Reviews
| Author | Benoit Dupont,Anita Gibbs |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.35.3.403 |
| Published date | 01 December 2002 |
| Date | 01 December 2002 |
403
THE AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOLUME 35 NUMBER 3 2002 PP.403–407
REVIEWS
Blue Army: Paramilitary Policing in Australia
Jude McCulloch
(2001) Melbourne: Melbourne University Press,289 pp. ISBN 0-522-84960-1, Paperback.
It has now become “routine activity” for social scientists in general, and those
dealing with law enforcement or international relations in particular, to think in
terms of “before” and “post” September 11. However, the uncertain concept of the
“war on terrorism”, just like the “war on drugs” a few years ago, is unlikely to
provide a meaningful and sound framework to understand what happened. One
thing it will certainly achieve, though, is the redefinition of the so-far-distinct roles
of the police and the military in democratic societies.
Jude McCulloch’s book, while written prior to the events, is a timely reminder
that the option of a closer relationship is fraught with danger for civil liberties
when democratic accountability mechanisms are bypassed. Her experience as a
lawyer in community legal centres exposed her to tales of unwarranted police
violence while she defended the families of suspects shot dead by the Victorian
police in the 1980s and 1990s. The central thesis of the book is that “the establish-
ment of specialist counter-terrorists units within state police forces in the mid-
1970s has lead to increasingly militarised forms of policing” (p. 1). The process by
which paramilitary tactics percolate through everyday police practices is said to
undermine democratic traditions and principles.
Using the Victorian police as a compelling case study, and relying on an impres-
sive collection of public enquiries and official documents — some of which have
not been in the public domain before — McCulloch is able to show what can go
tragically wrong when the police blindly adopts military tactics and values. From the
secretive beginnings of counter-terrorist squads in the 1970s, to the litany of fatal
shootings perpetrated with a frightening impunity, to a heavy-handed approach to
public order policing, she provides fascinating quasi-ethnographic insights into some
of the most unpalatable aspects of the police culture. She denounces a reconfigura-
tion of the state’s coercive capacities that would make the police “become more
adept at the soldier’s craft of killing” and “approach demonstrators and activists as
terrorists to be punished as enemies of the state” (p. 215). McCulloch offers a
Marxist analysis of the police as a class apparatus whose primary function is to
preserve and consolidate capitalist modes of production. Hence, the shift toward
paramilitary policing in Australia would reflect transformations in the nature of the
economy (p. 52), attributed essentially to the globalisation process (p. 215).
If her ideological posture is legitimately asserted, it can also be legitimately
contested. The historical materialism that underpins her argument reduces the
relationship between globalisation (the infrastructure) and police institutions (the
superstructure) to a mechanistic, unilateral and dependent set of interactions. It is
never acknowledged that the state, or its judicial and political institutions could in
return have a regulatory and mitigating role on the “class struggle”. The
demonology of the police presented in this book fails to take into account that
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