BEYOND ZERO TOLERANCE

‘Zero tolerance policing ’ has several meanings and references.1 Firstly, those who claim to support it are often merely using a fashionable slogan which condenses and expresses a range of commitments to harshness in criminal justice with no particular reference to specific policing strategies or tactics. Senior police officers often distance themselves from it.2 It could be objected that, in this form, ‘zero tolerance ’ is not worthy of our attention. None the less, there is something important here, both criminologically and politically. In the degenerate context of Australian law and order politics, it is not possible to dismiss zero tolerance as inconsequential.3 The political power of tabloid newspapers and talk-back radio should be underestimated. Unfortunately, many politicians treat policing as a realm where populist common-sense prevails, rather than as an important and complex area of public administration in which policy development should draw on extensive research-based knowledge (Sherman, forthcoming). Secondly, and literally, ‘zero tolerance ’ would mean that police should fully enforce the criminal law and that discretion would be eliminated from policing. Far from being anything new, this expresses an approach to the law-policing relationship which has long bee