Policing the rural crisis.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Hogg, Russell
• Date: 01 December 2005

Based on empirical research in a number of rural communities in north-western NSW, this article explores the dynamics of rural crisis as it is manifested in and through popular attitudes and campaigns around law and order. There is no denying that crime rates in many rural communities are high, often very high by national standards, or that local crime disproportionately involves Indigenous offenders (and Indigenous victims). However, the views expressed in interviews with established White residents, in local media and in organised campaigns around law and order are suggestive of a much deeper sense of threat and crisis. This, it is argued, can be explained in relation not simply to crime rates but the way in which crime is experienced at the local level and the manner in which it is connected to other unwanted change that is seen to threaten the integrity of these communities. In order to understand these anxieties it is necessary to explore historical patterns of settlement, the economic structure and the culture of rural communities. Indigenous Australians have, at best, occupied an ambiguous and fragile position in relation to membership of these communities, a form of 'passive' belonging, 'conditional' on deference to dominant White norms governing civic and domestic life. Local Indigenous crime can be a source of deep anxiety not only because it causes harm to person and property but because it is interpreted by many Whites as a repudiation of the local social order, a signifier of larger threats to the community and on occasions as a harbinger of social breakdown. The article explores some of the key themes emerging from interview material that characterise this sense of crisis and relates them to the larger pattern of change affecting many communities: economic decline, changing government policies and priorities, the growing relative economic and political power of Indigenous people, debates about native title and so on.

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The research on which this article (1) is based was carried out over a 3-year period (1998-2000) in communities in north-western NSW. (2) Two earlier articles were published in this journal (Hogg & Carrington, 1998, 2003). All the communities in which we undertook research had crime rates substantially above the state and Sydney metropolitan averages, as indeed do most nonmetropolitan regions in NSW. There is also abundant evidence that in these communities, as well as more generally, there are very high levels of contact between Indigenous people and the criminal justice system (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1995, 2004; Anti-Discrimination Board, 1982; Broadhurst, 2002; Cunneen, 2001; Cunneen & Robb, 1987; Jochelson, 1997; NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, 1999; Weatherbum, Lind, & Hua, 2003). Debate continues as to whether these high levels of involvement are best understood in terms of high levels of Indigenous crime or the discriminatory overpolicing of Indigenous communities. Different interpretations suggest different policy responses.

These are important debates but they are not my central concern here. I am willing to accept that there are serious crime problems in these communities. Indigenous Australians are disproportionately the victims as well as the offenders in these crimes. They also take the greater share of practical responsibility for dealing with the problems: staffing refuges, conducting night patrols, looking out for neglected kids and so on. I would maintain, however, that the present high level of criminal justice intervention in Indigenous lives and communities, whether it is properly characterised as discriminatory or not, cannot but perpetuate the levels of crime it seeks to control. Quite apart from anything else it simply wreaks social, demographic and economic havoc on families and communities to have so many of their members caught up in the disruptive cycle of the criminal process. A rational response to the crime problems would have to find other ways than a reliance on tougher law-and-order measures. But perhaps we are unlikely to even get to the point of having such a discussion if it is assumed that crime and its control is all that is at stake in public discourses around law and order. The attitudes and sensibilities manifest in our interviews with local residents, in organised local and regional campaigns around law and order, in media reporting and in muffled threats of vigilantism suggest rather that the feelings and reactions relate to something more than local crime. It is to exploring this 'something more' that this article is devoted.

Emile Durkheim (1985, pp. 39-46) pointed out a century ago that the social reaction to crime is much more than merely a response to a violation of the law. Crime, or (to be more precise) some types and instances of crime, stir the 'conscience collective'--the deep affective bonds that constitute the moral and social cement of a community. This accounts for the passionate emotional responses triggered by crime and whose public expression serves in turn to affirm communal bonds. This also directs our attention to what else may be at stake in the social experience and perception of crime and reactions to it in particular settings--to the shape and scale of the threat, real and imagined, and to other anxieties that cluster around the crime issue and which are articulated to it, and through it, in everyday life and discourse. This is why talk of crime so often effortlessly slips into statements concerning much more than crime--the moral decline of society, the parlous condition of the family, the threat posed by the presence of alien cultures, the corrupting effects of the media or declining respect for authority among the young. It is this perspective that I seek to apply to law-and-order discourse in the region and communities in western NSW in which our research was conducted.

A Note on Defining Rural Australia

Although the following analysis is concerned with what is the predominantly agricultural and pastoral interior of western NSW it is important to acknowledge that settlement in rural Australia is not based solely on agriculture and pastoralism. In many localities and regions mining, forestry or other extractive industries constitute the dominant economic activity. In others a single industry employer, such as an abattoir, or large infrastructure projects, such as dams, have played an important role. Tourism is becoming more important in some areas. Consequently there is significant diversity in the culture of rural Australia related to these and other differences in patterns of settlement. Caution is therefore needed in generalising the analysis beyond the settings in which the research was undertaken. However, this does not alter a central contention of the analysis: that for a variety of reasons discussed later agricultural and pastoral settlement has historically been the culturally preferred pattern and the one which has most resonated with national culture and policies of national development. The crisis in rural Australia is experienced as such primarily because social change (including increasing crime rates) is seen to threaten in particular the values and communities erected on those foundations.

Law and Order Campaigns in the West

The local law and order campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s in western NSW-mostly organised by conservative politicians, local councillors and some business people--primarily focused on high levels of public disorder and property crime involving young Indigenous people. These concerns are reflected and, one might add, heightened in the images projected in local, regional and occasionally the metropolitan news media in headlines and references such as the following: 'terrorised' towns (Daily Telegraph, July 7, 1995), 'town under crime siege' (Daily Liberal, February 26, 1998), 'bands of marauding children' (The Bulletin, September 12, 1995) and 'renegade Aborigines' (The Bulletin, April 7, 1987). In early 1998 one regional daily newspaper headlined one of its stories after a spate of local crimes as 'G--faces its own civil war' (Daily Liberal, February 27, 1998). Public meetings, marches, local law-and-order committees, petitions and delegations to state government from the mid-1980s on advanced a similar catalogue of demands in response to this experience of a law-and-order crisis, including: (3)

* increased police powers and police numbers to deal with 'lawlessness on the streets'

* police powers to remove children from the streets

* lowering the age of criminal responsibility and the age at which young offenders are tried and punished as adults

* imposition of criminal and civil liability on parents when their failure to control their children contributes to the commission of a crime

* an end to judicial leniency and the introduction of mandatory sentencing for serious and repeat offenders

* tougher prison regimes

* stricter discipline in schools

* reform of legal aid and abolition of the Aboriginal Legal Service

* an inquiry to determine the feasibility of a reserve police force.

The demands revolve around a consistent set of themes relating to young people out of control, failing families, lax discipline in schools, and the many ways in which the institutions of government fail ordinary people, through for example judicial leniency, criminal justice policies that favour criminals over victims, and policies that provide special rights for minorities. They suggest not just a concern with higher than average crime rates but the sense of a more profound crisis of social authority in these communities. On occasions citizen patrols have been threatened if state governments did not respond to local demands for tougher measures. (4)

Rural Australia and National Life

To understand the depth of this sense of crisis it is necessary to recognise the way in which Australian rural life and national identity have been intertwined historically...