity over time?
• How have weapons used by terrorist and extremist organisations in South East Asia evolved over time?
• How has target selection used by terrorist and extremist groups in these countries evolved over time?

Assessing Effective Anti- and Counter-terrorism Strategies

• What is the ratio of domestic to transnational terrorists and other violent attacks in these three countries, and how has it changed over time? 
• What counter- and anti-terrorist strategies have been most successful and least successful in reducing the number of attacks?

This study will deliver research briefs, policy briefing notes, and peer-reviewed articles to support:

1. An advanced statistical model that can evaluate the effectiveness of the various anti- and counter-terrorism strategies on terrorism and extremist violence in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand.
2. An up-to-date (2008) dataset on terrorism and extremist violence in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand drawing on data from GTD, ISVG and Australian sources;
3. An analysis of terrorist and violence trends in the region.
4. A comprehensive review of anti- and counter-terrorist strategies implemented in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand.
5. An analysis of the effect of anti- and counter-terrorist strategies on terrorism and extremist violence in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand.
6. One international conference in Washington, D.C. to scope the data requirements and model and one international policy/research conference in Australia to ensure important findings will be disseminated beyond the research community.

While budget limitations have forced us to focus here on three strategic countries, the collaboration formed could easily be expanded to included additional countries.

(Convenor – Professor Mark Finnane)

Chief Investigator: Professor Mark Finnane

Using historical methodologies, this project will examine the problems faced by democratic societies in developing policing and security strategies dealing with terrorism and threats to security. We will explore the challenges (political, institutional, legal, social) posed by the need to monitor, contain and prevent security and terrorist threats that are fostered within particular sub-communities of a society, whether defined by ethnicity, religion, ideology or other attributes.

The focus will be on Australian experience, within a comparative context that examines other institutional and legal responses to terrorism and social disaffection, e.g. in the case of Ireland and Britain during the 20th century.

The project seeks to answer the following questions:

• What are the kinds of political violence that have been experienced by democratic societies?
• How have categories such as ‘politically motivated violence’ and ‘terrorism’ been used to distinguish acts of violence against individuals, groups and states in the recent past?
• What kinds of legal and policing frameworks have characterised the responses of democratic societies to political violence and terrorism?
• To what extent have non-policing solutions been adopted in responding to political violence and with what effects?
• To what degree and with what impacts on other values and institutions have agencies responsible for dealing with political violence developed their capacity for intelligence and response to political violence?
• How far are historical state responses to political violence generic or particular, and with what consequences for political and social values and cultures?

Chief Investigator: Professor Mark Finnane

Since 9/11 counter-terrorism has been a significant concern for Australian governments:

• Economically, with over $8.3 billion spent to 2006;
• Legislatively, with 41 Commonwealth laws enacted or amended, and dozens more introduced or amended by each of the states and territories;
• Administratively, with new structures developed (eg National Counter-Terrorism Committee, state and territory counterparts, national coordination and functional committees such as the Transport Security Working Group) and existing agencies having their powers, resources and budgets significantly boosted; and
• Socially and culturally, with public engagement programs including information campaigns, alerts, and specific policies directed at Muslim communities.

As a result, counter-terrorism in Australia has changed fundamentally in a short period of time, from ad hoc reactive responses to rare events (eg the Hilton bombing) with no specific anti-terror laws, to a situation of multiple laws, bodies, plans, organising committees and strategies to respond to terrorism as a large-scale, ongoing, proactive, cross-government priority. Homeland security to date has been seen as a crime problem, requiring a policing response. Responses have focused on new offences and sanctions, new powers for policing and security agencies to prevent and detect crimes, and new systems of surveillance and intelligence gathering to aid those agencies. The process has been radical rather than evolutionary, and on-going rather than confined to one point in time. It has been driven by external events, so that after each occurrence such as 9/11, and the Bali, Indonesian, and London bombings, a new wave of counter-terror legislation, policy, funding, initiatives and administrative approaches has occurred. The process has been necessarily crisis-driven and ad hoc, rather than ordered and cohesive.

