Agents of Colonial Rule: Policing Suspect Communities in Western Australia, 1849-1914, and the Ongoing Legacies

• In Event: EHC-WG Panel 4: Colonialism and Empire in Historical Criminology

Abstract

This paper will explore aspects of my research project on policing practices in Western Australia, 1849-1914, and their intergenerational and contemporary legacies. The research was conducted using extensive and under-examined archival records in the State Records Office of Western Australia, which provide detailed evidence of the attitudes of police officers and their encounters with those they suspected and apprehended, especially Indigenous Australians, convicts and former convicts and non-European immigrants. These three groups were particularly characterised by the State and police officers as potentially suspicious and likely to be capable of criminal activity. Consequently, they were the subjects of policing surveillance. While scholars have recognised that police officers were at the forefront of the creation of a new social order in the Australian colonies, there have been no substantive comparative analyses of how officers negotiated their roles and operated in practice within the communities that they policed. The paper reveals evidence of policing practices towards these groups, and the ways in which police officers acted as agents of the colonial state in enforcing legislation and contributing to the marginalisation of these communities.
These historical findings are significant because we are currently in an era of intense scrutiny of policing practices and of institutional failings in policing structures in the media and public consciousness, in national and international contexts. To begin to unpick the contemporary problems of police violence and police targeting around the world, we need to recognise and understand its historical roots. Through historical research and examination of contemporary legacies, this research suggests that the institution of policing in colonial contexts is rooted in stereotyping, targeting and violence.

Author

• Eleanor Bland, Oxford Brookes University