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- Protect or punish?
Hello & yes I am in your inbox earlier than usual this week! We’re playing around to find the best day to send the newsletter, so you might notice it arriving on different days over the next few weeks. But rest assured the overall vibe & content will stay the same! Which brings us to this week’s topic…
*Light trigger warning for mentions of sexual assault and policing of First Nations people.
How do you feel when you’re in the general vicinity of a police officer? Like, emotionally. I’ve always felt nervous around cops and I suspect that’s pretty common. Does the institution exist to protect us (if so, from who/what) or punish us? Can we trust them to do either of those things?
It feels like Australia is finally about to have the conversation that the U.S. has been grappling with for years: how do you unfuck a policing system? Our is clearly quite fucked, because in only the past week we have had:
NSW Senior Constable Kristian White charged with three different types of assault after tasering and killing 95-year-old Clare Nowland.
Queensland Police exposing their own unlawful handling of children in a documentary they made about youth crime.
NSW Constable Ryan Barlow found guilty of assaulting a 16-year-old Aboriginal boy (his claim that the boy tried to kick him was shown to be a lie).
AFP Detective Superintendent Scott Moller admitted to crucial mistakes in his investigation of Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations against Bruce Lehrmann:
Giving Lehrmann’s defence lawyers access to notes from Higgins’ counselling sessions with a rape crisis centre
Giving the AFP Commander a briefing on the case that was biased against Higgins
Liking a LinkedIn post from his own account that said “Mr. Lehrmann is innocent until proven guilty.”
AFP Senior Constable Emma Frizzell, a lead investigator of Higgins’ claims, admitted that at the time she did not actually understand the legal criteria for laying charges
Former head of Dandenong’s Sexual Offences and Child Investigation Team (in Victoria), Larry Noel Grimshaw, plead guilty to sexually assaulting a female officer. He was her boss.
And that’s just this week. Police organisations want us to believe these are isolated instances, or problematic individual officers. But they’re not. The problems have been woven into the very fabric of the institution since Day 1.
Australia wasn’t just a regular ol’ colony, it was a convict settlement. Our first policing forces were soldiers and guards, whose jobs were a) to help the British invaders oppress, control or eliminate the Indigenous people already living here, and b) keep the (mostly poor) convicts in line. What’s required to do those jobs well? For one thing, you’d have to be constantly, carefully scanning for any sign of melanin – after all, Blak bodies might try to violently reclaim what your bosses had violently stolen from them. You’d also have to be watchful and suspicious of the convicts – after all, poverty and desperation had driven them to commit crime in the first place. In this harsh environment, they might do it again, perhaps even after they were freed.
The goal was to make sure Aboriginal people and poor people did not disrupt the plans of the wealthy British colonisers. Our modern day police force has evolved directly from those first soldiers and guards.
So to bring it back to the present question: what do the police currently exist to protect? Power. They were created to stop us from getting in the way of whatever power wants. The twitchiness a lot of people feel around cops is a subconscious knowledge that the officer is there to watch you, not to watch out on your behalf.
I don’t how to break the institution down and remake it in a way that is more fair. That’s way above my pay grade! But I do know that unless we can admit that policing is and has always been one-sided, we’ll never fix any of it.
Good stuff on Zee Feed rn:
On the surface we think of cosy games as a gentle way to relax. But digging a bit deeper (like always) the video games are actually teaching us huge life lessons about being content with mundane, boring things. A lovely essay! CLICK HERE TO READ.
Smart stuff on the Internet 💭
All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:
If economists want more unemployment, will they volunteer to join the dole queue? on ABC
Brutally honest, plain-speaking analysis that few other economic/financial commentators are brave enough to say: “From their way of thinking it's the only option we have. This is just how the system works, and it's the best system we've devised. But will any of them be volunteering to be unemployed first? Will they volunteer their children? It's unlikely. Unemployment is for other people.”
Comparing the 2008 writer’s strike to the current writer’s strike on Michel Jamin’s TikTok
Michael Jamin is a TV writer and he’s been doing some really helpful explanations about the strike on his TikTok acct. I hadn’t considered how badly streaming platforms need great content, which puts more power in the writers hands than I thought. Worth a watch if you’re following this story!
The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up—And They’re Horrified on The Atlantic
“Barrett says she’s still feeling the effects of her mother’s decade of oversharing… She and her mom have no relationship now, in large part because of the wedge her mother’s social-media habits put between them. “I get afraid to even tell my friends or my fiancé something, because in the back of my mind I’m constantly like, Is this gonna be weaponized against me on the internet?’”
And a Tweet that made me tear up – a really beautiful reflection on life & death:
Throughout the Pandemic, whenever I walked past this garden, there would be a little old lady sitting in this seat who would talk to whoever passed by.
This evening as I passed I realised…..— Kevin McGuigan (@KGMcGuigan)
6:41 PM • May 22, 2023