Address Causes Of Lawlessness

Editorial - Canberra Times

The law and order brigade is always at its most unattractive when the underclass is rioting. Members of the brigade self-confidently answer the wrong questions, demolish any number of Aunt Sallies, and their proposed solutions - almost invariably large doses of "toughness" and "crackdowns" - are not only prescriptions for further confrontations and disaster but for bitternesses which poison communities, and police and community relations, for years.

Lasting solutions have to be carefully balanced between firmly enforcing the law (and supporting its guardians in doing so) in the short term, but equally and deliberately seeking to address some of the causes of the breakdown in mutual confidence between police and a section of the community which such rioting manifests. In almost all cases, there is a measure of blame on both sides, and, on the police side, some systematic failure.

There will always be some people who will claim that mere poverty can explain or excuse rioting such as occurred last year in Redfern (when a young Aboriginal teenage delinquent impaled himself on a fence while probably thinking he was being chased by police), or at Palm Island (when a drunk man died of injuries caused during a struggle while he was in police custody) or at Macquarie Fields (after two young men who were passengers in a stolen car died when, during a chase by police, their car crashed into a tree). It doesn't. Even in the affected communities, most people obey the law. Indeed most people depend on the law's enforcement far more than they themselves suffer from differential enforcement of it. It is trite to remark that the peace is more likely to be breached where there is poverty, unemployment, discrimination and alienation, but even the victims of such problems cannot claim that their lot justifies running riot. Nor is it ever likely to resolve any of the underlying problems; indeed it is generally more likely to aggravate them.

But it is important to understand why pointless deaths, where there is police involvement, are so often the touchstone for such riots. In many cases, the dead victims are not known to a good proportion of the rioters. Why then the upsurge of emotion, anger and headlong violence, readiness to assume that some police misconduct has caused the deaths, and an almost desperate feeling that a line has now been crossed and that if a stand is not taken it will get even worse? All such feelings can, of course, be fuelled by alcohol, drugs and personal grief, and aggravated by immaturity and ignorance of the circumstances, but the base anger and alienation has to have some origin.

All too often, that origin is an almost complete breakdown in relationships between police and the section of the community involved, particularly (though in the case of Aboriginal communities by no means exclusively) its young men. They feel "picked on". They feel hassled nearly all the time, suspected of being up to no good even when they are doing nothing, and treated as if they were enemy aliens.

A proportion will, of course, be up to no good, not least with stealing, common assaults, traffic offences and drug matters - the more so in communities where unemployment is high and social problems have been concentrated. But the lawlessness of this proportion is sometimes perceived by their peers as seeming to give police a licence to stop and interrogate, with some hostility, almost any young man, and, if needs be, to charge them with petty street offences. The criminality of a significant proportion will be as much a function of a high police presence, and its capacity to generate business, as it is of intrinsic disorder.

That older people, whose fear of crime, or belief in its pervasiveness, is often manipulated by shock jocks and crude politicians, identify most of the risk with young men and applaud heavy police presences and a "tough line" with "hoodlums" goes without saying. That is to say, there is always a constituency not in the least troubled by the anger and sense of grievance of this section of the community, just as there are those who, when this anger explodes in mindless incidents such as in the past week, think that the answer is even more of it. The problem, however, is not of even further isolating them, but of bringing them back into the herd.

One of the consequences of this alienation is most easily seen in the United States with urban blacks, a very high proportion of whom will reach the age of 40 - if they live - with a criminal record. When skin colour or a sense of discrimination is in the equation, of course, the sense of alienation is even more pervasive; one reason why, say, black jurors are ready, in the US, to believe almost any allegation of police provocation, evidence-planting, or violence. Something similar, if not yet as bad, is already evident in many Aboriginal communities and in some of the Australian suburbs with high concentrations of migrants from particular regions.

A riot is a significant escalation of such simmering tensions, though rarely the end point. The very fact of a riot generally proves a loss of control. It is not at such a point that the appropriate police response is to run or to do anything other than enforce the law, firmly if with especial scruple about fairness. The law should be enforced, even if smart police tactics will reduce occasions when fresh confrontation is almost inevitable. But it is strategy as much as tactics which is necessary, and the last group that police should be listening to in planning it is the hairy-chested "get tough" brigade, those who demand "more police on the streets" (when they mean more intimidation and confrontation, rather than police being, as they ought to be, a normal and friendly part of the community).

Some will argue that the be-all and end-all of a riot is the spark that started the particular fire, but mere condign punishment, even after exemplary detective work, will not remove underlying frictions. Often, of course, it is as much as about perceptions as realities, but those who do not understand that for some of the angry rioters, the perceptions are deeply believed, are unlikely to be able to change them. If further incidents are to be avoided, it is not only confidence in the law that must be developed, but confidence in and respect for its guardians.