Since the day Saudi Arabia was founded, its highly centralised and paramilitary police organisation remained immune to scrutiny, and police performance and their relationship with the public have remained uncharted territories.  But lately, in response to leaking reports about rising crime levels and an escalating social control crisis, writers affiliated to the police organisation were quick to deny that a real crime problem exists.  However, some of those writers do admit that a serious social disorder problem is now brewing, and they find an urgent need to address the crisis.  According to them, any effective response requires a community orientated policing strategy to be applied immediately, even without debate or planning. The statement above raises three important questions.  First, does a social control problem really exist? Secondly, if yes, would a community policing (CP) approach address it?  And third, are the police and the public ready for change? To answer those questions, quantitative and qualitative data have been collected from a wide range of sources.  Results obtained from the data show clearly that the police are not the effective crime fighters they claim they are.  Further, although it has been found that the Saudi policing system is not without problems, a community policing approach, at least in the sense it is understood in the west, is incompatible with the Saudi culture.  Reasons for this incompatibility have been examined, and suggestions to improve the Saudi police performance have been made.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Dana M. Britton / Historically, relationships between police and residents in minority communities have often been contentious. However most of the literature on race, place, and policing has focused on the policing of Blacks and their interactions with the police in urban settings. Building on this work, this study aims to capture similar processes of racialized policing as they occur in the suburbs. This project expands our understanding by exploring policing as it is carried out in a marginalized Black enclave located in a predominately white middle class suburb. Specifically, I focus on Meacham Park, which is a segregated enclave annexed to the nearby white community of Kirkwood, Missouri. Drawing on interviews with thirty African-American residents of Meacham Park, I explore how residents experience policing and their attitudes toward the police. The interviews reveal a contentious history of relations between residents and the police, and I discuss respondents’ accounts of specific experiences with police surveillance, harassment, and (in some cases) misconduct. However, though many respondents reported extremely negative attitudes toward the police, the great majority also reported at least some positive interactions and experiences. This study extends research on the policing of minority communities into a segregated suburban context and offers implications for improving relations between the police and minority communities.

STUDENT NUMBER: 0407481N SCHOOL FOR HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES MASTER OF ARTS IN FORCED MIGRATION STUDIES / Proponents of migrants rights often posit that distinct legislation not only secure migrants rights in host countries, but also enhance the ideals of liberal democracies in which policing is regulated by the rule of law, impartiality and respect for due process. The potential for discrimination by host communities to some categories of migrants is deemed to underscore the importance of migration laws. Critics argue that such laws undermine the very rights they are supposed to protect in that they set different standards for the treatment of migrants. In this study, based on evidence from research with Somali migrants in Johannesburg, South Africa, study I argue that legal documents as evidence of legal status have little significance in the policing of migrants. This paradox can be explained by three main reasons; first, the issuance, retention and renewal of these documents is characterized by irregularities and corruption that undermine the legitimacy of the document, giving the police enough grounds for suspicion. Second the political and social context in which policing of migrants is done undermines the significance of their legal status. The anti-migration sentiment among the nationals effectively sets different standards for policing of migrants. Third, the legal framework gives the police the dual and potentially conflicting responsibilities of regulating migration on the one hand and protecting migrants on the other hand. The police have taken their regulation responsibility to be synonymous with that of gate-keeping whereby migrants are separated and denied access to government services. This role of gate – keeping is manipulated by the police for their own ends while citizens and politicians directly or indirectly sanction their extra-legal actions when dealing with migrants.

Three main areas are addressed: smuggling as a commercial activity; as a form of social crime; and as a problem of policing. The claim that the violence of the Sussex smugglers in the 1740s was atypical is scrutinised, adopting a comparative approach between regions and over time, and it is argued that force was a rational response adopted by many smugglers when their interests were threatened. The contrabanders extended their penetration of legal markets and distribution networks in the second half of the eighteenth century, but this was accompanied by increasing levels of violence. Studying the confrontations between the smugglers and the preventive forces raises the question of how violent a society England was. The discussion is moved away from the homicide statistics to armed defence and calculated intimidation. The use of violence as a business stratagem raises questions concerning the smugglers' status as 'social criminals.' Illicit importation enjoyed high levels of popular support, but whether contemporaries saw the pursuit of the contraband trade as legitimising murder and mayhem, remains debatable. The adversarial model, in which smugglers are pitted against the forces of the revenue, and represented as the defenders of the local economies against commercial monopolists, is an incomplete picture. Smugglers and revenue officers had to establish a modus vivandi, Collectors and Comptrollers were often leaders in their local communities and active in local politics, and some smugglers were themselves men of standing and influence. The intention is to focus on continuity; in terms of attitudes, methods, and the problems presented to the authorities. The involvement of the continental East India companies indicates that the smuggling trade in the first half of the eighteenth century should be seen as more than a number of locally based, small-scale enterprises The problem for government was that smuggling was more of a business than a form of social protest. Members of the political nation were conscious of the need to compromise for the sake of stability, and the use of the state's coercive machinery against smuggling, the army, navy and the law, is perhaps better seen as an exercise in containment rather than an attempt at repression.

