THE POLICED, THE POLICE, ZERO TOLERANCE, THE RULE MAKERS AND THE ALTERNATIVE
Neo Liberalism and the Birth of a New Aristocracy
Presentation by Michael Kennedy to Shelter NSW seminar, 'Housing dollars, social value', University of Sydney, Sydney, 5 July 2005
Michael Kennedy and Kelvin McQueen
School of Humanities, University of Western Sydney, and School of Education, University of New England
The Macquarie Fields and Redfern riots in Sydney, Australia, in 2004 and 2005 reveal the power structures and the relationships between the policy elites in the criminal justice system and rank-and-file police and members of disadvantaged communities. The blame for the causes of social disadvantage, disorder and crime are displaced by policy elites and a complicit media onto the 'problem' of affected communities and the police, harsh provisions are set in place to 'deal with' those communities and rank-and-file police, while little is done to address the real power imbalance between oppressors and oppressed.
The class framework of this story is about the policed, the police, zero tolerance, and, standing above it all, the rule makers. The policed are those cast aside by society's rule makers. The police deal with the resentment of the policed. And the rule makers, or new aristocracy, prescribe zero tolerance for all but themselves and live happily ever after.
The setting could be the lower socio economic areas of New York, London, Washington or Sydney. The focus of this discussion is predominantly the homes of the policed. The rule makers don't live there, but some police do. And while policing the policed, the police can become the policed - that's what zero tolerance means.
To begin at the simplest level: the economic deprivation of the policed leading to outbreaks of community resistance obviously is not caused by the state's low-level functionaries, such as police, teachers, nurses, or welfare workers. Nevertheless, they are left to manage the mess produced by the deprivation and marginalisation created by society's rule makers. On top of this, they are then blamed by the rule makers for the disorder created by the intervention they are licensed to use by those same rule makers.
On March 22nd 2005 a New South Wales Liberal Party politician Catherine Cusack argued:
. I actually wrote a paper 20 years ago about youth alienation. I don't think that is the thing that's changed. I think that young people will always struggle to find their place in the world. What's changed is the violence, the levels of substance abuse, just the enormous freedom that very young people seem to have and it's freedom to get themselves into an awful lot of trouble. This is what really worries me, this idea that people are entitled to respect even though they show nothing, they swear, they spit, they rob.(Brockie 2005).
Within days deputy Liberal leader, Barry O'Farrell from the floor of the New South Wales Parliament pointed at the speaker John Aqulina MP and shouted .He's the f---ing joke. O'Farrell went further and argued that Aquilina was not being paid to make rulings that favoured the Government. O'Farrell finished this outburst by explaining .You are not meant to apply rules as you see fit on a partial basis.And, quite frankly, Mr Speaker, if you can't do it, piss off until we get the money back (Noonan 2005).
Whilst there is a certain bad common sense regarding the 'get tough' initiatives of the Liberal Party their standpoint whilst obviously contradictory is consistent with conservative ideology. On the other hand Premier Bob Carr who is the leader of the more 'progressive' Labor Party Government announced on 28th April 2005 that he was shutting the door on lifetime leases for public housing. Unlike the guaranteed benefits secured from the public purse by all politicians and administrative elites Mr Carr said, .It shouldn't be assumed that anyone has public housing for life. Housing Minister Joe Tripodi then announced that more than 100,000 low-income tenants faced rent increases of up to $30 a week. Future tenants would be charged for water use and lifetime leases were to be scrapped. Minister Tripodi, said the Government wanted to remove subsidies from undeserving tenants. "Under the new arrangements we'll make an assessment and ask you, for example, please explain where you got your BMW from"? There are about 350,000 tenants in 145,000 public housing properties across New South Wales with 71,000 people on waiting lists. The proposed changes will lift the average rent by $15 to $88 a week (Pearman and Noonan 2005).
