The police and crime control: Effectiveness,community policing,and legal change

Conclusion Current research on the level of police resources, patrol and investigation strategies, community policing, and the likely impact of changes in the legal framework confirms the simple truth that the police capacity to influence crime has always been vastly overstated. Unfortunately, the preventive police forces that emerged in Anglo-American jurisdictions in the wake of Sir Robert Peel's new police were linked directly and for the first time to the crime rate. While there was little that they could actually do about the crime rate per se, questions of police effectiveness, resource allocation, and the adequacy of police powers have tended to be answered on the basis of such data ever since. The need now is to find different ways of measuring and evaluating police work. It may be that the major contribution of community policing is to highlight precisely this issue by shifting the focus of policing away from the crime rate and by forcing police departments, politicians, and academics to confront the real capabilities of the police and to devise methods of evaluating them and promoting them to an increasingly skeptical world.This is a revised version of a paper given at the third conference of the Society for the Reform of Criminal Law, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, March 19–23, 1989.LL.M., University of London 1968; LL.B., University of London 1967.     

Reviews

John Miller, Mikhail Gorbachev and the End of Soviet Power. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993, xviii + 267 pp., £45.00 h/b, £13.99 p/b.

Geoffrey A. Hosking, Jonathan Aves & Peter J. S. Duncan, The Road to Post‐Communism. Independent Political Movements in the Soviet Union, 1985–1991. London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1992 x + 236 pp., £37.50 h/b, £12.99 p/b.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992, xx + 264 pp., $41.50 h/b, $13.95 p/b.

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William M. Reisinger, Energy and the Soviet Bloc: Alliance Politics after Stalin. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1992, xiii + 184 pp., $37.95.

Joan DeBardeleben, ed., To Breathe Free: Eastern Europe's Environmental Crisis. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, and Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, xviii + 266 pp., £25.00 h/b, £9.50 p/b.

Donald D. Barry, ed., Toward the ‘Rule of Law’ in Russia? Political and Legal Reform in the Transition Period. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1992, 402 pp., $90.00.

Anna Lawton, Kinoglasnost: Soviet Cinema in Our Time. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, xvi + 288 pp. £35.00 h/b, £13.95 p/b.

David Pike, The Politics of Culture In Soviet‐Occupied Germany 1945–1949. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993, 691 pp., $ 55.00.

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“Our biggest killer”: multimodal discourse representations of dementia in the British press

A recent (2016) Office for National Statistics report stated that dementia is now “the leading cause of death” in England and Wales. Ever fixated with the syndrome (an unfailingly newsworthy topic), the British press was quick to respond to the bulletin, consistently headlining that dementia was the nation’s “biggest killer,” while (re)formulating other aspects of the report in distorting and emotive metaphorical terms. In this paper we examine how the media, through use of a recurring set of linguistic and visual semiotic tropes, portrayed dementia as an agentive entity, a “killer,” which remorselessly attacks its “victims.” Such a broadly loaded and sensationalist representation, we argue, not only construed dementia as a direful and pernicious disease, but also, crucially, obscured the personal and social contexts in which the syndrome is understood and experienced (not least by people with dementia themselves). This intensely lurid type of representation not only fails to address the ageist misinformation and common misunderstandings that all too commonly surround dementia, but is also likely to exacerbate the stress and depression frequently experienced by people with dementia and their families.     

Global Simplification of Extradition: Interviews with Selected Extradition Experts in New Zealand,Canada, the US and EU

This paper explores the discernible long-term trend towards the simplification of the conditions for extradition in the law of many states. The process of simplification appears to be justified by the necessity of taking more effective action against transnational crime. It appears to be taking place in three main areas: the recharacterisation of extradition from a criminal to an administrative process, the reduction of the substantive conditions for extradition and the expansion of the international platforms for extradition. The process is being tempered by and partially justified by greater individual human rights protections. In an effort to gain a better grasp of the nature of this process, what is driving it, and where it is heading, this paper records the views of a number of expert practitioners from the state, defence, and judiciary in seven different countries with significant extradition practice on these justifications, changes, and human rights protections. The paper synthesises their views thematically before drawing some conclusions about the nature of the process of simplification of extradition and whether there is an emerging global standard for extradition. The research was funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation International Research Fellowship for 2015.