Telling the untold: First Nations people’s perceptions of policing in Broken Hill and Wilcannia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways First Nations people perceive targeted policing practices in Broken Hill and Wilcannia, New South Wales. It focuses on First Nations viewpoints and perspectives to unveil the colonial legacies of the region, their infusion into contemporary policing practice, and the pressures those legacies exert on the community. The empirical material was generated through interviews with 19 First Nations community members, in collaboration with a First Nations advisory panel. By centring First Nations perceptions of policing, it contributes to critical colonial critiques and decolonising expertise of policing, focusing on subtle and perverse acts of policing in Broken Hill and Wilcannia, and how these are perceived by First Nations people on different structural, social and personal levels. The main argument is that instances of targeted policing are perpetrated against the collective community through methods of pressure and surveillance. This collective pressure specifically targets and alienates the First Nations community while maintaining a non-Indigenous social order. In doing so, police present a legitimate form of targeted policing that impacts community wellbeing in perverse and ongoing ways. This argument and approach enrich place-specific understandings of First Nations experiences of policing and unmask the dynamic aspects of policing that the community endures.