If I can just briefly return to the crude but probably accurate exchange between Liberal Party MP Barry O'Farrell and Labor Party Speaker John Aquilina it appears that history will ensure that the broader public is non the wiser regarding the behaviour of politicians. The Labor Party Government has seen fit to remove the crude language, uttered from the floor of Parliament, from official Hansard (Noonan 2005).
This blaming of ordinary people by the rule makers is their attempt to avoid the electoral damage that could arise from resistance to their rules. For this blaming to be effective and to grab hold of the popular imagination, the media and marketing arm of the rule makers needs to manage the flow of information, especially to avoid the perception that they have 'lost control', even though they have lost control of a sick economy. As a consequence, the media and the rule makers focus on police violence, on the one hand, and violent offenders, on the other. This is the best way for the rule makers to avoid accountability for the mess that they have created or have chosen to ignore. Then the only significant conflict in society appears to be between the rank-and-file police and the 'criminal' communities. The police or the policed can then be blamed for 'losing control', not the rule makers. This forms the common perception that social problems only exist between the police and the policed and, perversely, that the police are the 'cause' of the problems of the policed.
Who are the policed?
In March 2005, riots erupted in the outer western Sydney suburb of Macquarie Fields, sparked by the deaths of two youths involved in a police car chase. Initially, Premier rule-maker Bob Carr laid the blame for the riotous behaviour squarely on the individuals who ran amok and he denied pointedly that the high levels of unemployment and poverty in Macquarie Fields were to blame, since, apparently, many people grew up in poverty without resorting to violent anti-social behaviour (Totaro & Connolly 2005).
Deputy rule-maker, Police Commissioner Moroney, supported Bob Carr's assessment of who to blame (Totaro & Connolly 2005). Rule-maker-in-waiting, Liberal Party shadow Juvenile Justice Minister Catherine Cusack, agreed with her fellow rule makers on the SBS Insight program:
.there are hundreds of thousands of Australians living in disadvantaged circumstances. They're not all out on the streets rioting. A lot of them have been ambitious for their children, they've got kids trying to improve their lives, if you like, and so we've got to look at other reasons other than just social disadvantage . This is what really worries me, this idea that people are entitled to respect even though they show nothing, they swear, they spit, they rob, they assault people and then the riot's caused because for some reason there's not enough respect to them on the part of the police. (Brockie 2005).
However, the problem of blaming groups of the policed who might otherwise vote for him saw the Premier soften his hard-line stance. Bob Carr acknowledged that the types of disadvantage experienced in housing estates like Macquarie Fields were more complex than in the past:
There are more single-parent families; there is an impact of drug abuse. But I think the key to the problem is that in areas of disadvantage, you will get a small number but a very real presence of hardened career criminals. That can quickly despoil a whole area (Davis 2005).
Despite Carr's concession to a slightly more thoughtful explanation for social disorder, it still needs to be emphasised that the social distress found in disadvantaged communities rests on economic deprivation, that is, it is a direct consequence of poverty, to which, not surprisingly, some individuals react unconstructively (Weatherburn & Lind 2001). Yet the blame for this mess of poverty still continues to adhere to the policed and the police.
It should come as no surprise to rank and file police that the two wings of the government of rule makers and their personally appointed deputy rule-makers 'support' rank and file police by blaming the policed and calling for more police powers. We even had rule-maker hangers-on making unenlightening comments like the following:
This has gone too far, and now the very civil liberties that these social engineers have thrust upon us are now allowing criminals to roam the streets, commit crimes at will and thereby making prisoners of normal, decent, ordinary people. In that way, civil liberties have failed most people.but it is my experience it is a matter of choice, not circumstance. Looking at all those big mouth morons from Macquarie Fields on 60 Minutes, I can't see any reason why those kids are not out working. Yet, there is a small percentage of these losers who continually cry poor and claim to be underprivileged. They are what they are by their own choice (Munro 2005).
