Racism, urban combat, and police militarisation in response to Black Lives Matter protests

The killing of African-American man George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer kindled the Black Lives Matter protests that are sweeping across the United States, but the embers of protests have smouldered across the world through generations of colonised and enslaved peoples.

In the US, the modern scourge of mass incarceration and police killings of African-American men, women and children have direct links to the history of slavery, lynching and segregation. The system of ownership of black bodies has been replaced by a system in which black bodies are treated as "police property"; extrajudicial torture and hanging of black men replaced by police killings with impunity. Mass incarceration of African-Americans and other people of colour is the new Jim Crow.

The details of George Floyd’s death are now well-known – the vision of a police officer pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, witnesses begging the officer to stop, three police officers holding those witnesses at bay, and Floyd’s cry of "I can’t breathe".

The global response saw millions take to the streets.

This modern movement to end police violence and black deaths at the hands of police and in custody is larger, better-organised, more broad-based, and more global than ever before.

From little things big things grow

I went to my first deaths-in-custody demonstration more than 30 years ago in Melbourne, attended by about 10 people.

In Australia, tens of thousands of people recently marched, and made more individual gestures of protests. Floyd’s killing, the protests, policing of those protests, and the political fallout overtook the COVID-19 pandemic’s top spot in the media for the first time in months.

Protestors in Australia, similar to their counterparts in the US, demand an end to Aboriginal deaths in custody, and brutal and racist policing.

But Prime Minister Scott Morrison, when asked to comment on the protests here, argued that the issues are different because Australia is a "fair country" and "wonderful".

The Prime Minister has also denied the documented history of enslavement of Indigenous people.

In response to the vision of a Sydney police officer slamming a 16-year-old Indigenous boy face-first into the pavement, the New South Wales police commissioner commented that the police officer "had a bad day". Statements such as these continue the pattern of denying, minimising, and rationalising the continuing violence of colonialism in all its forms.

In Australia, First Nations people too often continue to be policed as enemies in occupied territory.

Since 1991, when the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody released its findings in relation to 99 deaths, most in police custody, there have been 434 more Indigenous Australian deaths in custody. Many Australians would struggle to name one of them.

The over-policing of Indigenous people is well-documented. The "crime" of being "black in a public place" or "black while driving" isn't one found in law, but one well understood by targeted communities.

Police as the gateway to the criminal justice system contribute substantially to the mass incarceration of Indigenous people in Australia. Indigenous people are the most incarcerated people in the world – they make up two per cent of the general adult population, but account for at least 27 per cent per cent of the prison population.

Police organisations are bound to protect and serve, using only the minimum force necessary to carry out their duties, whether in self-defence, defence of others, or to arrest people suspected of crime.

Militarising the police

My research, and that of researchers in the US, has documented a trend towards the militarisation of policing. This includes increasingly resorting to, and the availability of, more lethal firearms, the more ready resort to such weapons, and the introduction of a range of other "less than lethal weapons", including chemical agents and electro-shock weapons, armoured vehicles, and tanks.

These, however, are only tangible manifestations of a deeper issue, which is the adoption of a military culture that approaches policing as a force, and not a service.

While a civil police organisation focuses on preventing and detecting crimes, and aims to protect the entire community, a more militarised approach aims to overcome those deemed to be enemies by use of overwhelming force.

The mistreatment of Indigenous people by the police, and within the criminal justice system more broadly, reinforces and reflects the reality of continuing colonial relations of power.

Where police adopt a military philosophy, the community is divided into those to be protected, and those seen as a threat.

In the United States and Australia, the line between being presumptively seen as a threat or considered deserving of protection is most deeply etched in race.

While arguing that the trend towards more military styles of policing has accelerated over previous decades, the militarised approach to policing has long been the primary one to policing African-American communities in the US, and First Nation’s people in Australia.

A 1966 article in The Nation magazine, by African-American intellectual and civil rights activist James Baldwin, headlined "A Report from Occupied Territory", provides detailed and harrowing accounts of police violence in New York’s Harlem district.

In Australia, First Nations people too often continue to be policed as enemies in occupied territory.

---

Read more: Rhetoric, reality and reconciliation: Where to now?

---

The violent death of Cameron Doomadgee in 2004 on Palm Island in Queensland led to riots. Doomadgee, 36, died of massive internal injuries after he was arrested for being drunk and locked in a police cell, with no visible injuries. The post-mortem compared Doomadgee's injuries to those of plane crash victims.

When Doomadgee’s community learnt the nature of his injuries, they burnt down the police station, courthouse, and police houses. A state of emergency was declared, and dozens of paramilitary riot squad police were flown in.

More than a decade later, in 2016, the Federal Court found that the riot squad was racist in its response, and acted with impunity.

The Queensland government was eventually required to pay 447 claimants $30 million dollars, and apologise for the police behaviour. The police officer charged over Doomadgee’s killing was found not guilty of manslaughter.

In the United States and Australia, the line between being presumptively seen as a threat or considered deserving of protection is most deeply etched in race.

In April this year, a Victorian coroner referred the 2017 death in police custody of Yorta Yorta woman Tanya Day to prosecutors for further investigation. The coroner found that her death was "clearly preventable", and that there was a possibility an indictable offence had occurred.

In the US, there are now calls to defund the police.

In Australia, there are already alternatives to investment in policing, and the dominant policing model, that are working to better protect and serve the whole community.

Pat Turner, the lead convenor of a coalition of about 50 Indigenous community peak organisations working to "close the justice gap", said: “Now, I’m not saying that all the police behave badly – we have got outstanding examples of how the police work with our communities … [but] … we just can’t wait for ad hoc ‘good guys’ to come out of the system and engage properly – we need wholesale reform of the police departments.”

The mistreatment of Indigenous people by the police, and within the criminal justice system more broadly, reinforces and reflects the reality of continuing colonial relations of power. However, radically reforming policing and the criminal justice system, while necessary, won't be sufficient to achieve justice.

Senator Pat Dodson has pointed out that underlying issues to Indigenous incarceration and deaths in custody include health, education, housing, employment, the continued removal of Indigenous children from their families by child protection, and the detention of Indigenous children.