Mr David Dixon

David Dixon  is a professor at UNSW Law. He was Dean for ten years to mid-2016   

The common theme running through David Dixon’s policing research is how regulation (legal and otherwise) affects policing practice. He has an international reputation for research in discrete but related fields: gambling regulation; drug law enforcement; comparative policing strategies and developments in criminal justice; legal regulation of policing; police reform; and police interrogation.  He is currently researching comparative developments in police interrogation.

David Dixon has conducted research on policing in England, Australia and the US and is committed to empirical fieldwork and comparative, historical and interdisciplinary perspectives. His research on police interrogation is the only study based on a large random sample of interrogations in a jurisdiction routinely using audio-visually recording.

HIs current research continues to focus on interrogation, but also outside criminal justice on post-colonial legacies and on legal education. 

His books include:

• From Prohibition to Regulation: Bookmaking, Anti-Gambling and the Law (Oxford University Press); 
• Law in Policing: Legal Regulation and Police Practices (Oxford University Press);  
• A Culture of Corruption: Changing an Australian Police Service (Hawkins Press); and
• Interrogating Images: Audio-visually Recorded Police Questioning of Suspects (Sydney Institute of Criminology).

A full list of publications can be found on the Faculty webpage .

He has acted as research consultant and adviser to the Home Office (England & Wales), the Criminal Justice Commission (Queensland), the NSW Police, and the Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service. He was co-editor of Criminal Justice: An International Journal of Policy and Practice, and editor of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology.

Areas of expertise
Interrogation, Policing, Criminal justice, Illegal markets, Regulation