Anti-terrorism law reform in Australia has proceeded without a comprehensive detailed audit of existing powers and criminal offences, or examination of research findings or ‘best practice’ from overseas jurisdictions. There is an urgent need to develop an evidence-based approach to public policy and law reform in this field.

This project includes the following parts:

1. A systematic audit of counter-terrorism legislation within Australia (and selected overseas jurisdictions), to provide a complete picture of current legal frameworks and their emergence since 9/11.
2. A cross-jurisdictional comparative analysis of Australian counter-terror laws to examine differences (eg in powers, oversight arrangements, offences and sanctions) and how they impact on policing (eg cross-border law enforcement, gaps and duplication).
3. An implementation study of the direct, indirect and unintended effects of the new legal rules, and how institutional arrangements, resources, processes and practices that have developed around them reflect or modify the original purposes behind the legislation.
4. Identification of innovative counter-terrorism responses eg exploring the role of third parties (eg owners of private infrastructure, financial institutions, chemical retailers, regulators).
5. An analysis of post 9/11 shifts in the boundaries of domestic counter-terrorism responsibilities of police, security and military agencies, and how they impact on policing (eg in determining authority and achieving coordination).
6. The development of policy options for improving the consistency, implementation and effectiveness of counter-terrorism law and policy responses.

Chief Investigator: Professor Tim Prenzler

The primary aim of this project Integrity Systems is to advance knowledge about effective misconduct prevention strategies in policing. The last twenty years in Australia – since the time of the Fitzgerald report on police corruption in Queensland – have seen considerable innovation in techniques designed to minimise corruption and other forms of misconduct in police work. While there have been some evaluations of the impact of these strategies, there remains considerable uncertainty about what works in this area and how best to operationalise particular strategies. This project is therefore, concerned with enlarging knowledge about best practice in corruption prevention and placing it on a more secure scientific footing. The project will pursue these aims through cooperative research with professionals within police departments and integrity institutions.

• A systematic, national audit will be conducted of police integrity strategies currently operational within Australia, and their development since 9/11. This will include a cross-jurisdictional comparative analysis of different approaches (e.g. mediation vs. investigations, performance indicators and sanctions) and impacts on misconduct/complaints; as well as identification of innovative strategies;
• Identification, through the audit, of complaint and misconduct issues, and ethical policing issues, that are specifically related to post-9/11 counter-terrorism legislation and new police powers;
• Also through the audit, an examination will be made of current police ethical training practices and ethical standards to identify issues not adequately covered by present codes of conduct, or areas where codes of conduct could be implemented more effectively.
• A systematic analysis will be made of de-identified police complaints and other misconduct related data currently held by Australian agencies to provide a national picture of the nature and extent of misconduct/complaints;
• Through this misconduct indicators study, an assessment will be made of individual, social and organisational vulnerabilities to misconduct, including influences to engage in misconduct, officer attitudes and characteristics as well as management issues.
• The misconduct indicators study will also map out and assess current strategic practices for responding to complaints and misconduct issues, specifically in relation to methods of investigation and evidence gathering as well as decision making in litigation;
• From these studies a set of model responses will be developed for improving the consistency and effectiveness of police misconduct and complaints responses, including strategies to address emerging areas of concern (both organisationally and geographically).
• The project will also involve a series of discrete in-depth studies on particular integrity issues and innovative strategies selected through negotiation with industry partners and researched in an applied context with partners.

Chief Investigator: Professor Pat Weller

This project will examine the attributes of Australian and regional infrastructures that are most vulnerable to exploitation and attack by transnational threats. 

The first part of this project will be a systematic analysis of opportunities for transnational threats to Australia’s key infrastructure by examining:

• The key vulnerabilities including Australia’s communication hubs, flows of people and goods, transport and technology systems;
• The extent (i.e. the potential scope of damage from attack or failure) and attraction (i.e. the likelihood of attack or failure) of each vulnerability;
• The avenues of ingress (i.e. the ways in which terrorists, weapons, drugs, disease etc. can enter Australia);
• Mechanisms/logics of distribution (i.e. how these threats are distributed or concealed within Australia); and
• Targeted populations (i.e. concentrations/ distributions of at-risk populations most likely to be targeted). 

