"There are no excuses for this behaviour and I’m not going to have it said that this behaviour is caused by social disadvantage … A lot of people grew up in circumstances of disadvantage and they did not go out and attack police with bricks and light fires in the street."
Although it could have been said yesterday by David Cameron or Boris Johnson, this quote is from Bob Carr, in the aftermath of the 2005 Macquarie Fields riots. A year earlier he exactly foreshadowed Cameron’s pronouncements on London’s violence when he described rioting by Redfern’s Indigenous community as "criminality, plain and simple".
There has been a proliferation of amateur sociologists trying to diagnose the causes of the London riots — and the common note running through this commentary is a fear that "it might happen here". But it already has happened here: the 2005 Macquarie Fields and 2004 Redfern riots could be considered as blueprints for what occurred in London, right down to the subsequent political posturing on law and order.
The similarities between the two Australian cases and the current unrest in London are striking. Both Redfern and Macquarie Fields had rates of crime far above the average, with just over 8 per cent of residents in their respective postcodes having been convicted in a NSW court between 1999 and 2004. High unemployment was endemic — at the time of the riots Macquarie Fields had an unemployment rate double that of greater Sydney.
In both Australian cases the police and local community were engaged in a relationship of mutual hostility, often involving the bastardisation of youth. Much like the "stop and search" powers of the London Metropolitan being overused on black youth, young Indigenous men in Redfern have a long history of being subject to proactive policing by NSW police. Similarly, deaths at the hands of police were the catalyst for violence — in London the shooting of Mark Duggan and in Macquarie Fields the deaths of Dylan Raywood and Matthew Robertson during a police car-chase. In Redfern it was the death of TJ Hickey — who was impaled on a fence while riding his bike in Redfern. He was being pursued by a police car.
Aside from Bob Carr, other politicians at the time of the Macquarie Fields violence engaged in enough knee-jerking that the inquiry into the riots considered whether to assess whether politicians behaving like "armchair generals" compromised police operations. During the Redfern riots, then-opposition leader John Brogden called for the bulldozers to be brought in and the Block leveled.
"Impotent police" are also often said to be the cause — take Boris’ Johnson’s remark that the London Met could have "gone in harder". Miranda Devine makes the same point this week. To her credit, she’s the only Australian writing for a major newspaper with an attention span long enough to remember the violence in Sydney, even if she does callously describe the riots as "target practice for thugs" and nothing much else.
The impulsive need to condemn is a reaction to our inability to describe why riots happen in some disadvantaged areas and not others. We should be making a concerted effort to separate the process of identifying and punishing criminal acts from understanding why they happen, particularly on a large scale. Instead we get the constant insistence that people are rational moral actors — and that violence has no place in a reasonable society.
Don Weatherburn, on the Indigenous site kooriweb.org, says that any explanation that can’t answer the broader question of why violence is happening is "unsatisfactory". The common explanation we see in the media suggests that rioting is an "inchoate expression of anger and political resistance on the part of delinquent youths to the frustrations and privations they have to endure", but Weatherburn says the link between chronic disadvantage and rioting is "more insidious", and uses Macquarie Fields and Redfern as evidence.
Crime, policing and poverty are interconnected factors, according to Weatherburn. Long-term disadvantage, typified by broken homes, the spatial concentration of poverty in particular suburbs, unemployment (especially among young males), population turnover and a lack of education, creates chronically high-crime areas, which results in both overzealous policing, and a poor result from the policing that does occur. Cops who over-police face a backlash and erosion of community regard, and the cycle continues. A death at the hands of police provides the perfect catalyst for violence.
David Porter, from the Redfern Legal Service, told New Matilda that over-policing remains a contributing factor in "tension between disaffected youth and police forces". He says performance targets set for police "actively encourage the use of ‘move on’ powers and personal searches … in relation to the use of move on powers they’re looking to meet their targets, or even exceed them."
"The most exposed members of the community — young people who hang out in public places, homeless people — [are]easy targets for proactive crime strategies in circumstances where it may not be a productive use of police resources," he says.
A SMH interview with TJ Hickey’s mother following his death completes the picture: "They’re nasty. They treat our kids like dogs."
The inquiry into the Macquarie Fields riots recommended that a Community Action Plan be funded out past 2006 in order that some of the root causes of the violence might be addressed. One social worker was unconvinced: "People come in and do research programs, consult with the community and say that they will do a paper and have recommendations. Then there is nothing."
She was proven right. The Macquarie Fields Community Action Plan quietly disappeared, given little attention by Carr when he was premier and then lost in the train-wreck NSW Labor became when he resigned five months after the riots. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Carr wrote about London this week without mentioning either of the major riots that occurred during his term. Instead he recounts the time he met a resentful, whinging kid in Coogee who didn’t want to join the surf patrol. This convinced Carr that kids don’t care about investment in youth services, which don’t work, and instead a harder, more conservative approach is "the fresh, radical critique".
Carr is right about youth services, but wrong about the real fix. Weatherburn agrees that youth crime prevention strategies fixated on alleviating boredom have a "decidedly bleak" rate of success. The solution is for the police to "treat the residents of crime-prone neighbourhoods with civility" in the first instance, and do their jobs, rather than over-police. Addressing economic factors, building social cohesion and reducing the "spatial concentration of disadvantage" comes next.
For isolated, crime-ridden communities riots are one of the few catalysts for change. "It’s a measure of how bad things did get in Redfern that things have improved to a large degree", Porter says. "When you compare [London] to the Australian examples, Macquarie Fields, particularly in Redfern, those incidents led to a concerted effort on the part of police to improve their relationship with the community". This means a return to community policing, diversionary programs to keep kids out of the courts, and a "shift away from the ‘war on crime’ approach".
Nonetheless, entrenched poverty, especially among Indigenous Australian communities, is still a problem that is underfunded by government and largely ignored by Sydney proper. It certainly is by Sydney’s commentators, who spared barely a moment to use the London riots as an opportunity to reflect on our own history of violence and unrest.
Following the Redfern riots, Indigenous writer Tony Birch wrote an essay in Overland called "Who gives a fuck about white society any more?" Considering that we’re fixated on London rather than the suburbs of our own cities, I don’t blame him.
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