Queering Australian Policing

• In Event: Queering Policing

Abstract

Queer criminological scholarship on policing has increasingly emphasised the need to ‘queer’ the organisational nature and profile of police – often through proactive strategies of recruitment, community engagement and needs-based attentiveness. While this paper does not necessarily seek to disregard or diminish these endeavours, I argue that the risk of such strategies may be located within a hegemonic misrecognition or process of ‘forgetting’ the vexed relationship between police and queer-identifying individuals. I develop this argument by reference to two particular events associated with pride marches that occurred in Australia in early 2016. In one instance, a group of protestors performed a sit-in during a pride march in the city of Melbourne, Australia. The second instance relates to the policing of activists opposed to the mandatory detention of asylum seekers at Australia’s most iconic equivalent, the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney, Australia. Both of these interventions were met with either disinterest, disdain, or disgust by many of those in attendance. Similarly, both examples by necessity of their political enunciations raise important questions about the relationship between queer people, police, and an enduring (mis)recognition of both ¬over and under-policing.

Author

• Dave McDonald, University of Melbourne