The second part of the project will explore ways that governments can reduce infrastructure vulnerabilities and inform governmental planning and response to critical incidents. The project team will consider:

1. Ways to increase the immunity of key infrastructures to transnational threats; and
2. The impact such measures would have on our ways of life and modes of engagement with our regional neighbours.

The project will also map the range and variety of government machinery devised at federal and state levels to meet security threats. The team will explore the challenges confronting a whole-of-government response both within and between governments and identify ways different countries have sought to react and assess their policy and organisational impact. The research will examine the governance and function of the Rudd Government’s new approach to managing national security, including the impact of the National Security Statement.

Chief Investigator: Professor Gabriele Bammer

The aim of this project is to support other CEPS research projects particularly in undertaking research across disciplines and practice areas and in implementing new knowledge into policy and practice change, including generating fresh ideas about policing and security problems.

However, the concepts and methods required to do this are still in their infancy, hence the focus of this project is on methodological development. The methodological development spans the three domains which constitute the new cross-cutting discipline of Integration and Implementation Sciences (I2S), represented in the following figure:

I2S aims to provide a productive advance on a range of research approaches which seek to synthesise disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge, understand and manage unknowns and provide integrated research support for policy and practice change, including multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary approaches, post-normal science, integrated assessment, systemic intervention and action research. There is a solid basis for the continuing development and application of I2S, demonstrated by the publications listed below.

This project aims to support other CEPS research by providing

a clear articulation of the rationale and function of I2S;

repositories of useful concepts, methods and case studies, along with roadmaps to relevant theoretical underpinnings, for synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge, understanding and managing unknowns (Ignorance and Uncertainty project) and providing integrated research support for policy and practice change;

specialist I2S support, as appropriate; and

education at the graduate student and professional development levels in I2S theory and methods.

Research Outcomes:

• Pioneered the application of Integration and Implementation Sciences (I2S) in the fields of policing and security.

• Further development of Integration and Implementation Sciences (I2S), especially in the context of policing and security.

• Enhanced ability of policing and security researchers to conduct cross-disciplinary investigations including stakeholders.

• Enhanced ability of policing and security researchers to use their findings to provide decision support and achieve practice change.

• Enhanced functioning of the Australasian Policing Forum and the Australian hub of the global network associated with the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety held at Harvard University.

(Convenor – Professor Peter grabosky)

Chief Investigators:

Professor Mark Kebbell

The Intelligence Methods Project broadly covers all law enforcement and security work relating to crime or intelligence collection, collation, analysis and dissemination. The project is deliberately articulated in broad terms as intelligence is a developing and innovative discipline and to allow for a strategic view of intelligence problems and importantly an opportunity for the research community to positively contribute towards resolving intractable problems experienced by our policing and security Industry Partners. The Project is articulated around a conceptual model developed by Ratcliffe (2003). This provides a succinct and coherent picture of our current projects at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (CEPS) and offers a map of research opportunities for the future.

The role of the Intelligence Methods Project at CEPS is summarised using the 3-i model offered by Ratcliffe (2003). The model explains the relationship between the criminal environment, which could describe any problem faced by policing or security agencies, the analysis which describes the role of the crime and intelligence analysis staff and the decision-makers who are the police or security management and senior executive who have control of resources and decision-making power to activate recommendations provided by the analysts and other advisors.

The model represents the connectivity between the three elements. Interpret, linking analysis to the criminal environment, shows how the role of the analytical team (crime or intelligence analysts) is to take meaning from what is observed in relation to a problem and turn this into an analysed product that identifies what the problem is, where it is likely to occur, when it will happen, who will be involved and how it will unfold. The most crucial aspect of the analytical process is to be able to draw inferences from the information, demonstrate support for the inferences and in some cases recommend possible courses of action based on past success and failures with similar problems.

