Policing the Outback: Impacts of Isolation and Integration in an Australian Context

Abstract

Integration is important in narratives of policing in rural Australia. Communal integration, often depicted in rural studies as a positive element of gemeinschaft relations, or more recently equated with social capital, is crucial in understanding how remote communities are policed in Australia. However, while the above quote presents integration as a positive achievement, we wish to highlight the complexity of social relations in rural Australian settings and how this has differing implications for how police work is conducted. In particular, we will examine how particular visions of social order are achieved and maintained through practices of 'boundary maintenance', involving the material and symbolic inclusion and exclusion of specific individuals and populations. As such, rural spaces are not to be conceived as homogenous entities, but rather are diverse and pluralistic settings with competing and hierarchicised normative communities. This chapter explores these issues with reference to the experience of policing in remote Australian communities. We are concerned with how the material conditions of rural police work and symbolic understandings about the impact of 'rurality' upon police practice. In doing so, we acknowledge the links between space and policing, noting the spatial influences on the normative frameworks which guide police work. We wish to examine how integration in rural contexts implies adherence to normative frameworks, sustained by practical and symbolic policing measures, which operate to include and exclude specific populations marked as 'troublesome'. In particular, we will discuss how policing operates to reinforce normative accounts of Aboriginality and materially subjugate and exclude Indigenous populations.