Making Sense of 'Riot': The Fragile Legitimacy of Police Powers and Public Order Offences in an Intervention

Abstract

This paper examines the legitimacy of public order offences in a contested intercultural space. Other scholarship has exposed how public order offences are best understood, not as offences that are legitimate in themselves, but as a mechanism by which police can lawfully (but not necessarily 'fairly' or 'justly') increase their powers; this is to facilitate the 'maintenance of the peace' and to pre-empt crimes. This paper instead considers more fundamental issues on which public order policing and laws are founded. It challenges common sense assumptions what is 'public', 'offensive' or 'disordered'. Even when considered within a Western cultural frame, these can be seen to be highly constructed and culturally contingent concepts. These concepts become much more unstable with they are transplanted to a liminal or frontier space, such as a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory of Australia. In this highly contested space, the common sense appeal of these concepts is destabilised, and their legitimacy becomes tenuous, particularly for those who are the new objects of such ideas.Since the commencement by the Australian Federal Government of a dramatic and controversial intervention into the Aboriginal affairs of the NT, police have been authorised to exercise unprecedented powers with respect to Aboriginal people and use an array of offences that have facilitated the suppression of resistance to Intervention and cultural assimilation, and to finally secure control of this space in which Aboriginal people have continued to exercise domain as Aboriginal people, despite Australia’s ongoing colonial project.By reference to a case study in which an attempted Aboriginal dispute resolution process is reconstructed as a ‘riot’, this paper explores the impact of the attempted suppression of cultural practices using public order offences, and examines the early impacts, which include: increased political resistance to Intervention through deliberate flaunting of public order offences, lawlessness (where successful suppression of tribal practices results not in embrasure of mainstream values and practices but instead creates a vacuum where no social constraints operate), an exacerbation of the cycle of criminalisation and victimisation of Aboriginal people, and the possibility that tribal dispute resolution processes are withdrawing to spaces where Aboriginal people remain sovereign.