Victim-Oriented Police Reform: A Comparative Perspective

The growth of the global Black Lives Matter movement has shone a renewed spotlight on the universal experience of victimization in the form of under-protection and over-policing for marginalized communities across the world. This chapter uses this debate as an entry point for a discussion about what a more victim-oriented policing might look like and introduces case study examples from the United Kingdom, India, Argentina, and Australia. These examples of victim-oriented policing have been selected to demonstrate the breadth of similar experiences across the globe as societies seek to enhance democratic engagement with policing and to empower the role of victims within the criminal justice system. Victim-oriented policing is rights-based, in that it prioritizes the needs of those who have been victimized, and collaborative, in its recognition that state police agencies represent just one policing node amongst a network of agencies that perform policing functions to support the person who has been victimized. The chapter reviews the existing literature on victim-oriented police reform and introduces the case studies to support some theoretically informed commentary on the challenges of implementing sustainable victim-oriented reforms.