Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-108). Also available in print.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1988. / Also available in print.

This study sought to measure the perceptions of the community on the prevalence of police corruption and its impact on service delivery in the Pretoria Central area. Using a literature review and 25 in-depth unstructured interviews, the study found that the majority of community members regard most police officials as corrupt. A lack of understanding on the part of the police of the negative impact that actual or perceived police corruption has on sound police-community relations was evident. Recruitment without proper vetting of the workforce emerged as one of the causal factors for corruption. The study provides several recommendations for the enhancement of the South African Police Service‟s systems to militate against incidents of corruption and its impact on police service delivery. / Police Practice / M. Tech. (Policing)

This study sought to measure the perceptions of the community on the prevalence of police corruption and its impact on service delivery in the Pretoria Central area. Using a literature review and 25 in-depth unstructured interviews, the study found that the majority of community members regard most police officials as corrupt. A lack of understanding on the part of the police of the negative impact that actual or perceived police corruption has on sound police-community relations was evident. Recruitment without proper vetting of the workforce emerged as one of the causal factors for corruption. The study provides several recommendations for the enhancement of the South African Police Service‟s systems to militate against incidents of corruption and its impact on police service delivery. / Police Practice / M. Tech. (Policing)

This thesis about rank and file police takes place from within a class framework with its foundations in the works of Marx, Engels and Gramsci who theorised that revolution is the result of the contradictions in class society reaching breaking point. This thesis contends that ‘progressive’ intellectuals, journalists and politicians act, as Gramsci theorised, as the ‘subalterns’ of the state by creating a ‘moral panic’ about police corruption. They ignore the wider spread of corruption within a criminal justice system that is shaped and reinforced by a highly politicised criminal justice establishment. The supporting data of the argument is provided in open ended, semi structured interviews with operational police. This is integrated with material from media sources, parliamentary inquiries, commissions of inquiry, legal transcripts and various published data from journals, newspaper articles, personal diaries, conference papers, Internet publications and policy documents. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Abstracts THE TAINT This is a memoir of Ray “Poss” Ide, a man who has carried the taint of a horrifying crime since he was seventeen years old─a crime he claims he did not commit. The crime was the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. The Taint looks at the time leading up to his conviction for rape, including the years he spent in Westbrook Boys’ Reformatory and Boggo Road Gaol as a minor, and then his sentence served in NSW gaols with such inmates as Stephen Bradley, the man who kidnapped and murdered Graham Thorne, and the bizarre but rather likeable Dave Scanlan, known for his exploits as “the Kingsgrove Slasher”. In prison, Scanlan encouraged him to become an elite sportsman and released, Poss was recruited by Canterbury Eels football team; but just on the point of making a name for himself in Sydney, someone discovered that he had been gaoled for rape, and humiliated, he left the team. He moved back home to Queensland via Grafton, NSW (where he met and later married the Jacaranda Queen) and continued his sporting career, but never again in the Big League. He became the Manager of the Waterside Workers’ Club and helped prevent a turf war between the Wharfies and members of the Painters and Dockers. Poss is now working with lawyer Robert Bax to have his case re-opened. He believes his story to be a cautionary tale for young men. It is a chronicle of social change, including the sexual revolution of the sixties, the confrontations with “the demons” in the streets of Brisbane during the Joh era of Bible-bashing fundamentalism and police corruption. It’s a story about what really went on behind closed doors in institutions where vulnerable children were preyed upon, in gaols where men were expected to become beasts. It is a story of how the taint of a terrible crime affected a man’s whole life. “QUESTIONS OF OWNERSHIP” Writing someone else’s story can be an ethical minefield─especially regarding questions of ownership. Who owns the story, the subject or the author? The easy answer to this is the subject owns the story and the author the text, but on closer examination this may not necessarily be so. Then there are those other stakeholders who claim ownership of story: people who embrace a narrative because of its similarity to their own lives. Published stories about institutional abuse have resonated for adults who as children were placed into the care of churches or the state. Another kind of ownership is claimed by readers who accept a version of a story and dismiss any counter-story as being invalid. What I call the “Plath Phenomenon” is an example of this. I will examine these kinds of ownership of story with particular reference to the work of Janet Malcolm on biography and then will look at gaps and silences in “official” stories, those created in police stations and courtrooms.

This doctoral study comprises two parts. 75 per cent of the total weight of the submission consists of the creative component, the writing, directing and producing of a moving-image documentary in an online environment (supplementary material includes the script). Cutting edge technology (QTVR 'movies' and Live Stage Professional software) was used to create an immersive cinematic experience on the net. The Wrong Crowd can be viewed either online at www.abc.net.au/wrongcrowd or offline via a CD Rom (the latter includes the radio play 'Death of a Prostitute' which was excised from the version published via ABC Online because of legal concerns on the part of the ABC lawyers). The second part of the doctorate is the analytical contextualisation, comprising 25 per cent of the submission. This part examines the critical literature on the nature of the documentary form, documentary as history, cultural memory and the autobiography as history. Documentary exists as a truth-claim. History also embraces the search for evidence. The history documentary has a television form from which the online version is derived. The nature of the internet as a delivery platform for the moving image is discussed with reference to he truth claim as founded in the visible evidence - the news coverage - the 'this really happened'. The evidence however is open to interpretation for the historical record and is retold to suit the present power relations (the funding bodies, the commissioning editors, etc). In a CD Rom and more so online, this tendency towards individual interpretation is amplified to the point where the viewer can participate in the construction of the argument via a navigable database. Visually, the change from the temporal montage of the linear television documentary to spatial montage of the windows interface has led us to reconnect with computer-based moving images as a form of animated painting. Conventional screen theories of engagement and reception are invoked to aid in the discussion of modified cinematic conventions of editing and framing within the online form. The case-study of one of the inaugural Australian Film Commission funded online documentaries, The Wrong Crowd: Inside the Family Outside the Law, is a personal history narrative that intersects with Queensland police history from the 1950s to the late 1970s at the moments of inquiries into issues of police brutality and corruption.