The following studies will be conducted:

• The effective analyst. This study concerns collating a representative range of views from crime and intelligence personnel concerning the necessary attributes of an effective analyst. 
• The effective product. This study concerns a representative range of views on products concerning what makes an effective product.
• Simulation studies. These studies concern a number of simulation exercises that will be conducted to shed light on how analysts make decisions and to provide training opportunities.
• Synthetic data set. A synthetic data set will be created to model statistical algorithms of relevance to intelligence.
• Mapping analytical decision making. Analytical decision-making will be mapped in a variety of contexts.
• Influence of intelligence products. The Influence of sanitised intelligence products’ on decision-making will be investigated.
• Managers’ perceptions. Intelligence managers’ perceptions of current and future directions in intelligence will be solicited and documented.
• Effective practice. Effective applications of intelligence will be documented as exemplars of good practice. 

Chief Investigator: Professor Peter Grabosky

Since 9/11, police and security agencies have worked hard to improve inter-operability problems, increase the level of information sharing both within and between regulatory agencies, further embed scientific approaches into investigations (e.g. forensic products) and generally improve the investigative function of police and security agencies.

This project will “take-stock” of the current investigative function of law enforcement agencies and generate a new, comprehensive vision for preventing and responding to serious crime problems in Australia. The project team will participate in a series of global forums that are part of Harvard’s ‘Executive Sessions’ in which innovative and influential policy and practice leaders from around the world will come together to generate new ideas for the future of policing. In partnership with our Industry Partners, the CEPS role will be to develop a "blueprint" for a new, comprehensive approach for responding to serious crime (2008-2010) and run trials to test the new responses in Australia (see Reduce Crime and Harness Technologies).

The project team will:

• Host high-level dialogue sessions with police leaders in Australia;
• Explore the barriers and opportunities for information sharing both within and across agencies in Australia;
• Examine the role of forensic sciences in helping to better respond to serious crime problems;
• Assess futuring methodologies that will better position law enforcement and intelligence agencies to anticipate and prepare for the future; and
• Develop a blueprint for paradigmatic change in Australia.

Chief Investigator: Professor Mark Kebbell

In recent years an increasing literature has shown that a minority of offenders are responsible for the majority of serious crime, including extremism. As a consequence, the focus of this project is to identify ways of targeting people of high risk of committing serious violent crime so that interventions can be put in place to reduce their offending. Most risk assessment tools exist for correctional purposes, with few finding their way into Policing. However, the increasing competition for resources and, therefore, the increasing need for evidence-based practice in helping focus resources, have led to the emergence of models of risk assessment for Police in several crime areas, most prominently Domestic Violence and Child Protection. However, despite the established literature regarding traditional Forensic risk assessment for psychopathy and violence, there has been little attention to bringing such tools into the Policing domain for serious violent crimes (for example, murder, serious assault, terrorism and extremism/hate crimes). In doing so, tools will need to be adapted for the specific purposes and training needs of police, but will undoubtedly improve police decision-making and resource allocation.

Broadly speaking there are three main approaches to risk assessment for offenders in the forensic arena: the clinical approach; the actuarial approach; and, more recently, the structured decision-making approach. The clinical approach can be described as an approach whereby the assessor uses his or her judgment to determine the level of risk an individual poses. The sources of information can include interviews with the individual, case reports, and historical information that is used to create an estimate of the dangerousness of the individual. There have been a number of critiques of this approach (Grubin, 1998) that focus on the poor accuracy and reliability of clinical judgment. Indeed, several reviews indicate that in many instances clinical perceptions of risk are little better than chance (Douglas & Skeem, 2005; Monahan, 1981; Langton et al., 2007). Reasons for this included the fact that the assessor may use factors in making their judgments that do not relate to risk, for example, how likeable or attractive the individual is, how friendly they are to the assessor, and whether they fulfill the assessor’s stereotypes of an offender.

Part 1: What is risky?

