Police Perceptions of Protest: The Perth 'Treasury Riot' of March 1931

Abstract

In 1972, a writer in the fournal of Contemporary History observed that 'until fairly recently police history could easily be confused with adventure or detective stories put into a historical setting'. Increasingly, sociologists and historians have turned their attention to studies of the structure and functioning of police forces in various societies.1 Most of the articles and monographs dealing with the histories of the Australian police forces, however, have been confined to the eastern colonies before responsible government. Both sociological and historical studies have usually focused on police forces as institutions or administrative units. Few have attempted to examine the nature of day-to-day police work, and fewer still have considered the question of popular attitudes to the police, or the attitudes of police towards the public. The inaccessibility of many police records, and the relative paucity of other sources of contemporary comment on police-community relations, are undoubtedly partly responsible for the lack of such studies. Moreover, official records, even where available, rarely afford insights into informal areas such as the opinions and attitudes of police officers towards the public, or towards each other or their superiors. This article examines police attitudes to and perceptions of organised protest by the unemployed in Perth during the Great Depression, through a study of the largest demonstration, the 'Treasury Riot' of March 1931. During the depression years, groups of police came into contact with relatively large numbers of 'ordinary' people much more often than was usually the case in Western Australia. Protests and demonstrations of various kinds were frequent occurrences between 1928 and 1933. In this way police were regularly confronted with a wide cross-section of people. Through memoirs, police records, and interviews with several retired police officers, it has been possible to form some tentative conclusions about police attitudes to those they confronted in these demonstrations.