Peter Worsley (2000, p.95) argues that rule makers have always manipulated people of humble origins such as police and soldiers to act against other people of humble origins and against their own best interests - in this instance, against the civil liberties that should protect both the policed and the police. This is what is known as 'divide and rule'. Part of this process, according to Chris Cunneen, includes the rule makers deliberately separating the police from the policed:
I think one of the things that's come out of the recent riots is that we should look at what the relationships of the police were with the communities. Those relations must have been extremely poor for young people to become involved in those riots. You know, that needs to be a starting point. So it's not just about social disadvantage, it's not just about unemployment. It's about the relationship or the lack of relationship between the police and the community (Brockie 2005).
But let's not kid ourselves; poverty and unemployment are the prime causes of the entrenched problems and resistance found in policed communities. Even if rule-maker hangers-on 'can't see any reason why those kids are not out working' (Munro 2005), maybe the Australian Bureau of Statistics can in their Australian Social Trends 1999: Work-Definitions & References, which helps to explain why we have such 'moderate' unemployment at the moment:
An employed person [is a] person aged 15 and over who, during the reference week, worked for one hour or more for pay, profit, commission, payment in kind, or workload without pay in a family business, or who had a job but were not at work (Australian Bureau of Statistics 1999).
In other words, if a young person works for just one hour a week (paid or unpaid!) they are not included in the unemployment data presented to the public by State and Commonwealth rule makers. Unemployment, in real terms, is about double the official statistics. For young people, you can double that again to 19 per cent unemployment - and you can double that again for young people in Macquarie Fields, and double it again for young Aboriginal people in Redfern. There's also the casualisation of the labour market providing few, if any, long-term unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. But don't expect the rule makers or their big business buddies to tell you this. If racism or discrimination against poor people starts anywhere, it's with employers who won't give the policed a job. No jobs equals no money equals some crime equals a mess created and ignored by the rule makers and, you guessed it, the police are expected to clean it up (Gouldner 1968).
Who are the police?
The process of blaming is to clearly distinguish for public consumption between the victims and the perpetrators. Sometimes, the policed are not the only ones blamed for the rule makers' mess. For example, Jan Burnswoods MP, Labor's chairperson of the committee investigating the 2004 Redfern riots, which arose from broadly similar circumstances to those at Macquarie Fields, stated publicly before the commencement of hearings that 'Anyone who thinks Aboriginal people don't have reasons to resent police going back generations [is wrong]. We all know the words "they took our children away". Anyone who thinks there isn't racism involved in this surely is wrong' (Devine 2004). This blaming of rank and file police as the perpetrators by a member of Labor's 'Left' faction cleverly shifts the media spotlight away from the real history of the deliberate 'all of government' destruction and neglect of Aboriginal communities by rule makers 'going back generations' to the culpability of the apparently 'racist' rank and file police who were sent to quell the riot on the night. But who really is to blame for the situation that confronted police on that night? Who put the racist practices of dispossessing and then neglecting Indigenous peoples in place, and who then benefited and still benefits from that situation? It is absurd to suggest that rank and file police benefit in any way from Indigenous social and economic marginalisation, but they are directed to clean up the mess made by the rule makers.
The situations that confront police in places like Redfern and Macquarie Fields come from rule makers using rank and file police to enforce brutal and racist policies of social control after the economic damage has been done by those who benefit from the impoverishment of certain sections of society. And who are those who must be controlled? While the greatest economic marginalisation has been of Indigenous peoples and some recent migrant groups, the events at Macquarie Fields show that oppressive policing strategies will be used also against poor white communities (Cunneen 2001).
One of the contributing factors to community hostility towards rank and file police may be the way police are deliberately separated from the communities they police. The 'common sense' of blaming rank and file police can develop in this atmosphere of mutual ignorance, which can then be reinforced with antipathetic comments made to the media by the likes of Jan Burnswoods MP and other 'concerned' rule makers. Emanating as it does from the parliamentary press gallery and the Premier's media office, this orchestrated blaming generally fails to mention the role of politicians and administrative and business elites (the rule makers) in shaping the life chances of marginalised communities and the police. Let's make no bones about this, all discriminatory and oppressive legislation, no matter whom it is directed against, is put in place by the rule makers to serve their own ends. This oppression is then legitimised and reinforced by the compliance of the legal establishment and the state's administrative elites and promoted by an obedient media. It is then that the state's low-level functionaries, such as police, teachers, welfare workers and social workers, have to more or less reluctantly enforce this oppression and take the blame for any ensuing resistance.
