Publication:
Policing people of Middle Eastern appearance : the construction of a suspect community in New South Wales, Australia

dc.contributor.advisor Grewcock, Michael en_US
dc.contributor.advisor Sentas, Victoria en_US
dc.contributor.advisor Dixon, David en_US
dc.contributor.author McElhone, Megan en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2022-03-15T12:33:38Z
dc.date.available 2022-03-15T12:33:38Z
dc.date.issued 2019 en_US
dc.description.abstract People of Middle Eastern background and appearance have been over-policed by the New South Wales Police Force since the 1990s. This over-policing has involved an assemblage of policies, practices, and institutional units. Police work has also coalesced with law-and-order police, political, and media rhetoric to produce public discourses about the criminal capacities of ‘Middle Eastern’ people, as captured in the neologism ‘Middle Eastern organised crime’. These developments have been subject to little academic scrutiny. This thesis reduces the gap in the literature by examining the Police Force’s approaches to policing people of Middle Eastern background and appearance, for non-terrorism-related matters, between 1998 and 2018. The conceptual tool used to examine the over-policing of people of Middle Eastern background and appearance is the ‘suspect community thesis’. The suspect community thesis draws attention to institutionalised policies and practices that render members of racialised groups collectively subject to extraordinary policing and surveillance because of their status, identity, or associations, rather than their conduct. This study does not merely apply the suspect community thesis but also develops it in specific ways, thereby making both empirical and conceptual contributions. It draws on data from interviews with lawyers, community workers, members of the Police Multicultural Advisory Council, former police officers, and a range of documents. This thesis contends that the Police Force’s over-policing of people of Middle Eastern background and appearance has created and maintained a ‘Middle Eastern suspect community’ in New South Wales. Key themes traced in this regime of over-policing include the creation of police squads; the territorial policing of localities racialised as Middle Eastern; the targeted use of legal powers; and the extension of surveillance and regulation through community-based policing. The thesis also explores how institutional censorship and image-maintenance practices have allowed the police organisation to insulate its public knowledge claims about the suspect community. The policing of the Middle Eastern suspect community has been animated by proactive, intelligence-led, and pre-emptive rationalities and methodologies, which have also taken root in other jurisdictions. Accordingly, the findings of this thesis may be useful in conceptualising the over-policing of racialised communities in other contexts. en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/63394
dc.language English
dc.language.iso EN en_US
dc.publisher UNSW, Sydney en_US
dc.rights CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 en_US
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/ en_US
dc.subject.other Race en_US
dc.subject.other Police en_US
dc.subject.other Policing en_US
dc.subject.other Suspect community en_US
dc.subject.other New South Wales en_US
dc.subject.other Australia en_US
dc.title Policing people of Middle Eastern appearance : the construction of a suspect community in New South Wales, Australia en_US
dc.type Thesis en_US
dcterms.accessRights open access
dcterms.rightsHolder McElhone, Megan
dspace.entity.type Publication en_US
unsw.accessRights.uri https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
unsw.date.embargo 2021-09-01 en_US
unsw.description.embargoNote Embargoed until 2021-09-01
unsw.identifier.doi https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/3803
unsw.relation.faculty Law & Justice
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation McElhone, Megan, Law, Faculty of Law, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Grewcock, Michael, Law, Faculty of Law, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Sentas, Victoria, Law, Faculty of Law, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Dixon, David, Law, Faculty of Law, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.school School of Law *
unsw.thesis.degreetype PhD Doctorate en_US
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