Unmasking police accountability: responses to Australian First Nations peoples’ deaths in police custody
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The view that there is something inherently wrong with the ways in which police are held accountable when a person dies in their custody has been expressed across several national contexts, most often with a focus on Indigenous people and people of colour. This is so even when processes typically seen as accountability mechanisms are engaged. With a view to garnering some understanding of this dissatisfaction, this paper focuses on the question, How is police accountability understood by those discussing deaths of Indigenous people in police custody in an Australian context? A narrative review method identified key themes from textual sources that discussed police accountability in the specific context of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person dying in police custody. The findings indicated three key elements of how police accountability is understood, namely: independent investigation of police actions, criminal prosecution, and public giving of honest evidence, with these themes emerging against a background of claims that police accountability does not exist when Indigenous people die in police custody. Of particular interest are findings as to what the narrative review did not show about police accountability and what that might mean for developing police accountability processes that better meet the needs and expectations of Australia’s First Nations people and the broader community. It is proposed that, in contrast to police being ‘held accountable’, the complementary position of police ‘being accountable’ may yield better accountability-related outcomes in policing contexts, both systemically and individually.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".