Prelims

Half Title Page

Place, Race and Politics

Endorsements

How is it that South Sudanese migrants, an overwhelming law-abiding group, have come to be criminalised in Australia? Using the 2016 Moomba ‘riot’, Place, Race and Politics charts the creation of a racialised law and order crisis in Melbourne. This terrific new book provides a detailed analysis of how social and political processes came to associate South Sudanese blackness with violent crime and what the consequences of this criminalisation were on the community. I strongly recommend it.

Karen Farquharson, Professor of Sociology and Vice President of the Academic Board, University of Melbourne

Following in the tradition of Hall et al’s classic, Policing the Crisis, Place Race and Politics: The Anatomy of a Law and Order Crisis analyses the racialisation and politicisation of crime during the 2018 Victorian election in Australia. Drawn from a number of discrete research projects undertaken by each of the authors, the book is broken down in chapters that largely reflect these different projects. As a result, the authors are able to focus on different elements of the ‘law and order crisis’ from the demonisation and dangerisation of asylum seekers and immigrant groups, to the media’s reportage and amplification of events, the populist political discourse and indeed interviews with those at the coalface of events. It makes for a sobering read as it teases out the long-standing Australian twin political strategies of vilification and law and order auctioneering. As the book shows there are no real winners to come out of such strategies and, ultimately, they serve to undermine the legitimacy even of the political winners – in this case the Victorian Labor party beholden to a tough on crime approach for the foreseeable future. The authors wisely eschew a straight ‘moral panic’ approach to the topic (while not rejecting it altogether) and offer something more sophisticated. Race and Politics: The Anatomy of a Law and Order Crisis makes a significant contribution to critical scholarship on law and order in Australia, but in doing so also explores the tentacles of racism, xenophobia and insecurity that constantly threaten to erode the successful foundations of multi-cultural Australia.

Murray Lee, Professor in Criminology and Associate Dean Research, University of Sydney Law School

Title Page

Place, Race and Politics: The Anatomy of a Law and Order Crisis

By

Leanne Weber

University of Canberra, Australia

Jarrett Blaustein

Monash University, Australia

Kathryn Benier

Monash University, Australia

Rebecca Wickes

Monash University, Australia

And

Diana Johns

University of Melbourne, Australia

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2021

Copyright © 2021 Leanne Weber, Jarrett Blaustein, Kathryn Benier, Rebecca Wickes and Diana Johns. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80043-046-4 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-045-7 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80043-047-1 (Epub)

List of Acronyms

ABC

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

ABS

Australian Bureau of Statistics

ACOSS

Australian Council of Social Services

CBD

Central business district

LNP

Liberal National Party

PSO

Protective Services Officer

UK

United Kingdom

UNHCR

United Nations High Commission for Refugees

US

United States

YNO

Youth network offender

About the Authors

Leanne Weber is a Professor of Criminology at the University of Canberra, Australia, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology, Oxford University. She researches policing and border control using criminological and human rights frameworks. Her books include Crime, Justice and Human Rights, 2014 (Palgrave, with Elaine Fishwick and Marinella Marmo); Policing Non-Citizens, 2013 (Routledge); Stop and Search: Police Power in Global Context, 2013 (Routledge, with Ben Bowling) and Globalization and Borders: Death at the Global Frontier, 2011 (Palgrave, with Sharon Pickering), which was awarded the inaugural Christine M Alder Book Prize by the ANZ Society of Criminology.

Jarrett Blaustein is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. His research currently focusses on intersections between security and sustainable development governance, law and order politics and the global mobility of crime control policies. Jarrett's sole-authored book titled Speaking Truths to Power: Policy Ethnography and Police Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina was nominated by the publisher, Oxford University Press, for the 2016 British Society of Criminology Book Prize and his research also appears in a number of leading criminology journals.

Kathryn Benier is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. Her research focus is urban criminology and the neighbourhood ecology of crime. Kathryn's work focusses on hate crime and the impact of immigration and ethnic diversity on social relationships, cohesion and sense of belonging over time. Her work primarily investigates the impact of social exclusion and crime on young people, primarily those of African or Muslim heritage. Kathryn has an interest in quantitative methodology and extending new statistical techniques in other fields into criminological research.

Rebecca Wickes is a Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Monash University where she is the Director of the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre. She is also the Chief Investigator of the Australian Community Capacity Study (ACCS), a multi-million, multi-site, longitudinal study of 298 urban neighbourhoods in Victoria and Queensland. Her research focusses on the spatial concentration of social problems with a particular focus on how physical and demographic changes in urban communities influence social cohesion, the informal regulation of crime and victimisation.

Diana Johns is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, where she researches and teaches across the domains of prisons and punishment, children/young people and the criminal legal system and criminal justice knowledge production. Her work is focussed on the effects of criminalisation, the impacts of imprisonment and the possibilities of restorative and relational justice practices. Her book Being and Becoming an Ex-Prisoner was published by Routledge in 2018. She is currently working with colleagues on another book, Coproducing Criminal Justice Knowledge, to be published by Routledge.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge we are settler occupiers on Aboriginal land. We acknowledge that sovereignty over this land – and by the people of the many Nations who have lived on this Country for thousands of years – has never been ceded.

Collectively, we acknowledge that we live and work on Kulin Country, specifically the land of the Boon Wurrung/Bunurong and Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin nation in and around Melbourne, Victoria, and the land of the Ngunnawal people of the area now known as Canberra and the Ngarigo people of the Snowy Mountains.

We pay respect to Elders, past and present, of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, to their ongoing connection to and care for Country and to the cultural knowledge, wisdom and heritage they hold from the past and carry into the future.

The authors would like to credit Chloe Keel, Greg Koumouris and Claire Moran for their contributions to Chapter 3 and note that they are listed as co-authors of this chapter. Rebecca Powell and Meg Randolph assisted with the collection of data used in the drafting of Chapter 4. We would also like to acknowledge and thank Dr Sara Maher for her advice and assistance in the early developmental stages of the book.

We extend special thanks to Julia Farrell for her expert assistance with editing and compiling the manuscript and for her cheerful forbearance in the face of many delays, the complexities of working with multiple authors and the additional challenges imposed by the very real crisis that is the COVID-19 pandemic.

We would like to restate our thanks to the community members who shared their experiences in our research projects and the community organisations that assisted generously in the recruitment of young people as participants.

The research cited in Chapter 4 would have been impossible without the assistance of the Federation of South Sudanese Associations in Victoria, Afri-Aus Care, Daughters of Jerusalem and local youth and community workers.

The focus groups and interviews discussed in Chapter 5 were conducted with the support of the Centre for Multicultural Youth in Melbourne. We would also like to thank Nyayoud Jice and Barry Berih for their assistance with the project, as well as all of the young people who gave their time.

The interview material included in Chapter 4 was previously published in the following reports:

• Weber, L. (2018, December). ‘Police are good for some people, but not for us’: Community perspectives on young people, policing and belonging in Greater Dandenong and Casey. Border Crossing Observatory.

• Weber, L. (2020, April). ‘You're going to be in the system forever’: Policing, risk and belonging in Greater Dandenong and Casey. Border Crossing Observatory.

Some material published in Chapter 5 has been adapted from

• Benier, K., Blaustein, J., Johns, D., & Maher, S. (2018). ‘Don't drag me into this': Growing up South Sudanese in Victoria after the 2016 Moomba ‘riot’. Centre for Multicultural Youth.

In all cases reproduction rights have been retained by the authors.