Human rights are a defining feature of how the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has been 'imagined and made' in its post-conflict society. This thesis marks the first attempt to make sense of how human rights are articulated, interpreted and applied by those intimately involved in Northern Irish policing. Based on extensive access to the PSNI, I marshal qualitative data collected from interviews with over one hundred police officers from various departments. I tour four sites of local policing to expose and examine the vernaculars and practices of human rights that lurk within each. The story I tell over the course of eight chapters is one of a police service trying to sustain human rights as a central narrative to explain its daily work and build its organisational identity in a divided society, to varying degrees of success. I argue that human rights are, in fact, a malleable, contested and conditional concept to 'imagine and make' a police service and regulate the decision-making of its officers; perhaps much more so than police reformers in Northern Ireland had realised or the PSNI wish to acknowledge. In the first half of the thesis, I identify and deconstruct how the PSNI's chief officers and local political parties seek to express and mobilise competing visions, values and agendas through human rights narratives. I then pay close attention to how human rights are interpreted and translated by junior officers performing two forms of routine policing in N.Ireland: the 'dirty work' of the Tactical Support Group and the 'community work' of Neighbourhood Policing Teams. I ask to what extent officers have internalised human rights as way of making sense of their daily work. In the second half of the thesis, I explore police officers as an important, but poorly understood, class of human rights practitioner. To better grasp how officers interpret and apply human rights standards, I closely analyse two sites of policing where distinct schemes of human rights-based regulation exist: public order policing and police custody. This thesis contributes to understandings of the concept of human rights, its interactions with law and politics and the condition of policing in contemporary Northern Ireland.

Anti-social behaviour (herein ASB) has become important socially, politically and culturally in the United Kingdom over the past fifteen years. Successive Governments have prioritised tackling ASB, with a plethora of legislation being introduced to tackle low-level nuisance behaviour. The Crime and Disorder Act (1998) shaped much of the policy in relation to ASB, with the flagship policy of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) being introduced alongside other punitive measures. Alongside the dramatic increase in policy aimed at criminalising nuisance behaviour, a large literature has emerged spanning the social sciences, allied health sciences and criminology fields. Despite a large number of studies examining ASB, none has thus far explored ASB in rural locations. Given that Scotland is a predominantly rural country, it is important that a concept that has driven a large part of the criminal justice agenda is conceptualised in rural locations. Despite the Social Attitudes Survey highlighting the fact that rural areas statistically suffer from less ASB, there is a commonly held (mis)conception that this means that the impact of ASB on rural areas is also less (Ormston & Anderson, 2009). There is also an assumption in the existing literature that because there is statistically less ASB in rural areas, that ASB is less serious than that which exists in urban locations. In addition to a general lack of theorisation of ASB in rural Scotland, the challenges of responding to ASB over a large geographic area adds an interesting and important spatial dimension to the way that ASB is tackled. The core argument in this thesis, therefore, is that the distinctive characteristics of rural environments are central to understanding the nature, meaning and impact of ASB in this environment. This thesis therefore begins to redress the lack of work on ASB in rural locations by conceptualising and analysing the nature and impact of, and responses to, ASB in two case study locations in rural Scotland. Garland’s theorisation of the new culture of crime control which emerged in the late 90s provides a helpful urban focused framework to examine debates around rural ASB (Garland, 1996). Drawing on the existing urban-based ASB literature, the thesis begins by critically examining whether ASB that occurs in rural locations is distinct from that witnessed in urban environments. This thesis argues that, although there are distinct aspects to the ASB present in the rural Scottish case studies, the ASB experienced typically mirrors that experienced in urban locations rather than reflecting a distinct form of rural ASB. Nevertheless, the rural context fundamentally shapes the impact that ASB has on rural communities. The thesis draws on criminological and rural literatures to argue that a more sophisticated approach, where scale, harm and context are central components of the way that the impact of ASB on rural communities is understood, needs to be developed. The limited rural literature examining crime often neglects the everyday, lived reality of the impact of ASB and crime on remote populations, instead tending to focus on the structural challenges associated with tackling ASB. Exploring the impact of ASB at this micro-scale illuminates interesting differences between the urban conceptualisations of ASB and those found in the rural. Progressing up to the meso-scale is important for understanding ways that the police and other actors respond to ASB in rural locations. The challenges associated with the scale of rural locations is apparent through the response of the police and other agencies to ASB. This thesis argues that, in contrast to the way that ASB is conceptualised in rural locations, there is a distinct rural policing response to ASB with a distinct interaction between agencies, the community and the police which is enabled by the scale at which each operates. ASB in rural locations therefore tends to be tackled in a more holistic manner, in which the circumstances of the individuals involved tend to be considered before the appropriate interventions are made. Context and scale therefore play a key role in understanding the response of various actors to ASB. Combining these three conceptual inputs, this study engages with an area of ASB which has hitherto received scant attention. In contrast to much of the existing urban ASB literature, which treats the context as a passive entity, this thesis argues that ‘the rural’ is a key contextual part of understanding the nature and impact of, and responses to, ASB. Far from being a peripheral part of the ASB literature, the rural environment therefore should be considered of key importance for understanding ASB in other contexts.

