In Australia, and other multi-media saturated societies, impressions of police and policing are largely generated through various media formats. These include police content generated by police media units, crowdsourced bystander video and images of police operations, and traditional media reports of police and policing practices. This ‘simulated’ policing (Lee and McGovern 2014) is now played out through technological affordances (Wood and McGovern 2020) within a broader cultural context that has established police engagement through social media as a legitimate test of police fairness, transparency and accountability (Ellis 2021). Since 2013, where a coalescence of technological and cultural forces ushered in a period of heightened public scrutiny of police operations in public, and the subsequent adoption of body worn cameras by many Australian policing organizations, police have had more direct access to their audiences through social media. Yet, data from the National Survey of Community Satisfaction with Policing shows that public perceptions of police integrity had been at 10-year lows nationally in the 2022-23/2021-22 reporting periods (Productivity Commission 2024, 2023).
LGBTQIA+ perceptions and experiences of police in Australia
Shedding light on aspects of this context, Dr Ellis presented on LGBTQIA+ sources of information about police and perceptions of police integrity based on the results of a 2025 mixed-methods nationwide survey of over 1000 LGBTQIA+ Australians (research conducted in collaboration with Professor Nicole Asquith (QUT) and Associate Professor Angela Dwyer (QUT), and Mr Ron Mason (UTAS)). Two of the most popular sources of information about police were queer media (74%), and what friends have said about police (71%). Those who were aged between 18-35 were significantly more likely than those 46 years of age and above to source their view of police from friends, what other people say about police, and queer media. Respondents aged between 18 and 35 were also more likely to source their information about police from family than those between 46 and 65 years of age.
Australian criminology students’ attitudes towards the police: Exploring the role of moral foundations
Based on a national survey of 430 undergraduate criminology students enrolled at Australian universities, Dr Mark Wood (in collaboration with A/Prof Clare Farmer, Dr Sally Kennedy, Dr Chris Linke, and Dr Emma Gretgrix, Deakin University) spoke about the examination of the predictive value of students’ moral foundations, beliefs about crime causation, and punitive attitudes in shaping their attitudes towards the police. Our regression analysis shows that men hold more favourable attitudes towards the police than women, and that students who place themselves further to the conservative end of the political spectrum tend to report greater support for the police. But beyond these more familiar predictors, our findings also provide support for our hypothesis regarding the influence of the Loyalty moral foundation on attitudes towards the police. In Moral Foundations Theory, the Loyalty foundation pertains to the value placed on group cohesion, solidarity, and maintaining commitment to one’s community or institutions. Students who scored higher on Loyalty were more likely to express positive attitudes towards the police. This suggests that trust in policing may, for some students, operate as part of a moral stance on maintaining collective order. Understanding this dynamic can help further explain why debates about police can be so contested, as they are tied to differing moral views about what holds communities together.
Voices of authority: exploring the emergence of the official police podcast
Associate Professor Alyce McGovern presented on the more recent move of policing agencies in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand into the world of podcasting. This evolution in police image work has seen several state and national police forces release official podcast series that purport to ‘shine a light’ on or offer ‘a rare glimpse’ into the ‘real world’ of policing. In providing a preliminary examination of how and why police present them-selves and the work they do to the public using this contemporary media format, the paper highlights the continued importance of criminological interrogation of police media work in the context of recent conversations on the proliferation of copspeak and Copaganda.
The dangerisation of drill music in Western Sydney: Cultural signifiers, pre-crime policing and the decline of the presumption of innocence
Professor Murray Lee (in collaboration with Harry Wynter, Assoc Prof. Alexis Kallio, Dr Toby Martin, and Prof. Jioji Ravulo, University of Sydney) spoke about the gradual development of legislation that undermined the presumption of innocence, and the mechanisms of dangerisation that associate serious crime with certain genres of music and performing musicians. By situating relations between New South Wales police and drill rap group ONEFOUR within legal, cultural history and using documents procured by the authors through Government Information Public Access requests (GIPAs), we argue that such laws and policing practices not only fail to enhance community safety but often uphold deeply intrenched colonial logics, exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequity.
The presenters would like to thank the UNSW School of Law, Society and Criminology, and ANZSOC for supporting the events through a local events grant.
References
Ellis, J., R. (2021). “More than a trivial pursuit: Public order policing narratives and the ‘social media test’.” Crime, Media, Culture 17(2): 185–207.
Lee, M. and A. McGovern (2014). Policing and Media: Public relations, simulations and communications. Oxon, Routledge.
Wood, M. A. and A. McGovern (2020). “Memetic copaganda: Understanding the humorous turn in police image work.” Crime, Media, Culture 0(0): 1-22.
