Cultural accommodation and the policing of Aboriginal communities: A case study of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands
| Author | Amanda Nettelbeck,Alexander Reilly,Peter Whellum |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865819866245 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Cultural accommodation
and the policing of
Aboriginal communities:
A case study of the
Anangu Pitjantjatjara
Yankunytjatjara Lands
Peter Whellum, Amanda Nettelbeck and
Alexander Reilly
University of Adelaide, Australia
Abstract
The relationship between Aboriginal communities and police continues to be a pressing issue
in contemporary debates about criminal justice reform in Australia. The Australian Law
Reform Commission’s recent Pathways to Justice report offers a set of recommendations
on how to interrupt the continuing cycle of Aboriginal people’s disproportionate suscepti-
bility to arrest, police custody, and incarceration. Many of its recommendations are grounded
in the principle of building more systematic forms of cultural accommodation and community
collaboration into the culture of policing. Some of these principles are already adopted by
Australian police authorities in programmes such as the employment of Aboriginal police
liaison officers, the inclusion of cultural awareness education in the training of law enforce-
ment personnel, and the guarantee of interpreter services. Focusing upon the Anangu
Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands and drawing upon the reported experiences of Anangu
with police, this article examines the extent to which such reforms have transformed
Aboriginal/police relations and worked to incorporate cultural difference into the culture
of contemporary policing. While none of the policing issues discussed here are unique to the
Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, the geographical remoteness of the Lands and
the diversity of their communities combine to establish a unique set of policing challenges.
Having considered existing strategies to meet these challenges, the article concludes that
Corresponding author:
Amanda Nettelbeck, School of History and Politics, The University of Adelaide, North Terrace, Adelaide,
South Australia 5005, Australia.
Email: amanda.nettelbeck@adelaide.edu.au
Australian & New Zealand Journal of
Criminology
2020, Vol. 53(1) 65–83
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0004865819866245
journals.sagepub.com/home/anj
Aboriginal people’s fuller access to justice requires deeper structural reform to the culture of
policing than is yet available.
Keywords
Community policing, cultural accommodation, cultural awareness training, interpreters,
policing reform
Date received: 28 April 2019; accepted: 8 July 2019
Introduction
In March 2018, the report of the Australian Law Reform Commission’s ‘Inquiry into
the Incarceration Rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ was tabled
before the national parliament (ALRC, 2017). Titled Pathways to Justice, the report
extends – and in many ways repeats – older calls for intervention into the structural
disadvantages faced by Aboriginal Australians in the criminal justice system, including
the recommendations for change outlined in the national 1991 Royal Commission into
Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (Anthony, 2015; Cunneen, 2001; Johnston, 1991). One of
the outcomes of the Royal Commission was the establishment of Aboriginal Justice
Advisory Councils in every Australian state or territory (Cunneen, 2007). Although
these have had some impact in shifting the terms on which the administration of justice
operates in relation to Aboriginal people, Aboriginal incarceration rates have only
increased in the almost three decades since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal
Deaths in Custody tabled its report, confirming the place of Aboriginal Australians
as the most incarcerated people per capita in the world (Anthony, 2016; Zillman,
2018). There can be no doubt that breaking the historical patterns that continue to
limit Aboriginal access to substantive justice requires a new level of political will.
The Australian Law Reform Commission’s new Pathways to Justice report offers
35 recommendations geared towards interrupting the structural problems of Aboriginal
people’s relationship to the criminal justice system. These include amending existing
legislation to better accommodate cultural circumstances, but they also include more
systematic reforms grounded in cultural change and more extensive community collab-
oration. These more culturally oriented recommendations highlight programmes of
‘justice reinvestment’, which would re-centre the justice system’s energy and resources
into community-driven initiatives for preventing or mitigating offending and its prose-
cution at the ‘front’ end. They also highlight a need to introduce more robust measures
of cultural accommodation into the administration of justice itself, for instance by
establishing more specialist Indigenous sentencing courts, providing more cultural
awareness training to law enforcement personnel, guaranteeing interpreter services to
Aboriginal people for whom English is not the first language, and employing more
Aboriginal people within police services (ALRC, 2017, recommendations 13–18).
As the Pathways to Justice report acknowledges, access to justice begins with polic-
ing. Police represent the ‘front line’ of the criminal justice system as first responders and
they hold considerable powers in this capacity, including discretionary determination
66 Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 53(1)
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