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Law Enforcement, Public Health, and Vulnerability

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Abstract

There is now widespread scholarly and practice agreement that vulnerability is at the very core of law enforcement and public health (LEPH) partnerships. Practitioners also agree that ‘clients’ are the same across sectors: police often encounter people who have been receiving the care of (public) health practitioners or, at the very least, been on the radar of these practitioners. Yet, legislation and policy continue to be disjointed in relation to definitions of vulnerability, when consistency in defining the problem, along with collaboration between these fields, would help disciplinary and practice collaborations in the field. As a result, siloed practices remain the norm and are quickly becoming outdated in terms of service delivery efficiency and appropriate care. This chapter will identify the reasons why seeking a better integration of practice across all sectors is a worthwhile pursuit. We argue that debates around disciplinary specificity and fenced-in budgets are to the detriment of better-targeted, holistic service delivery for vulnerable people. Collaborations across law enforcement and public health may appear costly and time-consuming in the short term; however, multidisciplinary practice can elicit significant return on investment and timely recuperation of costs in the longer term. In this chapter, we first consider the nature, and the crucial positioning of vulnerability at the centre of all LEPH collaborations. We then analyse several events that have precipitated renewed attention on vulnerability, as well as the undeniability of its universality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Or, more likely, who are subject to a public health intervention from their general or clinical health practitioner.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tasmanian Inst. Law Enforcement Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia

    Isabelle Bartkowiak-Théron & Nicole L. Asquith

Authors
  1. Isabelle Bartkowiak-Théron
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  2. Nicole L. Asquith
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Correspondence to Isabelle Bartkowiak-Théron .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tasmanian Inst. Law Enforcement Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia

    Isabelle Bartkowiak-Théron

  2. Faculty of Health and Community Studies, MacEwan University, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    James Clover

  3. School of Business, Law and Social Science, Abertay University, Dundee, UK

    Denise Martin

  4. Milken Institute School of Public Health, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    Richard F. Southby

  5. Centre for Law Enforcement and Public Health School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne Global Law Enforcement and Public Health Association, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Nick Crofts

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Bartkowiak-Théron, I., Asquith, N.L. (2022). Law Enforcement, Public Health, and Vulnerability. In: Bartkowiak-Théron, I., Clover, J., Martin, D., Southby, R.F., Crofts, N. (eds) Law Enforcement and Public Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83913-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83913-0_4

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-83913-0

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