Moral Indignation, Criminality and the Rioting Crowd in Macquarie Fields

Abstract

On the night of Friday February 25th 2005 three young men in a stolen car crashed into a tree in a narrow street in the public housing estate of Macquarie Fields. Minutes before the impact, the car was pursued by two plain-clothes police officers in an unmarked car. The driver of the stolen motor vehicle, Jesse Kelly, survived the crash, while the two passengers, Dylan Raywood and Matthew Robertson, died in the impact. What ensued were four nights of unrest and intense commentary and coverage by media and politicians. It is estimated that between 100 and 300 people participated in the protest. However simply one may describe such an event, social disturbances on that scale are rarely simple occurrences. Yet this knowledge did not deter media and some academic commentators from invoking abbreviated and spasmodic stimuli as an explanation for such events. Rather than endorse this superficial attempt at explanation this paper examines the case of Macquarie Fields from the perspective of the protesting crowd's moral indignation.The idea that the protesting crowd might hold a legitimate claim to sentiments of 'moral indignation' appears to have escaped both the public and intellectual imagination, which has focused almost entirely on issues of 'law and order' and been expressed in terms of 'outrage'.