But let us not overlook the fact that rank and file police are also 'policed'. One of the best blame-games in living memory was the Wood Royal Commission into the New South Wales Police Service between 1994 and 1997. While serious corruption was revealed, what vocal critics of rank and file police have failed to explain is why they have been so quiet about the misconduct of the Royal Commission's investigators and lawyers. To take just two examples, the investigation strategies led to double-digit suicides (Curtiss 2003; Glascott 1997) and fifteen intravenous drug users died during a Commission-sanctioned police integrity operation that involved the distribution of heroin (Brown 2003). No investigator or lawyer who served with the Royal Commission has been brought to justice for these abuses of power and procedure. These examples reinforce the point that rank and file police are situated at the 'disposable' end of the criminal justice system, just like the policed, where they can be framed, blamed and abandoned, while corrupt rule makers can use their culture of silence and mateship to avoid ever facing justice.
If rank and file police stop to consider the 'we support you' rhetoric of the Labor or Liberal rule makers and their hangers-on, then they should be aware of the corrupt and criminal acts that have been perpetrated against rank and file police over the last fifteen or so years. These crimes can be found in the largely ignored revelations about staff misconduct and criminal behaviour at the Wood Royal Commission and others detailed in the unpublished Harrison Inquiry (Commonwealth Attorney General 1997) and the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs (Commonwealth of Australia 2003). The 'we support you' gang of rule makers and their hangers-on has been unable to explain the failure to investigate most of these allegations.
What is zero tolerance?
Yet, at the same time, the rule makers have supported 'zero tolerance' policing of both the police and the policed. Over the last ten or so years, the 'broken windows' theory of Wilson and Kelling (1982) of harassing anyone who may even look like a 'crim' and the Compstat surveillance of police workload, introduced by New York's rule-makers Bratton and Giuliani (Bratton & Knobler 1998), have been presented as a type of holy grail to fix all crime and corruption. It must come as a crushing blow to the supporters of the aggression associated with zero tolerance policing when ex-NYPD Commissioner William Bratton recently announced in Brisbane that
'Zero tolerance doesn't work anywhere,' he said. 'In New York City we used it for two problems only: police corruption and police use of drugs. "If you're corrupt, we'll put you in jail; if you're using drugs, we'll fire you."' The idea of zero tolerance simply could not be applied across the broad spectrum of everyday crime such as public drunkenness and hooliganism, Mr Bratton said. Instead, the idea of zero tolerance smacked of zealotry and set police up for impossible standards. 'We can control it (crime), but we can never totally eliminate it' (Murdoch 2005).
So zero tolerance was really only meant to apply to rank and file police! So that's the rule makers' agenda - create the mess, sacrifice police, and then blame them for any problems or resistance that arises.
What's the alternative?
The simplistic 'policed versus police' explanation given wide currency by rule makers for the crime levels in New York and London or the riots at Macquarie Fields and Redfern needs re-examination. For instance, how does the following fit into that pattern? It was reported in 2004 that police 'left the Redfern riot "disgusted" and "embarrassed" with how their bosses had handled Sydney's worst civil disturbance in decades' (Sofios 2004). It would appear that both the police and the policed express resistance towards those rule makers who impact on their day-to-day existence.