abstract: Sexual assault victimization is a pervasive issue affecting one in four college women. This staggering statistic causes concern for universities across the country to protect students and encourage victimization reporting. Yet little known about college women’s reporting behaviors and what influences the decision to report. Previous research has established possible reasons influencing reporting behaviors such as fear of retaliation, shame, guilt, and not viewing the incident as a crime. However, few studies have explored the role of prior perceptions of police and the impact of procedural justice on victimization reporting. Using a factorial vignette design, this study tests the influence of prior perceptions of police, procedural unjust treatment, and the sex of the responding officer on the likelihood to report sexual assault. Self-report survey data were collected from 586 female participants attending a public university. Consistent with expectations, results indicate that positive prior perceptions of police significantly increased students’ likelihood to report sexual victimization. Being treated in a procedurally unjust manner by the police had the largest impact on victim decision making, even when controlling for prior perceptions of police; decreasing the likelihood that a student would report their victimization. Contrary to expectations, the sex of the responding officer had no effect on students’ decision to report their victimization. This study has important implications for current policing methods and policies aimed at police-victim interactions among the population at highest risk of sexual victimization. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Criminology and Criminal Justice 2019

Since the terrorist attacks on the United States of America on September 11, 2001, approach to policing has observably been shifted across the country. Utilizing a qualitative methodology, this study explored the perceptions of community members from a Chicago, Illinois community regarding the shift in policing style post 9/11. Cooley's theory of the looking glass self, coupled with a phenomenological approach to understand the deeper meaning associated with the perceptions of the residents and the shift in policing styles in Chicago communities. The data were obtained from participants who were at least 40 years old and held a residence for at least 3 years in the area prior to 9/11 and 3 to 5 years immediately after 9/11. The study included the use of a semi-structured interview guide and the findings were analyzed using inductive coding with thematic analysis. The findings indicated that residents of the community want a positive relationship with the police but perceive that they are viewed negatively by the police and that police fear them. Participants agreed that they recognized a shift in policing strategies and consistently noted a desire for police to return to community policing strategies that they perceive have been abandoned in favor of more militaristic approaches to law enforcement. The positive social change implications stemming from this study include recommendations to police executives to consider the strategic and tactical demilitarization of the police department and integrate community preferences in future decision making regarding critical standard operating procedures including stop and frisk policies, training initiatives, and zero tolerance declarations. Adherence to these recommendations may improve oversight of officers and improve relationships with the community.

This thesis is a critical approach to the concept of fear of crime. It is not necessarily a call for an end to the study of fear of crime. From a genealogical perspective, the thesis first traces the proliferation of academic, governmental and popular interests in the fear of crime in three Western democracies; and secondly explains how this interest has affected both the subjects of inquiry and the very modes of inquiry themselves. It investigates historically the emergence of fear of crime as a set of discourses in the human sciences and in government and explores the ways in which these various institutions have imagined the subjects of their inquiries. It also discusses the ways in which fear of crime has become a discourse within popular culture and the mass media, and explores why gender is a potent signifier in fear of crime research. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Diversified, essentially privatised, policing options are expanding daily in modern societies. They have become available to, and are being accessed by, individuals, community groups and governments on a regular basis. While this dissertation examines the phenomenon of private policing in Australia generally, its task, more specifically, is to document and review the laws that govern, shape and make accountable private policing operations and activities. Chapter 1 reviews the origins and manifestations of contemporary shifts to privatised models of policing. Chapter 2 examines models of relationships between public and private personnel, and the various methods of accountability that may serve to govern the activities of the latter. Chapters 3 to 8 explore and explain the applicable laws that inform, shape and govern private policing generally. What this examination reveals is that "private police" are empowered by a multitude of common law and legislative principles, along with a mosaic of diverse and semi-structured rules not necessarily designed for this specific purpose. One quickly finds that the laws that permit, facilitate, regulate and manage private manifestations of policing do not fall within easily discernible legal parameters. Finally, Chapter 9 provides a summary of the dissertation, together with some general thoughts concerning the effectiveness and appropriateness of the law as a vehicle for bringing about the desired goals, namely effective policing that provides appropriate outcomes for victims, suspects, private personnel, public police and the general public alike.