ORCID Profile
0000-0001-5596-3478
Current Organisation
University of Wollongong
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Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 21-04-2021
DOI: 10.1177/00048658211007532
Abstract: Public commentary has offered mixed opinion on the likely impact of COVID-19 restrictions on drug-related offending. On the one hand, it is argued that drug users – and the drug markets in which they interact – may have become the incidental targets of law enforcement as police seek to enforce social distancing regulations by focusing their efforts on street-level pedestrian activity or open-air gatherings. On the other, interstate border closures and restrictions on person and freight traffic are thought to have interrupted illicit drug supply chains, temporarily reducing or displacing market activity at the street level and thus reducing police detections of drug users. In this study, we extend current analyses of crime during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore how the rate of police detection for drug possession and other drug-related offences has changed. Using crime data from the Australian state of Queensland, we use Auto-Regressive Integrated and Moving Average time series modelling techniques to explore historical trends and their dynamic forecasts. We then compare actual offence rates for March through June to identify any statistically significant changes. We find that reported drug offences significantly vary across time and location highlighting that the impact of COVID-19 is not universal across Queensland. Thus, the significant heterogeneity in local drug market dynamics that has elsewhere been documented remains even in a major crisis with significant changes in policing activity and resource allocation. Our analysis has significant import for criminal justice practitioners in further understanding drug market dynamics and drug-related offending during COVID-19 restrictions.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 02-06-2021
Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent introduction of strict government orders to `stay-at-home' has led to a significant decline in most crime types--except, notably, illicit drug detections. However, the impact of these restrictions on open-air, or street-level, drug markets has been neglected in the study of COVID-19. In this paper, we use data from the state of Queensland, Australia, to explore how COVID-19 restrictions may have impacted the open-air drug market of Fortitude Valley in Brisbane. Using a spatiotemporal generalised additive model (GAM), we find that drug detections did not change in the Fortitude Valley region (despite significant increases across the whole state) but that this finding masked considerable reductions in and around the Fortitude Valley train station as well as in the vicinity Brunswick Street mall. It seems that any COVID-19-related decrease appears to have been offset by increases elsewhere, particularly to the streets north and south west of the main street market. These results highlight the limitations of city-wide aggregate analyses of crime during the pandemic and highlights the need for future research, including with qualitative and ethnographic methods to better understand the lived experiences of drug sellers/users and the law enforcement officers who policed these areas.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 15-07-2020
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-09-2021
Abstract: The drug-crime nexus has received interest from both drug-crime scholars and public policy experts internationally. While there is little disagreement that drug use is linked to higher rates of crime, causation remains hotly contested. One area of emerging interest is the confounding influence of “identity” in shaping long-term behavioral drug use and criminal trajectories. In this study, we explore the prevalence with which recent drug-using police detainees self-identify as drug-dependent and, using logistic regression, model self-identification as a function of one’s demographic, and drug-use profile. We find that being female and younger is associated with an increased odds of self-identifying oneself as dependent, controlling for drug use variables. Of the five drug types, primary heroin users are the most likely to self-identify, whereas cocaine, cannabis, and hetamine users are less likely. To end, the potential implications of these results are discussed, and future research avenues are explored.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2021
DOI: 10.1016/J.DRUGPO.2021.103561
Abstract: In many parts of the world, the social mobility restrictions and stay-at-home orders introduced during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic have been associated with significant reductions in crime. However, contrary to this general finding, illicit drug offence detections increased significantly. In this study, we explore the geographical distribution of the increase in Queensland, Australia, using spatiotemporal generalised additive model (GAM) to identify locations in the Local Government Area (LGA) of Brisbane where drug offence detection rates were unusually high during the three months of the COVID-19 lockdown (April-June 2020). Contrary to expectation, we find that the increase in drug offence detection rates appears to have been modest in most places, but widespread and diffuse throughout the city. We conclude that drug offence detections are most likely to have increased incidentally, probably as a consequence of general street policing initiatives which saw an increase in the visibility and vulnerability of drug user communities. We do, however, identify several locations in Brisbane where the drug offence detection rate exceeded the prediction by a considerable margin (in one case, more than double the upper limit of the prediction). We argue that in these locations the increase was likely the result of some spatial displacement of inner-city drug markets coupled with a series of targeted policing activities. Further research is needed to clarify the true mechanism of change in these locations.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 23-09-2022
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 27-02-2023
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2021
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-2021
No related grants have been discovered for Cameron T. Langfield.