For an alternative understanding of the riots, rank and file police should know that the implementation by the rule makers of aggressive policing strategies, such as zero tolerance, confirms in the public mind the role of police as oppressive agents of social control - that is, that they are the enemies of ordinary people. The Centre for Research on Criminal Justice in the United States understood long ago in 1975 that although the police are misused as a repressive force by the rule makers to contain the poor and the powerless, they are also themselves exploited by relatively low pay for the difficult work they do and are largely politically powerless. The police are the instruments of the law, but they do not make the law. The police protect the private property of business, but they do not own it. As guardians of the peace they defend government policies that support inequality and racism, but they do not derive any personal benefit from these. In their repression of popular protests, the police defend a political order from which they are excluded. They are also deliberately socially isolated from the communities they 'serve'. The police are both victimisers and victims. Rather than letting rule makers and their hangers-on call for more police powers to be used against the policed (which only means that those same powers will be used against the police), because the police have just as much to lose as the policed, then they need to organise politically their resentment against the impositions of the rule makers (Bernstein et al 1975, p.144).
Social unrest, crime and violence that have poverty at their core are problems created by the rule makers and it is no longer acceptable for governments to avoid their responsibilities and thrust what is properly their problem onto police, teachers, nurses and other low-level functionaries expecting them to tidy up the mess, and then for the rule makers to play the blame-game.
Reference list
Australian Bureau of Statistics (1999) Australian Social Trends 1999: Work-Definitions & References. Canberra: Australian Government www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs.
Bernstein, S., Cooper, L., Currie, E., Frappier, J., Harring, S., Platt, T., Poyner, P., Ray, G., Scruggs, J. and Trujillo, L. (1975) The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove- An Analysis of the U.S. Police, 2 edn. The Centre for Research on Criminal Justice: California.
Bratton, W. and Knobler, P. (1998) Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic, Random House: New York.
Brockie, J. (2005) Out of Control. Chris Cunneen & Catherine Cusack. SBS-Insight Programme. 22 March.
Brown, T. (2003) 60 Minutes: Dirty work. TCN 9.30 March.
Commonwealth Attorney General (1997) Findings of the Harrison Inquiry into the Australian Federal Police. In: Commonwealth Government: Attorney General Darryl Williams, (Ed.) Findings of the Harrison Inquiry into the Australian Federal Police, pp. , 8 May. Attorney General's Department: Canberra]
Commonwealth of Australia (2003) Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs - Crime in the Community , Commonwealth Government : Canberra.
Cunneen, C. (2001) Conflict Politics and Crime, Allen and Unwin : Sydney.
Curtis, M. (2003) Fought the Law. Sunday Telegraph, 7 September, pp.12-17.
Davis, A. (2005) Carr Searches for Social Trigger to riots. Sydney Morning Herald, March 5, p.3.
Devine, M. (2004) The Problems with Redfern. Sydney Morning Herald, May 20.
Glascott, K. (1997) Police, Paedophiles and Pay-Offs. The Weekend Australian, 15 March, p.10.
Gouldner, A. (1968) The Sociologist as a Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State. The American Sociologist May, 103-116.
Munro Mike (2005) Mean Streets. Tim Priest in online forum. 60 Minutes [online]. http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2005_03_13/story_1320.asp. Nine MSN - Sixty Minutes, 13 March.
Murdoch, A. (2005) Australia Can Learn from US Mistakes. The Courier Mail, 15 March, p.5.
Noonan, G. (2005) Point of Disorder, Mr Speaker, You are Joking. Sydney Morning Herald, 25 March.
Pearlman, J. and Noonan, G. (2005) Carr Shuts Door on the Lifetime Lease. Sydney Morning Herald , 28 April, p.3.
Totaro Paola and Connolly Ellen (2005) When Rage Hits Boiling Point. Sydney Morning Herald, 5 March, p.19.
Weatherburn, D. and Lind, B. (2001) Delinquent - Prone Communities, Cambridge University Press: Melbourne.
Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G. (1982) The Police and Neighbourhood Safety. The Atlantic, March, p. 29-38.
Worsley, P. (2002) Marx and Marxism. Routledge: London.
Dr Kelvin McQueen
School of Education
University of New England
ARMIDALE 2351
Phone: (02) 6773 2573
Email: kmcquee2@metz.une.edu.au
Michael Kennedy
University of Western Sydney
Ph (02) 47748391
M 0418669584
Email m.kennedy@uws.edu.au