Racial Profiling, Australian Criminology and the Creation of Statistical ‘Facts’: A Response to Shepherd and Spivak

Abstract

Stephane Shepherd and Benjamin Spivak in their article ‘Estimating the extent and nature of offending by Sudanese-born individuals in Victoria’, published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, suggest that recent patterns of alleged offending among South Sudanese young people “may be more reflective of an increased involvement in crime for a small number of young men, rather than systemic policing bias or the natural consequence of a group’s demographics” (Shepherd & Spivak, 2020, p. 364). In this article, we interrogate the research methodology and findings of Shepherd and Spivak’s (2020) study. We argue that among the crucial flaws of the article is the substantive lack of interrogation of crime statistics on alleged offending and the article’s failure to triangulate this data with the diverse perspectives and voices of South Sudanese people themselves.