Investigating death: the emotional and cultural challenges for police

Abstract

The over-representation of vulnerable populations within the criminal justice system, and the role of police in perpetuating this, has long been a topic of discussion in criminology. What is less discussed is the way in which non-criminal investigations by police, in areas like a death investigation, may similarly disadvantage and discriminate against vulnerable populations. In Australia, as elsewhere, it is police who are responsible for investigating both suspicious and violent deaths like homicide as well as non-suspicious, violent deaths like accidents and suicides. Police are also the agents tasked with investigating deaths, which are neither violent nor suspicious but occur outside hospitals and other care facilities. This paper, part of a larger funded Australian research project focusing on the ways in which cultural and religious differences are dealt with during the death investigation process, reports on how police describe – or are described by others – during their role in a non-suspicious death investigation, and the challenges that such investigations raise for police and policing. The employment of police liaison officers is discussed as one response to the difficulty of policing cultural and religious difference with variable results.

Keywords:

• emotion
• culture
• death
• coroner

Acknowledgements

This research was led by investigators from Queensland University of Technology. Appropriate ethics approvals were gained from Queensland University of Technology, Queensland Health, Queensland Police Service and Queensland Coroner's Office.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In our interviews, Jewish families were rarely acknowledged as a separate category but rather accommodated by police under broader (and legitimate) cultural or religious concerns. We have surmised that this may be due to in part to the social construction of Jews as ‘gentile, Western Other’, homogenised and othered in much the same way as the ‘Asian’, but not to the same extent because the Jew is also white, European and Western (Stratton 2000). Research also demonstrates that anti-Semitism is on the decrease in Australia, unlike many other countries (Rutland 2005, Stobbs 2008) and that the Jewish community are neither over-policed nor over-criminalised in Australia (Stobbs 2008). In Australia, it is also consistently noted that prominent members of the Jewish community were part of the founding government of Australia and continued to use their influence in policy and legislation regarding Jewish immigration after World War II (Rutland 2005). Finally, the recasting of Judaism after the Holocaust as integral to the history of the West would appear to place Jewish objections against autopsy in a different location to either Muslim or Indigenous concerns (Mamdani 2004).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage grant [grant number LP100200393]. It was also supported by The Queensland Health Service Forensic Scientific Service, Queensland Police Service and Queensland Coroner's Office.