• A systematic review of the policing and academic literature will be conducted to identify existing and current practice for identifying serious offenders in a policing context. This will include, for example, the psychopathy, domestic violence, and violent crime literature. 
• Review of open source material available on subsets of serious violent crime types (for example, since a focus of CEPS is national security, all convicted Australian terrorists are a subset of violent offenders that will be used).
• Identification of consistent themes associated with risk of violent offending and suggest potential factors that may be evaluated to aid the determination of risk.

Part 2: Can we assess risk?

• Analysis of serious crime data to produce a typology of serious violence offences/offenders; identifying the most frequent, highly problematic forms of violence and focusing much of our research endeavours on this. Specifically we aim to predict individuals who engage in serious violence a priori from a policing perspective. Issues of escalation; offending specificity vs diversity, and; violence recidivism will be explored.
• Investigation of police officers’ perceptions of risk of violence for different individuals, these will include potentially violent offenders or violent extremists. We will look for consistency and accuracy. A particular focus will be the role of expertise; we aim to distil the knowledge of experienced officers in assessing risk so the relevant aspects can be provided to less experienced officers.

Part 3: Testing the tool

• Piloting with industry partners the risk measures developed through the above means.
• A series of discrete in-depth studies on particular serious crime issues and innovative strategies selected through negotiation with industry partners and researched in an applied context with partners.

Chief Investigator: Professor Peter Grabosky

This project stems from our involvement in Harvard’s Executive session (see Investigative Practices Project) and the Australasian Policing Forum, scheduled to commence in March 2009. Based on the outcomes of these discussions, we will harness new technologies and test new, innovative responses to serious crime problems using two categories of crime: drugs (representing conventional crime organisations) and explosives control (representing terrorist groups). The trials will involve major organisational change and include application of a range of innovative management strategies, techniques (e.g. crime analysis) and technologies (e.g. forensic and behavioural approaches). The project will result in a fundamental shift in the way police think about, prevent, respond to, and reduce incidents of serious crime.

This project uses a range of analytical tools from complex systems analysis, social and organisational psychology, and evolutionary biology to examine the strengths and weaknesses of transnational actors.

Specifically, the project will:

• Explicate the dynamics, strengths and weaknesses of transnational actors.
• Determine what processes exist that create opportunities for radicalisation.
• Determine how climate change and other natural events could give rise to the radicalisation of transnational actors.
• Develop an understanding of transactional networking structures.
• Identify the dynamics of flows of inspiration.
• Define how knowledge is conveyed through transactional networking structures.
• Clarify the financial structure of transactional networks including the flow of finance within and between networks.
• Identify the business activities involved in carrying out different transnational crimes in order to identify the functions, processes and network configurations attributed to these various crimes.
• Use information on the dynamics, strengths and weaknesses of transnational actors to guide law enforcement operations so that they can be used to target, divert and destroy transnational criminal networks.

Chief Investigator: Professor Peter Grabosky

Some research has been done on the natural history of each kind of organization and the career history of members, but no attempts have been made to generalize more broadly about the rise and decline of criminal organizations. This is significant for two reasons. The first is that the distinction between types of organization may not always be clear. For instance, youth gangs may evolve into more formal organized criminal groups (Weisel 2002); terrorist and criminal groups may share common organizational features, learn from each other and even use the same tactics (Makarenko 2004). The second reason to be interested in generalization is that insights derived from and strategies developed in dealing with one type of criminal organization may be applicable to others. For example, strategies of destabilization employed against Black militant groups in the United States in the 1960s may be relevant to present day counter-terrorist initiatives.

This project aims to transcend academic and law enforcement ‘silos’ by comparing and contrasting three types of illicit organization: youth gangs, conventional organized crime groups and terrorist organizations. It seeks to develop and test a general multilevel theory of illicit organizations. Working initially from a wide-ranging review of the literatures, it explores the nature of these organizations at two levels. The first is the organizational level, involving consideration of the genesis, ascendancy and decline of illicit organizations. The second is the individual level, involving an examination of the recruitment, intensification of commitment (e.g. radicalization in the case of terrorists) and desistance of individual members. The project aims to develop an inventory of propositions on both these levels, as well as cross-level propositions, such as those that would explain the effect of organizational decline on individual recruitment.

