Edney, Richard --- "Book Review: Conflict, Politics and Crime - Aboriginal Communities and the Police" [2001] IndigLawB 26; (2001) 5(7) Indigenous Law Bulletin 22

Book Review:

Conflict, Politics and Crime: Aboriginal Communities and the Police

By Chris Cunneen
Allen & Unwin, 2001, 320p, paperback
RRP: AUD $35.00 (incl GST)

Reviewed by Richard Edney

Chris Cunneen’s Conflict, Politics and Crime: Aboriginal Communities and the Police is a refreshing treatment of indigenous/police relations in Australia by an author well placed to provide such a commentary. The author places the relationship between indigenous communities and the police in its wider political context rather than approaching the issue as a mere policing issue or crime problem.

For Cunneen, the notion of power and who does what to whom, in what circumstances and with what consequences, is the central analytical category with which he approaches the subject matter of this book. The most significant benefit of this approach is that it moves the debate beyond instrumentalist approaches to policing, which ignore the extent to which police, as an instrument of the state, are involved in the cultivation and reproduction of the political order. For Indigenous communities in Australia, the nature of that ‘order’ has been highly problematic and generally involved intervention of a negative type.

As noted above, Cunneeen situates indigenous/ police relations in a wider political framework. In such a framework the police are not merely the passive enforcers of a neutral criminal law, but active and necessary participants in such a process whose effect on indigenous communities have been significant and enduring. Cunneen makes extensive use of historical data to implicate the police forces throughout Australia as a central part of the colonial enterprise. The interaction between indigenous communities and the police during the colonial period was to establish the tenor of the relationship that remains to this day. It was, and is, a relationship characterised by acts of violence and abuse of power towards indigenous communities and the ironic involvement of police in such abuses to maintain a law and order regime to ‘benefit’ the emerging nation state in this country. This historical base, upon which all subsequent relations between indigenous communities and the police are configured, is a useful framework to understand why there are still such fractured and poisoned relations between indigenous communities and the police.

For those familiar with the reality of indigenous/police relations the findings outlined in Cunneen’s book on policing and indigenous offending will not be revelatory. What is different is Cunneen’s treatment of the subject matter and the linkage made between the exclusion of indigenous people from mainstream economic and political relations, and the significance of this for the operation of the criminal justice system. What Cunneen does effectively is to place the role of the police in that context and to demonstrate how the structures of that relationship disadvantage indigenous people. Part of this relationship is also how indigenous people are constructed as dangerous ‘others’ through the use of cultural referents, or stereotypes, which law enforcement agencies may use in policing and enforcement of the criminal law.

As for ‘solutions’, Cunneen does not put forward glib and superficial proposals such as more effective ‘community policing’ (whatever that means). Instead, Cunneen makes clear that what is required is a reorganisation of wider social, economic and political relations that recognises and supports the idea of self-determination for indigenous communities. This, incidentally, is perhaps the most outstanding feature of this book. That is, Cunneen’s preparedness to move beyond explanations and solutions that focus merely on the activities of the actors in the criminal justice system and to link the operation of that system in a relevant and meaningful way to wider questions of power and dispossession.

Conflict, Politics and Crime is an essential contribution to the area of knowledge concerned with the relationship between indigenous communities and the police in Australia. For those who have little knowledge of such matters, Cunneen’s work provides a useful primer to the area. However, there is more to this work than a mere literature review. It is also a work of political theory and ought to be treated as such.

Richard Edney is a Solicitor with the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service.