Previous to this Police Establishment, our Streets frequently exhibited the most disgraceful Scenes of Rioting, Drunkenness, and Excesses of every kind, and each Morning brought to light the History of Thefts, Burglaries, and Depredations which had been Committed the Night before. Happily such Occurrences are now almost totally suppressed …
Not so according to the dour Scot’s own inquisitor, JT Bigge, who thought the police very inefficient and who railed against the town’s love affair with liquor, purchased from a battalion of licensed and unlicensed dealers. In criticising one magistrate who was himself involved in the spirit trade, Bigge forewarned of a conflict between public duty and private benefit which would plague the city for more than two hundred years. Although it did not seem to affect the manner in which the magistrate had carried out his duties, wrote Bigge,
In a community, wherein it was of the utmost importance that the exercise of magisterial authority should be placed above the suspicion of being actuated by personal motives, it was certainly unfortunate, and it is still to be regretted, that any foundation for such suspicion should ever have existed; and that any of the magistrates should have had, or should now possess an interest in the extended use of a commodity, which they knew to be the cause of mischief to the colony, in proportion as it was the cause of profit to themselves.
Even a sympathetic historian such as Thomas O’Callaghan, who wrote in the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society in 1923 that Macquarie’s reforms led to the dawn of a new era for the colony’s police, could find grounds for criticism. He thought the nightwatch system, where constables patrolled with a cutlass and rattle, calling the time every half-hour, was of benefit to nobody but thieves, housebreakers and other such villains. ‘They certainly benefited by the custom,’ he wrote, ‘as it enabled them to know when and from which direction the police were approaching’.
The early police suffered from many obvious shortcomings. Between May 1825 and October 1826, according to Hazel King, fifty-seven officers were dismissed and twenty-five resigned from a force which barely exceeded fifty in total. Many of the men were inveterate drunks, simply because the community from which they were drawn was itself full of alcoholics. Before 1833 quite a few of the higher ranking officers were also illiterate, with the Assistant Chief Constable for one being unable to read his own warrants. Most of the early commanders were forced to resign through scandal; one of them, Colonel HC Wilson, claiming that the constables he had ordered to work in his home as carpenters, shoemakers and liveried servants, were in fact his bodyguards, and that their fine livery was a disguise. Deeper strains, however, were occasioned by the city’s fundamental schism between ‘the felonry and the free’. Macquarie, who in his darker moments thought the entire colony consisted only of those who had been transported and those who should have been, excited open hostility by appointing two freed convicts, Simeon Lord and Andrew Thompson, to the magistracy. The Reverend Marsden quickly refused to share a bench with them and Judge JH Bent closed the Supreme Court rather than have its sacred halls befouled by ex-convict attorneys.
The clash of these forces, which later found expression in the endless proxy war between Macquarie Street and Town Hall, flared over control of the police in the 1840s. The mid-forties in particular were haunted by the angst of the propertied classes over increasingly violent crime as the city’s starving unemployed grew more desperate. Wentworth, who had accused the police of bias against him during the elections of 1843, was amongst those agitating for a parliamentary inquiry into the supposed crime wave. The disorganised, uncoordinated structure of the colony’s numerous police forces doubtlessly contributed to the problems, although another reason for the Legislative Council’s inquiry lay in their ambition to wrest total control of the police from the city council. The council shared responsibility for funding the police at that time and the police themselves had responsibility for a number of matters within the ambit of local government such as ‘nuisance inspection’, or waste management as it is now called. The aldermen complained of having to pay for a body over which they had no control, frequently demanding that they be given such authority, as was the case in England. Those sorts of disputes were only ever resolved in one way, however, and in 1862 the colonial government established the New South Wales Police Force under its exclusive control.
This early and intense politicisation of crime and policing created a template which still shapes the eruptions of neostupidity which pass for a criminal justice debate in the city today. Two centuries on, with rationalist policies forcing a retreat of government from the civic sphere, the freedom of movement available to political actors is limited, while demands for intervention are not. Crime control, through the agency of the police, remains one of the few areas in which political rhetoric is not constrained by neo-liberal philosophy, hence the recurrent spectacle of ‘law and order’ elections in which the major parties spend millions of dollars out-bidding each other for the punishment-freak vote.
