Megan McElhone | Birkbeck College, University of London (original) (raw)

Papers by Megan McElhone

The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice

We argue that defunding the police is necessary to address fundamental and systemic problems plag... more We argue that defunding the police is necessary to address fundamental and systemic problems plaguing British policing. We do so in response to an article written by Fleetwood & Lea (2022), published in this journal, claiming that ‘defunding the police does not translate well to the UK’ (p.172).

People of Middle Eastern background and appearance have been over-policed by the New South Wales ... more People of Middle Eastern background and appearance have been over-policed by the New South Wales Police Force since the 1990s. This over-policing has involved an assemblage of policies, practices, and institutional units. Police work has also coalesced with law-and-order police, political, and media rhetoric to produce public discourses about the criminal capacities of ‘Middle Eastern’ people, as captured in the neologism ‘Middle Eastern organised crime’. These developments have been subject to little academic scrutiny. This thesis reduces the gap in the literature by examining the Police Force’s approaches to policing people of Middle Eastern background and appearance, for non-terrorism-related matters, between 1998 and 2018.The conceptual tool used to examine the over-policing of people of Middle Eastern background and appearance is the ‘suspect community thesis’. The suspect community thesis draws attention to institutionalised policies and practices that render members of racial...

Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture, 2019

The popular media plays an important role in staging, describing and interpreting race, ethnicity... more The popular media plays an important role in staging, describing and interpreting race, ethnicity, culture, class and criminality for the public. This chapter presents a qualitative content analysis of three Australian popular media texts that frame Middle Eastern background communities in Australia as being crime-prone. The texts analysed are The Combination (2009), Underbelly: The Golden Mile (2010) and Down Under (2016). The chapter argues that these texts represent Middle Eastern background communities as having proclivities for gang membership and firearms-related violence, and as displaying disregard for police and the rule of law. As such, this chapter complements and extends the body of literature that has considered the racialised framing of Middle Eastern background communities as crime-prone in Australian news reporting since the 1990s.

Alternative Law Journal, 2021

In the introduction to Justice Alternatives, Pat Carlen summarises the political, economic, and s... more In the introduction to Justice Alternatives, Pat Carlen summarises the political, economic, and socio-cultural moment in which much of the world (and certainly the Anglosphere) currently finds itself. Her summary makes for grim reading. The neoliberal turn in the politics of capitalist economies has resulted in the battering of welfare states. Meanwhile, the casualisation of workforces and decimation of the living wage have magnified the wealth disparities upon which capitalist systems depend. As capital accumulation and social relations under capitalism have always produced racialised inequality, Carlen's observation that racialised groups and migrants are intensively surveilled, policed, and punished, and that they are accused in nationalist political and public discourses of having caused social, political, and economic decline, can be of little surprise.

Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 2017

In November 2013 the Firearms Act 1996 was amended to provide police in New South Wales with new ... more In November 2013 the Firearms Act 1996 was amended to provide police in New South Wales with new powers to allow them to search for firearms, firearms parts and ammunition without obtaining a warrant. The New South Wales Government's ostensible aim in introducing these new search powers was to assist police in ensuring that individuals who had been issued with a Firearms Prohibition Order were complying with the terms of their order, with a broader view to reducing firearms-related crime in New South Wales. However, the exercise of these powers has not always aligned with the apparent rationale for introducing them, and firearms, firearm parts and ammunition were found in just two per cent of the searches conducted by police in the two years following the amendment of the Firearms Act. In this period police also conducted more than 200 unlawful searches of people who were not subject to an Order. This comment will question the extent to which Firearms Prohibition Order search powers can be justified as an effective and necessary law enforcement tool.