Dr Tim Cubitt was the Australian recipient of the 2021 PhD Student Paper Award for his paper ‘A machine learning analysis of serious misconduct among Australian police’.
I’m extremely thankful to ANZSOC for selecting this paper, titled ‘A machine learning analysis of serious misconduct among Australian police’, for the PhD paper award, fair to say it was a considerable surprise. This paper, published in Crime Science, applied a machine learning technique to predict serious misconduct among 1,200 officers from the NSW Police Force. In doing so, we produced a robust prediction model, and identified several important features associated with serious misconduct. In particular, that misconduct was not simply a function of inexperience among officers, rather risk persisted into mid-career.
The findings of this paper have noteworthy implications for the ways in which misconduct among police is detected, and managed. It appeared that factors such as career stagnation, and taking up a second job, were associated with serious misconduct. While this suggested a complex interplay of factors increasing likelihood of misconduct among officers, it also spoke to the importance of including data beyond complaint incidence in analyses such as these. Ultimately, the factors that contribute to, and escalate risk of police misconduct are complex, and require analytical methods capable of accurately eliciting the nature of the problem.
In the time since this paper was published, I have graduated from my PhD, and undertaken several further pieces of research relating to police misconduct in Australia, and the United States. Including how network analytics may be used to detect groupings of police misconduct, and the role of gender in understanding and preventing misconduct. Thanks must go to my PhD supervisors, Ken Wooden, Erin Kruger and Michael Kennedy, and to Western Sydney University for their support throughout. Thank you again to ANZSOC for this award, it is greatly appreciated.