The job, as the police service is known to its members, reeks of politics. Station politics. Service politics. State and city politics. All caught up with media politics, drug war politics and good-cop-bad-cop, ICAC, PIC and union politics. It’s politics which decides how a cop will do his job. Politics which says what that job is. And politics which destroys any cop fool enough to disagree or misunderstand. The Macquarie Fields command, for instance, is one of the most politically sensitive in the State. Over a hundred nationalities live there, but unlike the pleasant cosmopolitan theme parks of the east and north, the Mac Fields story is not a narrative of cultural success.
The command takes in huge housing commission estates at Claymore, Minto, Ingleburn and, of course, Macquarie Fields itself. They sprawl over the dry hills of Sydney’s time-worn basin. Some of the oldest neighbourhoods, pioneer settlements founded by returned servicemen in the late 1940s and 50s, retain a quirky appeal, their well-tended gardens and asbestos-board bungalows testifying to four or five decades of loving attention. But they rest uneasily within vast tracts of poorly designed faux townhouses. Burnt-out car bodies lie abandoned in the worst streets where two of the guarantors of modern urban civilization, the ambulance service and firefighters, fear to tread. So far removed from the commonwealth of the city do some here feel themselves, they are famed for attacking firefighters who respond to blazes in the neighbourhood. Some families on these estates can tell of three or four generations who have never known employment – although the generations do cycle through a little quicker in these parts. The command is thought to be home to the country’s youngest grandmother, a twenty-seven-year-old woman. With clusters of tightly packed private housing often sitting like enemy camps behind a natural line of defence such as a freeway, a creek or in one case a golf course, outbreaks of class friction are inevitable. In July 1999 400 residents of Woodbine, an almost exclusively private suburb, protested the building of a footbridge linking them to Claymore. The Woodbiners, reported the Daily Telegraph, believed public housing tenants from the Claymore estate would ‘break into their homes, steal their cars and vandalise their property’.
Politics can be a strangely empty concern out here. But while the constituents of Sydney’s millennial slums count for little in the hard calculations of the ruling elites, they are an important symbolic presence in the endless guerilla war between those elites. An alliance of convenience between the mass media and the city’s various political competitors has defined crime as a hot-button issue, and the Mac Fields police command, with its dense concentrations of the doomed, the insane and the abandoned, provides an arena in which these actors can perform their version of a Japanese Noh play, a form of theatre in which little actually happens but the actors in their masks and vivid costumes suggest the essence of a story, or a myth. In the theatre of the city’s south-west Murray Edelman’s thesis takes on immediate significance; for those made anxious by a gap between their expectations and bleak reality, a myth can replace gnawing uncertainty and rootles
sness with a dramatic account of who are friends and who are enemies. The identification of the enemy does not have to be accurate.
The seed of an especially powerful myth, that of Asian youth crime gangs, germinated shortly after Geoffrey Blainey prepared the ground in the mid-1980s. By July 1986 the city’s media were transfixed by the spectre of ‘race war’ in the western suburbs. Huge gangs of Lebanese and Vietnamese youths were reported to be battling for turf with knives, swords, clubs, billiard cues, fence palings, machetes, broken bottles and martial arts weapons such as nanchaku (two short lengths of wood joined by a chain, made famous by Bruce Lee and called ‘numb-chuckers’ by the Sun-Herald). On 7 July, at the ‘Battle of Bankstown’, up to sixty street fighters were said to have flayed each other in the Bankstown Mall as shoppers ‘fled in terror’. The fight, described as ‘World War Three’, ‘running gang warfare’, ‘a vicious fracas’, and a ‘replay of the Vietnam War’, was followed on 16 July by another in the suburb of Marrickville where a young Lebanese man, Tony Maala, was stabbed and seriously wounded. The Sun Herald opened its account of the second encounter with these lines of cool-handed prose:
The tension was sharp as the sheath-knife plunged into the stomach of the Lebanese teenager, now lying in a pool of blood. His Vietnamese attacker had fled. Friends comforted the bloodied victim. Lebanese women cried, while their men shook their heads in disbelief.