Abstracts THE TAINT This is a memoir of Ray “Poss” Ide, a man who has carried the taint of a horrifying crime since he was seventeen years old─a crime he claims he did not commit. The crime was the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. The Taint looks at the time leading up to his conviction for rape, including the years he spent in Westbrook Boys’ Reformatory and Boggo Road Gaol as a minor, and then his sentence served in NSW gaols with such inmates as Stephen Bradley, the man who kidnapped and murdered Graham Thorne, and the bizarre but rather likeable Dave Scanlan, known for his exploits as “the Kingsgrove Slasher”. In prison, Scanlan encouraged him to become an elite sportsman and released, Poss was recruited by Canterbury Eels football team; but just on the point of making a name for himself in Sydney, someone discovered that he had been gaoled for rape, and humiliated, he left the team. He moved back home to Queensland via Grafton, NSW (where he met and later married the Jacaranda Queen) and continued his sporting career, but never again in the Big League. He became the Manager of the Waterside Workers’ Club and helped prevent a turf war between the Wharfies and members of the Painters and Dockers. Poss is now working with lawyer Robert Bax to have his case re-opened. He believes his story to be a cautionary tale for young men. It is a chronicle of social change, including the sexual revolution of the sixties, the confrontations with “the demons” in the streets of Brisbane during the Joh era of Bible-bashing fundamentalism and police corruption. It’s a story about what really went on behind closed doors in institutions where vulnerable children were preyed upon, in gaols where men were expected to become beasts. It is a story of how the taint of a terrible crime affected a man’s whole life. “QUESTIONS OF OWNERSHIP” Writing someone else’s story can be an ethical minefield─especially regarding questions of ownership. Who owns the story, the subject or the author? The easy answer to this is the subject owns the story and the author the text, but on closer examination this may not necessarily be so. Then there are those other stakeholders who claim ownership of story: people who embrace a narrative because of its similarity to their own lives. Published stories about institutional abuse have resonated for adults who as children were placed into the care of churches or the state. Another kind of ownership is claimed by readers who accept a version of a story and dismiss any counter-story as being invalid. What I call the “Plath Phenomenon” is an example of this. I will examine these kinds of ownership of story with particular reference to the work of Janet Malcolm on biography and then will look at gaps and silences in “official” stories, those created in police stations and courtrooms.

Abstracts THE TAINT This is a memoir of Ray “Poss” Ide, a man who has carried the taint of a horrifying crime since he was seventeen years old─a crime he claims he did not commit. The crime was the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. The Taint looks at the time leading up to his conviction for rape, including the years he spent in Westbrook Boys’ Reformatory and Boggo Road Gaol as a minor, and then his sentence served in NSW gaols with such inmates as Stephen Bradley, the man who kidnapped and murdered Graham Thorne, and the bizarre but rather likeable Dave Scanlan, known for his exploits as “the Kingsgrove Slasher”. In prison, Scanlan encouraged him to become an elite sportsman and released, Poss was recruited by Canterbury Eels football team; but just on the point of making a name for himself in Sydney, someone discovered that he had been gaoled for rape, and humiliated, he left the team. He moved back home to Queensland via Grafton, NSW (where he met and later married the Jacaranda Queen) and continued his sporting career, but never again in the Big League. He became the Manager of the Waterside Workers’ Club and helped prevent a turf war between the Wharfies and members of the Painters and Dockers. Poss is now working with lawyer Robert Bax to have his case re-opened. He believes his story to be a cautionary tale for young men. It is a chronicle of social change, including the sexual revolution of the sixties, the confrontations with “the demons” in the streets of Brisbane during the Joh era of Bible-bashing fundamentalism and police corruption. It’s a story about what really went on behind closed doors in institutions where vulnerable children were preyed upon, in gaols where men were expected to become beasts. It is a story of how the taint of a terrible crime affected a man’s whole life. “QUESTIONS OF OWNERSHIP” Writing someone else’s story can be an ethical minefield─especially regarding questions of ownership. Who owns the story, the subject or the author? The easy answer to this is the subject owns the story and the author the text, but on closer examination this may not necessarily be so. Then there are those other stakeholders who claim ownership of story: people who embrace a narrative because of its similarity to their own lives. Published stories about institutional abuse have resonated for adults who as children were placed into the care of churches or the state. Another kind of ownership is claimed by readers who accept a version of a story and dismiss any counter-story as being invalid. What I call the “Plath Phenomenon” is an example of this. I will examine these kinds of ownership of story with particular reference to the work of Janet Malcolm on biography and then will look at gaps and silences in “official” stories, those created in police stations and courtrooms.

This thesis about rank and file police takes place from within a class framework with its foundations in the works of Marx, Engels and Gramsci who theorised that revolution is the result of the contradictions in class society reaching breaking point. This thesis contends that ‘progressive’ intellectuals, journalists and politicians act, as Gramsci theorised, as the ‘subalterns’ of the state by creating a ‘moral panic’ about police corruption. They ignore the wider spread of corruption within a criminal justice system that is shaped and reinforced by a highly politicised criminal justice establishment. The supporting data of the argument is provided in open ended, semi structured interviews with operational police. This is integrated with material from media sources, parliamentary inquiries, commissions of inquiry, legal transcripts and various published data from journals, newspaper articles, personal diaries, conference papers, Internet publications and policy documents. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)