Policing and the Community in Australia Rick Sarre

1. Policing and the Communityin AustraliaRick Sarre For the IPES, Bahrain, October, 2003

2. Australian police services Australia has 6 large, centralised police bureaucracies (+ a Federal police service and 1 Territory service) covering, in most cases, extensive geographical areas. About 40,000 officers atapprox 230/100,000 population.

3. Community policing Principally, community policing is designed with the idea of preventing criminal activity but ALSO tackling and reducing the conditions under which deviant behaviour may be encouraged. Categories of community policing can be listed as the following: • problem-solving policing • inter-agency cooperation • partnership with the community I wish to focus on the last two.

4. Problem-solving policing • This idea emanated from the Herman Goldstein notion of problem-oriented policing and has re-emerged, arguably, as intelligence-led policing. Policing on the beat, good intelligence inspired by having the confidence of the local community and informants.

5. Inter-agency cooperation The idea that public police forces should not discourage the growth of ad hoc protection services has been alive in Australian jurisdictions for many years. Governments have encouraged an expansion of the role in peace-keeping currently being played by private personnel and professional security providers.

6. Inter-agency cooperation There is currently dawning a new era in Australian policing that presents police services with many opportunities to integrate their own resources with those of other institutions, including private providers, in establishing an efficient, yet democratic, policing ‘network’.

7. Inter-agency cooperation That is, re-vitalising the notion of ‘community policing’ into a coordinated policing network where there are new models for mobilizing the community sector (public/private/community-based) and integrating their capacities into existing structures. The work of Australian academics at REGNET is important in this regard.

8. Community partnerships I wish to look at Indigenous Australians and policing issues. This setting highlights elements of all three of the community policing strategies mentioned. To begin: There is a massive over-representation of Indigenous Australians in the criminal justice system today. This is an embarrassment for all Australians. E.g. Indigenous Australians are 2% of the population but 20% of the prison population.

9. History An unofficial policy of Aboriginal eradication began to unfold amongst the military peace-keepers in late 18th century New South Wales. Australia’s colonial history is replete with stories of savagery, waterhole poisonings and shootings.

10. History It was not unusual for colonial administrators to deploy police in frontier warfare against Indigenous tribes, and as a form of self-defence. Caught up in a world of land theft, attack and reprisal, colonial police, even those who may have harboured some sympathy for native populations, had little option but to carry out their assigned tasks.

11. Legacy for the modern era For many Aboriginal people, the first contact they had with the police was with a paramilitary force of dispossession, dispensing summary justice and on some occasions involved in the indiscriminate massacre of clan and tribal groups. (Cunneen, 2001, p 50) Similar themes today.

12. Modern day [F]ar too much police intervention in the lives of Aboriginal people … has been arbitrary, discriminatory, racist and violent. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the antipathy which so many Aboriginal people have towards police is based not just on historical contact but upon the contemporary experience of contact with many police officers. (Johnston, 1991, p 195)

13. Consequences • Over-policing In the remote New South Wales town of Walgett, for example, where 18 per cent of residents identified as Indigenous in 1993, Amnesty International (1993) found that there was one police officer per 96 residents, while the average for the rest of the State of New South Wales (where just 1.8 per cent of population are of Aboriginal descent) was one police officer per 459 residents.

14. Consequences • High arrest rates The use of the caution, as an alternative to arrest, is less common for Indigenous Australians than it is for non-Indigenous Australians for reasons that probably relate to higher recidivism rates. This has the effect of ‘confirming’ a self-fulfilling prophecy. E.g. In Victoria, Indigenous young people are significantly less likely to receive a police caution than non-Indigenous young people (11.3 per cent versus 35.6 per cent in 1995/1996).

15. Consequences • High remand in custody rates Wright, 1999 confirmed that Aboriginality is significantly associated with the likelihood of being remanded in custody. He tracked 4,758 adult defendants whose cases were finalised in 1996 in SA magistrates courts. 25 legal and extra-legal remand-in-custody predictors derived from the court and police data were fed through a regression analysis. The study concluded that Aboriginality is significantly associated with a custodial outcome, independent of any other variable in the model.

16. New horizons: the three aspects of community policing identified can play a role in forging a new future 1. ‘Professional partnerships policing’  where Aboriginal people are given a key role in controlling anti-social behaviour, minor infractions and serious breaches of the law  can be and have been successfully integrated into policing policies.

17. New horizons 2. Community Constables now work in mainstream policing activities. While it is recognised that women are too few in number as Aides or Community Constables, especially given the double impact of gender and ‘racial’ inequalities in policing Indigenous women, there have been a number of positive benefits for police and Indigenous communities alike as a result of these partnerships.

18. New horizons 3. Training in non-racist attitudes. Yet a study by Wortley and Homel (1995) highlighted that police prejudice is more likely to emanate from police interactions with Indigenous Australians rather than inherently racist attitudes. This finding highlights the need for strategic policy-making that moves beyond the provision of cultural awareness programs in police training.

19. New horizons 4. Customary law, community justice panels and Indigenous-run policing patrols. There are over one hundred of the last of these, which operate around Australia (Blagg and Valuri, 2002). One of the best known is the Tangentyere night patrol and social behaviour project in Alice Springs, an operation designed to take drunk and disorderly people into care before police need to be called to arrest them.

20. New horizons 5. Aboriginal court:Non-appearances at court by Indigenous offenders provide much work for police in tracking down, and arresting, those accused persons who have failed to answer their bail. Non-appearance, then, has two major consequences for police and indigenous relations: offenders are likely to be arrested on warrant, and the likelihood of bail being refused at the next hearing is extremely high. One initiative that has drastically reduced the rate of non-appearances (and therefore rates of arrest) is the Aboriginal Court.

21. New horizons 6. Cautionsshould be made more accessible and available as an option for police. This does not mean to suggest that all drunkenness or inappropriate language or behaviour in public places is to be condoned. In many cases, however, a stern warning to unruly persons might be just as effective as an arrest in stopping inappropriate behaviour.

22. Conclusion 1 Policy-makers need to consider designing policing strategies that will bring about fewer Aboriginal arrests, and make it less likely that officers will seek custodial remands for Indigenous offenders. Furthermore, self-policing and Aboriginal courts in appropriate regions should be explored as part of a broader political agenda that embraces the possibilities of Indigenous self-policing, self-administration of justice and self-determination.

23. Conclusion 2 ‘Community-style’ policing within Indigenous communities will likely remain a major challenge for governments and Indigenous administrators alike. But if these issues remain in the forefront of police research and policy-making, however, they promise to improve policing for all Australians.