The Sydney Morning Herald asked, ‘Youth gang brawls: is it adults next?’, declaring the city’s ethnic communities ‘faced the very real danger that youth gang violence could escalate into serious adult conflict’. The Police Minister called for ‘action’ the next day. While Maala was seriously injured, and some fighting actually did break out on both occasions, the media’s response – citing such impeccable sources as ‘the whisper around the old town plaza’ and ‘the word out on the streets’ – was only vaguely connected to reality. The Battle of Bankstown for instance, the initial engagement of the city’s putative race-hate war, was revealed on investigation by the Ethnic Affairs Commission to have involved only half a dozen or so actual protagonists. And the reports of the Maala stabbing at Marrickville were so incoherent and wildly contradictory as to be useless for any purpose other than indicting the journalists concerned. On 18 July the Herald, for instance, reported the Marrickville fight was a result of a dispute between a Vietnamese and Lebanese youth ‘who were in the same class in the Canterbury area’. When the knife was drawn, ‘the alarm went out to the Bankstown gangs, who arrived on the scene in carloads to take up the battle’. Exactly how the alarm got out, or how carloads of Bankstown hoodlums made it to Marrickville in the short time it took the police to respond, was not explained. The Daily Telegraph provided a possible solution: the Herald’s version of events never happened. According to the Telegraph’s man the two sides ‘sprang apart’ as Tony Maala dropped to the ground, and police were on the scene ‘in minutes’. Too late, however. The youths had already ‘split up’ and run off ‘in all directions’.
The gross inconsistencies of the city’s two major newspapers’ accounts were never resolved but that did not matter. The Asian youth crime story developed its own momentum anyway. As they charged after it, into the suburban badlands, most reporters cut their ties to the world of real things and passed like tongueless blind men through the night, decoding any dimly perceived movement on the Asian youth crime front by reference to third-rate Ninja movies and a dopey sort of free-floating Aryan anxiety. The accuracy of the suburban race war fable was less important than its potency as a myth which gave meaning to ominous and perplexing events. Although the early dispatches from the front made token gestures towards the role of unemployment and a lack of resources in fomenting unrest, the wider national debate about the ‘Asianisation’ of Australia ensured that the media’s focus was pulled in hard on Asian, and particularly Vietnamese, ‘youth gangs’ above all else, irrespective of confounding information. For instance, an Institute of Criminology study by Patricia Easteal analysed criminal records through the mid to late 1980s for both Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese youth in New South Wales and found that the Vietnamese had a significantly lower crime rate. Thus, suggested Easteal, ‘sensational media reports are not indicative of the level of criminal activities within the Vietnamese community’. Easteal found that Vietnamese youths were generally two times less likely to commit a violent crime, four times less likely to drink drive, and fifteen times less likely to use illegal drugs. Most of the Vietnamese offenders came from four Sydney suburbs, as do most Vietnamese. Three of these areas had higher crime rates in 1976, prior to the arrival of the Vietnamese community. Easteal compared the media images of Asian gangs as ‘Mafioso-like, complete with godfathers who induct parentless refugee minors into their “families” and force them to commit extortion, robbery, car theft and gambling/drug offences’ with the evidence of youth workers and community leaders speaking of small groups of bored and lonely teenagers with nothing to do. More recently, researchers from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre spent two years in Cabramatta burrowing into the area’s heroin culture, and finding in 1998 that
Cabramatta has been demonised as the ‘crime capital of Sydney’. The evidence suggests that this perception is incorrect. Rates of serious crime in the suburb are unexceptional and the image of bloody streets controlled by ‘Asian gangs’ is simply inaccurate. Data from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research indicate that Cabramatta is ‘safer’ than many areas in the inner city of Sydney.
Rates of assault, robbery without a weapon, robbery with a weapon other than a firearm, domestic burglary, motor vehicle theft and shop theft ‘were all substantially greater in inner Sydney than in Cabramatta’. What Cabramatta did have, however, was ‘a disproportionate share of offences related to the possession and sale of narcotics’. And, of course, the 5T gang.
