Public health and law enforcement (PDF)

Three international conferences on the intersection of law enforcement and public health - Melbourne 2012, Amsterdam 2014 and 2106 - have shown a vast range of areas and issues in which the partnership between the two sectors is critically important in devising and implementing the most effective approaches to complex social issues. This area, newly identified academically but with a long and respectable history [e.g. Bittner, Punch], is beginning to receive long overdue scrutiny with the realisation that effective approaches to these issues come only with multi-sectoral collaborations and partnerships. The conferences demonstrated that these issues are manifold - the last conference highlighted themes including mental health, violence (especially gender-based), crises and catastrophes, infectious diseases (especially HIV) and trauma (especially PTSD and road traffic), but there are many more areas that can be considered. This eBook highlights a few of the more important areas, including papers from talks given at the 2016 LEPH Conference providing an excellent illustration of the range of substantive themes: mental health, domestic/family violence, child abuse and alcohol-related harm; and of some overarching issues of leadership and collectivisation of responses. It should be emphasised, and the papers herein manifest this, that few of these issues exist in the single person or the single situation in isolation - mental ill-health, alcohol, other drugs, and violence all commonly inter-relate and reinforce each other's untoward impact.