• The research will begin with a wide-ranging literature review on each of the three organizational forms. This review takes the form of a mapping of key variables including organizational structure (and/or network morphology), leadership, patterns of recruitment and individual motivations for both joining and committing to the organization. Particular attention will be paid to the life cycle of the organizational types, including factors giving rise to their emergence and decline, both those that relate to the structure and purposes of the organizations themselves and those that relate to outside interventions, that is, the success or otherwise of strategies for their interdiction.
• A propositional inventory will be developed that will cover all aspects of the natural histories of the different types of illicit organizations and the criminal careers of their members, derived from the literature review discussed in the first paragraph. An assessment of potential data sources will also be undertaken of existing data sets in Australia and elsewhere. We will explore the data dimensions for monitoring changes in OMCG and related organized crime activity relative to differences between states. A comparative study of Australian and Hong Kong data sets capable of capturing lethal and/or non-lethal violence involving organized crime groups or members associated with such groups (either as victims and/or offenders) will be developed from existing epidemiological surveillance data.
• The propositional inventory will be supplemented and honed by input from a series of workshops in Canberra attended by academic and law enforcement participants. A Google Groups site dedicated to the project has been established to assist this process. Potential survey, quasi-experimental, observational and simulation research designs will be developed and analytical approaches assessed.
• Articles and working papers will be published on selected aspects of the project, drawing on knowledge gained from the literature review and synthesizing and comparing information across the three types of organization in relation to particular aspects of the project. A book manuscript provisionally entitled Crime, Terrorism and the State is currently under contract with SAGE Publications with a delivery date of 31 January 2010. A feature paper on ‘Triad ‘Dark’ Societies’ in volume 5 of Security Challenges will be published in September 2009. The project team will also contribute to a major new hand-book on organized crime to be published by OUP with a final delivery date of December 2010. 
• In the second half of the project (years 3 and 4) the finalized propositional inventory will be tested on the available Australian police data bases in collaboration with our industry partners, and on other data bases in the public domain.

Chief Investigator: Professor Gabriele Bammer

Dealing with the unknown is just as important as making maximum use of available knowledge. Developing more sophisticated concepts and methods to effectively understand and manage ignorance and uncertainty is one of the three domains of the new cross-cutting discipline of Integration and Implementation Sciences (I2S; see Knowledge Integration project). Different disciplines and areas of practice focus on different aspects of ignorance and uncertainty. To date there has been relatively little attention to trading ideas or synthesis of approaches across different disciplines and practice areas to strengthen the ability to manage the unknown, especially in relation to major societal issues like policing and security.

This project builds on two seminal works: Michael Smithson’s 1989 book Ignorance and Uncertainty: Emerging Paradigms (Springer, NY) and Gabriele Bammer and Michael Smithson’s 2008 edited book Uncertainty and Risk: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Earthscan, London).

These works demonstrate that unknowns cannot be eliminated; that there are different kinds of unknowns which can be arranged into typologies allowing us to distinguish between distortion and incompleteness, for example; and that there are at least six major management strategies for unknowns – reduction, denial, banishment, acceptance, exploitation and surrender.

The aim of this project is undertake sub-projects, where possible in collaboration with a range of CEPS and other policing and security researchers and practitioners, to:

• Enhance the ability of those researchers and practitioners to better understand, manage and communicate about ignorance and uncertainty;
• Provide new insights into various aspects of policing and security through a more sophisticated approach to ignorance and uncertainty;
• Elaborate conceptual frameworks about ignorance and uncertainty by integrating diverse discipline and practice perspectives relevant to various policing and security topics; and
• Strengthen methods for managing ignorance and uncertainty in various aspects of policing and security.

Modules to enhance understanding and management of ignorance and uncertainty will be developed for the graduate and professional development courses described in Knowledge Integration project.