The 5T are a long-time favourite of desperate news editors with space to fill and deadlines to meet. Their name, redolent of the 3 Lions and the 14K Triad, derives from the five Ts tattooed on the gang members’ forearms. The Ts have been translated as meaning murder, money, sex, drugs, violence, prison, lack of respect, bad attitude and an unhealthy love of machetes, billiard cues and, naturally, ‘numb-chuckers’. But as both youth workers and streetkids told me some years ago when I was researching the first heady moments of the 5T’s rise to fame for Juice magazine, the meaning was, originally at least, infinitely more saccharine. Tuoi Tre Thieu Tinh Thuong: Young people lack love and care. But such maudlin ooze has never sold newspapers, unless it is poured over cancer babies and beached whales. Nor is it much use for amplifying and channelling mass anxieties about spiralling crime rates, racial conflict and socioeconomic decay. To magnify and direct such fears creates a setting in which the beliefs and positions of millions are mobilisable and ‘the creation of political followings’ becomes more feasible. The arousal of those feelings is often of more political consequence than the outcomes generated. Manoeuvre around such issues as ‘Asian youth gang violence’ and the ensuing ebb and flow of mass support are the life force of politics and more important to the actors concerned than outcomes such as the Carr Government’s ‘knife legislation’.
For the legions of the city’s poor, unemployed and even middle-class people whose experience of the 1980s and 1990s was not of white shoes and Cointreau balls, intense economic change nurtured corrosive fear and a sense of powerlessness. There is no solace in blaming impersonal developments like ‘globalisation’ in such circumstances. So the anxious parties look for explanations in myths of failed or guilty leaders, dangerous outsiders or simple conspiracy. A related consequence is the appeal of Edelman’s ‘hero-leader’, often riding in from outside the system to deal with the threat. It is no accident that someone like Pauline Hanson appeals powerfully to the victims and losers of fifteen years of economic and cultural revolution. In such situations neither the ‘enemy’ – be they Asian youth gangs or the World Bank – nor the hero-leader – say, a maverick
politician or talkback radio demagogue – can be viewed as a complex, ambivalent human being with a potential for empathy. ‘They are perceived as embodiments of a particular role,’ writes Edelman. Their mythic role.
By the early 1990s the 5T were getting regular press as a large, organised, mafialike outfit, maybe 100 strong, with a formal structure of rank and rules and with links to other unspecified ‘Asian crime gangs’. New members were said to go through an initiation (involving some criminal or violent act), were sworn to secrecy and devoted Total Loyalty to the gang. They were ‘known’ to sit at the hub of Cabramatta’s huge open air heroin market, putting them in control of the city’s drug trade, and have since been fingered for extortion rackets, home invasions and the murder of John Newman, the local member of parliament. About the only thing not known about the 5T gang is how a bunch of dozy, beer-loving tabloid journalists continually scored the hot gear on such a violent, secretive, fanatically devoted crime ring. But of course there is no fashionable cachet in telling the readers that you wheezed up to the clippings library with a sticky bun and a cup of coffee to crib your notes from whichever poor, po-faced hack got the job of breathing life into the Asian crime gang caper before you.
While facts (such as the calibre of the bullets which blew away John Newman) are as hard and tactile as a pebble in the mouth, their meaning is always negotiable. Before the MP’s murder was exposed as a possible end game of a power struggle within the local branch of the Labor Party, it was widely known to be a payback killing for Newman’s stand against the 5T. The murder was a perfect fit for the myth that the 5T were what was wrong with Sydney. Their insidious connections to ‘adult’ Asian crime gangs were flooding the city with heroin and causing the social chaos which the anxious and the displaced seemed to perceive all around them. So resource deprivation and the massive collateral damage of economic restructuring were suddenly transformed into a story of race war, and the common interests of people from poorer suburbs in the city’s south-west were fractured along ethnic lines. Rather than youth centres, education, job training and infrastructural investment, politicians mobilised support on the promise of more police and harsher laws, driving a wedge into communities already riven by multiple stress lines. Occasionally this lack of a sense of proportion and irony would backfire amusingly, as with the ALP’s mooted ‘crackdown’ on youths who wore their baseball caps backwards. A ghastly fashion mistake yes, but hardly a crime. At other times, however, the comic gave way to the tragic. In 1993 for instance, while the Herald cranked up early warnings of ‘child gangsters’ and ‘Asian terror gangs’ on page three, the Sun Herald buried a short report that in the previous twelve months, thirty thousand migrant children had missed out on places in English language courses. Despite the media’s increasing interest in ethnic crime, nobody seems to have bothered to note a possible relationship between the emergence of the ‘child gangsters’ and the federal government’s decision to consider retrenching another forty per cent of staff from the English language program after an initial cut of twenty teaching positions.
Leviathan Page 40