‘Without uniform I am a community member, uncle, brother, granddad’: Community policing in Australia’s Torres Strait Region
| Author | John Scott,Zoe Staines,James Morton |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00048658211005516 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
‘Without uniform I am
a community member,
uncle, brother, granddad’:
Community policing
in Australia’s Torres
Strait Region
Zoe Staines
School of Social Science, University of Queensland, Brisbane,
Australia
John Scott
School of Justice Faculty of Law, Queensland University of
Technology, Brisbane, Australia
James Morton
Magistrates Court of Queensland, Proserpine, Australia; Bowen
Magistrates Court, Bowen, Australia
Abstract
As a palpable legacy of violent colonialism, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (‘Indigenous’)
Australians are the most incarcerated peoples in the world. Community policing, which
hinges on the development of trusting community–police partnerships, is frequently
proposed as a means of reducing this over-representation, but approaches vary and produce
divergent outcomes. This article draws on interview data to explore policing in Australia’s
Torres Strait Region – a remote archipelago situated off the northern tip of Queensland.
A strong commitment to community and hybridised policing approaches likely provide a
partial explanation for relatively low crime in the region. However, under-reporting of
some offences (e.g. domestic violence) suggests a possible need to overlay alternative
approaches that improve access to justice for all victims, especially women. Overall, the
Torres Strait Region experience holds possible lessons for policing in Australia’s other
Corresponding author:
Zoe Staines, School of Social Science, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia.
Email: z.staines@uq.edu.au
Journal of Criminology
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00048658211005516
journals.sagepub.com/home/anj
2021, Vol. 54(3) 265–282
remote Indigenous communities, again demonstrating that decolonisation is a critical starting
point for addressing over-representation.
Keywords
Australia, community policing, Indigenous, island criminology, remote, Torres Strait Islands
Date received: 7 January 2021; accepted: 9 March 2021
Introduction
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians
1
have high rates of contact with police
as both offenders and victims of crime (Australian Law Reform Commission, 2018) and
are the most incarcerated peoples in the world (Anthony & Baldry, 2017; Australian
Bureau of Statistics, 2019). This is a palpable legacy of violent and destructive colonial-
ism since European settlement of Australia in 1788, including ongoing trauma and
racism (Cunneen & Tauri, 2016). State police were typically at the forefront of colonial
expansion, often responsible for the violent removal of Indigenous peoples from their
lands, their institutionalisation into remote missions and reserves, and the enforcement
of harmful social policies (Bringing Them Home Report, 1997; Cunneen, 2001; Cunneen
& Tauri, 2016). In a country where there is no national treaty between Indigenous
peoples and the settler state, and whereby settler colonialism is best understood as a
‘structure not ...event’ (Wolfe, 2006, p. 388), this history is both echoed in and com-
pounded by strained police–Indigenous relations today. This is especially the case in
remote Indigenous communities where (predominantly white) police tend to see them-
selves as ‘strangers [in] strange lands’ (Dwyer et al., 2020).
In response, Australian police have been strongly encouraged to adopt community
policing approaches, which value and support community–police partnerships and
‘policing by consent’ (Fitzgerald Inquiry, 1989; Royal Commission into Aboriginal
Deaths in Custody, 1991). Nevertheless, commitments to community policing vary
(Bull, 2015), and Indigenous Australians’ interactions with the criminal justice system,
including experiences of police and policing, likely vary across different places and
socio-cultural groupings. This potential variation tends to be overlooked in existing
research, which frequently homogenises Indigenous Australians’ experiences of crime
and policing. For example, to the authors’ knowledge, there are no existing studies
focusing specifically on policing in Australia’s Torres Strait Region (TSR), a remote
archipelago situated off the northern tip of Queensland. This article seeks to correct this
by examining the nature and implications of policing in the TSR, which is home to
around 8103 people, 82% of whom identify as Indigenous (Australian Bureau of
Statistics, 2016), and who constitute an ethnically distinct group from Aboriginal peo-
ples on the Australian mainland, sometimes being referred to as a ‘minority within a
minority’ (Scott & Morton, 2018).
This article forms part of a larger study into crime and justice in the TSR and builds
on previous publications from the study, which have demonstrated that crime rates are
relatively low there – something we have (elsewhere) argued stems from particularly
266 Journal of Criminology 54(3)
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