Contemporary policing faces many challenges, at global, national and local levels. In 2014, Griffith University together with the Queensland Police Service (QPS) hosted an inaugural joint symposium designed to examine these challenges and their implications for Australian police services. The co-hosted symposia have continued annually since then.
The rationale of the Future of Policing symposia is that police leaders and researchers can work together to identify and examine problems, and develop new and innovative solutions. The symposia are intended to help overcome the ‘dialogue of the deaf’ traditionally said to affect communications between practitioners and researchers.
The theme of the 2019 symposium was on transforming policing. Increasingly complex communities, crime and social problems, and government objectives, are all driving police agencies to re-think what they do and how they do it. Police must continue to balance traditional community safety concerns with new imperatives for proactive intervention, disruption, and coordinated harm prevention. How can these multiple goals be achieved? We were pleased to be joined by leading practitioners and researchers to guide discussions on these issues.
The 6th annual symposium was again co-hosted by GCI and Queensland Police Service (QPS) on the 7 August at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. It was opened by Mark Ryan, Minister for Police and Corrective Services. Speakers included QPS Commissioner Katarina Carroll, NZ Police Deputy Chief Mark Evans, Youth Justice Director-General Bob Gee, Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council Director Anne Edwards, Milan Orgad from Australia New Zealand Policing Advisory Agency and GCI members Kristina Murphy, Jacki Drew and Martin Andresen. Attendees included representatives from across Australia, and senior levels of the Queensland government.
