Does Australia have a police brutality problem?
Police brutality in Australia isn't new. A leading theory says it's rooted in colonialism.
Police officers in Australia rarely kill. Australia is among Finland, Sweden, Germany and New Zealand in recording some of the lowest rates of killings by law enforcement in the world.
This year, though, there's been a lot of attention placed on Australia's police brutality. It's not a recent phenomenon. One top theory traces Australia's relationship with police brutality back to the colonies.
The focus turns to police brutality
- The U.S. #blacklivesmatter protests turned our focus to the more than 430 Indigenous deaths in custody since 1991.
- In June, an Aborginal teenager in Sydney was body-slammed to the ground by a NSW Police officer.
- A week later, South Australia Police launched an investigation into the arrest of an Aboriginal man in Adelaide after he was struck by a police officer while restrained.
- On Sunday, in the midst of Victoria's second wave lockdown, a man was stomped on and hit by a police car in what Victoria Police's Deputy Commissioner said was "an inappropriate use of force". The 32-year-old man hit by police was placed in an induced coma because of his injuries.
The 'Irish Model' of policing
In the 19th century United Kingdom, the London Metropolitan Police developed the 'British Model' of policing, which embedded officers in the community.
Historically, Australia has gone with a different way of policing: the 'Irish Model'.
Known from its origins in suppressing opposition within the Irish colon during the 19th century, the 'Irish Model' pits police against the community.
Police are put in military style barracks and are often highly centralised.
When the British colonised Australia, this was the model of policing that was set up. Academics have argued this directly influences police brutality today.
"Many police officers in the frontier colonial era were conscious of being part of a 'civilizing mission' and held highly paternalistic attitudes." - Professor Thalia Anthony and Professor Harry Blagg in The Conversation in June.
In Australia, the police did not just protect, they attacked.
Police were responsible for some of the more than 300 massacres of Indigenous Australians since 1780, including the killing of 60 Warlpiri, Anmatyere and Kaytetye people in the 1928 Coniston Massacre.
Police powers in the first half of the 1900s extended to "forced isolation and confinement of Aboriginal people on public health grounds, such as in various lock-up hospitals, on the basis of a diagnosis made by a police officer of syphilis or leprosy - or a decision that the person was at risk."
"Moving away from a colonial and assimilationist model of policing in Australia involves restructuring police and honouring First Nations self determination," Professor Anthony and Professor Blagg argue. "It's time to consider setting police models on a new course that abolishes force and re-imagines community relationships."