Abstract
This paper explores the nature of relations between public officials and community workers, drawing on empirical data from a study on Indigenous patrols in New South Wales, Australia. Patrol workers interact with public officials from various state entities who are tasked with overseeing funding, carrying out evaluations and, to varying degrees, monitoring the ‘effectiveness’ of local patrol operations. These interactions illuminate several issues regarding the ways in which knowledge about patrols is created, contested and communicated between Indigenous and non-Indigenous domains. The emergent patterns of these relations can be described as ‘seagull syndrome’, which involves the privileging of some types of knowledge over others in decision-making regarding Indigenous affairs, often with disastrous consequences for Indigenous organisations and communities. The paper documents the core features of seagull syndrome with respect to the discrete practices, everyday decision-making and mundane communication between public officials and patrol workers in New South Wales. It considers the implications of seagull syndrome for policy-makers and academics working in the Indigenous justice space and suggests ways to resist or challenge this tendency
Highlights
Knowledge production and the ‘local/expert divide1 One morning in the early stages of this research project I was heading from Sydney to Bourke by train to do preliminary fieldwork
The Countrylink train service to Bourke leaves Sydney at 7:00am and gets to Bourke at about 7:00pm, changing at Dubbo for a shuttle bus service and, by this stage in my doctoral candidature, I was beginning to get accustomed to these dull days spent almost entirely in public transport
The Countrylink train service has a system of pre‐allocated seating and, as staff regularly remind its customers, ‘you must sit in your allocated seat’
Summary
Knowledge production and the ‘local/expert divide One morning in the early stages of this research project I was heading from Sydney to Bourke by train to do preliminary fieldwork. This stage involved accessing records in relation to past and present patrol initiatives by contacting federal, state and local government agencies holding relevant archival material The purpose of this aspect of the research project was primarily to obtain information relating to the development and operation of patrols in Australia and to gain insights into governmental perceptions of these matters. I spoke with some people on the basis of their affiliation with a government department, organisation or representative body, some research participants emphasised that they were expressing their own views and not necessarily those of the organisation While completing this project I learnt a great deal, not just about Indigenous patrols and about young people’s experiences with the state police, relations between patrol workers and government officials, some of the blind sights within criminology as a discipline and about some of my own biases and assumptions. Elevating such knowledge to the status of ‘more encompassing’ is significantly misleading: as government officials themselves acknowledged, their generalised knowledge of the local situations was superficial, incomplete and even flawed
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