Place, Race and Politics by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Race & Ethnic Relations, Political Science, General, Ethnic Studies
ISBN: 9781800430464
Google: FAZ7zgEACAAJ
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2021-11-19T04:27:01+00:00

Cleanskins and Criminals

Without knowing the specifics of the risk-based system used by police, local youth workers who supported young people who came into conflict with the law observed that police tended to place young people into rigid categories of either ‘cleanskin’ or ‘criminal’. These workers claimed that intensive policing of young people deemed to be ‘criminals’ (equating to the categories of YNOs or core YNOs) often undermined the genuine efforts made by these young people to change their lives. Young South Sudanese Australians in our study who disclosed that they had been in conflict with the law reported being forever judged on the basis of their past and feeling trapped in a cycle that they could not escape. These participants reported that police were constantly trying to ‘pin something on them’, as they faced the prospect of being ‘in the system forever’.

One young man argued that police should instead recognise the disadvantage faced by his community to understand ‘why young people behave the way they do’, adding that ‘they don't recognise the grief in my life’. Automated processes can be conceptualised as transforming individuals into ‘pure information’, divorced from the context and complexity of actual human lives (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000). In this regard, data-driven systems have the potential to amplify this pre-existing effect of distancing police intervention from its social context.

Young people who had come into conflict with the law sometimes shared their impressions of how police monitored them. One young South Sudanese Australian painted a colourful picture of how local police identified their targets each day: ‘Staff meeting in the morning, they're saying, “Apex, Apex, Apex. Going to fuck up all the kids.” And then they think every nigga is Apex, bro. Apex doesn't even do crime’. These young people echoed the claims made by some youth workers that intensive policing was undermining the efforts of young people to change. One said: ‘We're not crims no more, we don't want to be crims … We're just trying to have fun’. However, they felt that the younger police in particular did not give them a chance: ‘They treat you like an everyday criminal, you know what I mean, like an adult’. Another said, ‘They don't even know what they're arresting kids for nowadays’. These accounts created an impression of a conveyor belt of surveillance and arrest, such that: ‘They try so hard so you can't break out of the cycle even though you try’.

Although Australian police often attribute negative views about police to bad experiences in countries of origin, a South Sudanese Australian mother and grassroots community worker who participated in this research saw it differently. She was critical of the police tactics of relentless surveillance of past offenders, which she said were widely experienced within her community. She noted that in Africa ‘people don't get police records’. Instead, the justice system just ‘solves the problem’ then ‘leaves people be’; whereas in this country, she observed, ‘a criminal record goes on forever’.

At the other end of the risk spectrum,

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