Abstract
Police researchers have long posited a connection between policing and belonging, or between policing and related concepts such as citizenship. However, much of this literature does not include empirical data demonstrating the actual impact of policing experiences on individuals and communities. Where it does, belonging is rarely located at the centre of analysis. In this article, I explore the role of policing in generating experiences and perceptions of belonging. I connect the theoretical literature on policing, borders and belonging by conceiving of everyday policing as a racialized process of social bordering, and present evidence from a qualitative study with migrant communities in southern-eastern Melbourne, Australia. I conclude that discriminatory policing reinforces social boundaries that are relevant to both ‘belonging’ and the ‘politics of belonging’, and identify police, in conjunction with other social actors and institutions, as potentially powerful agents of ‘governmental belonging’.
Introduction
Police researchers have long posited a connection between policing and belonging. Police have been described by Loader (2006) as mediators of belonging and by Waddington (1999) as arbiters of citizenship, while Tyler (1997) notes that police communicate during encounters with members of the public whether or not individuals are respected members of groups. Qualitative work in the stop and search genre has reported experiences of shame, anger and discrimination associated with unwanted street stops (e.g. Brunson and Miller, 2006; Parmar, 2011). Belonging, and related concepts, have also been invoked in the context of border criminology, where internal bordering practices (whether performed by police or others) are said to delineate boundaries of belonging, entitlement and citizenship (Bosworth et al., 2017; Brouwer et al., 2018; Weber and Bowling, 2008). However, in this body of research the possibility that police encounters can affect belonging has not usually been the explicit focus of empirical inquiry.
In this article, I connect the theoretical literatures on policing, borders and belonging by conceiving of everyday policing as an ‘internal bordering practice’ that reinforces social boundaries in ways that influence belonging and experiences of belonging at a number of levels. I engage with some prominent theories of belonging and contribute empirically to the policing literature by presenting evidence from a qualitative study on the reported impact of encounters between police and young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds on their perceptions of belonging. The article begins by comparing the concepts of borders and boundaries to establish how it can be that everyday policing—as opposed to ‘migration policing’ that is directed explicitly towards the enforcement of immigration law (Aliverti, 2015; Weber, 2013)—might operate as a form of bordering. I then explore the idea of belonging, noting distinctions made by key theorists between belonging and the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2010) and between passive and governmental belonging (Hage, 2000), in order to give substance to the idea of ‘borders of belonging’.
Finally, I present material from a qualitative study conducted in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. That study involved informal discussions with youth workers over a two-year period from mid-2016 to mid-2018, plus recorded interviews and focus groups with young people aged 16 years and over from migrant and refugee backgrounds and older members of their communities. The study is ‘exploratory’ and was part of a larger, still ongoing, research programme aimed at producing new theory about internal bordering practices. Rather than testing existing theories, the approach was inductive and open ended (see Weber, 2018)—allowing research participants to define their own conception of belonging, and remaining open also to the inclusion of whatever groups of young people from refugee and migrant backgrounds were impacted by the boundary-reinforcing effects of everyday policing. More details about the methodology are included in the empirical sections of the article. The limitations of this exploratory design, and ideas for future research are canvassed in the conclusion.
Policing, boundaries and belonging
Borders, boundaries and citizenship
It is now commonplace to conceive of borders as non-geographic, relational and performative. For example, Geddes (2008) distinguishes territorial borders from what he calls organizational and conceptual borders. Territorial borders are the familiar geographically defined borders policed by customs and immigration authorities that are the subject of most border control research. Organizational borders operate away from territorial borders and employ bureaucratic means such as denial of access to services (Weber, 2018), often in support of territorial borders. Both territorial and organizational borders can influence the capacity of non-citizens to enter or remain in sovereign territory. Conceptual borders, on the other hand, arise from perceptions about who does and does not belong within a particular place, community or society. They are enacted by a wide range of actors and can produce physical exclusion on occasions where they intersect with territorial borders. However, conceptual borders are more likely to lead to social exclusion.
Geddes’ typology takes us to the nexus between borders and boundaries. Fassin (2011), for example, has articulated the relationship between territorial borders and social borders, which he refers to as boundaries. Conceptual borders can be thought of as an example of social bordering. Fassin argues it is essential to see the connection between borders and boundaries in order to study the policing of migration, since migration policing involves both expressions of sovereignty (associated with territorial borders) and questions of identity (associated with social borders or boundaries). Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) also acknowledge that the term ‘border’ can be used in reference to social and cultural distinctions. In fact, they claim that the distance between borders and boundaries is closer than that between different types of territorial borders, such as borders and frontiers. This close relationship suggests that researching the dynamics of conceptual borders (following Geddes) or social borders (following Fassin), from the perspective of border criminology, could produce new theoretical understandings about the nature of borders.
Borders and boundaries are linked through their roles in processes of in/exclusion that operate at different stages in the migratory experience. As noted by Fassin (2011: 215): ‘[i]n effect, immigrants embody the articulation of borders and boundaries […] They cross borders to settle in a new society and discover boundaries through the differential treatment to which they are submitted.’ For Mezzadra and Neilson also, inclusion and exclusion are not mutually exclusive. Rather, various combinations of bordering practices can produce an ‘excess of inclusion over belonging’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2012: 62) whereby individuals may be lawfully present while socially marginalized. Individuals subject to these processes of ‘inclusive exclusion’ (Agamben cited in Aas, 2011) are consigned to the status of ‘imminent outsiders’ (McNevin, 2011). This notion of physical inclusion within the territory of a nation state in the absence of social acceptance and inclusion has also been articulated within criminology.
Markers of difference and exclusion are often associated with hierarchies of citizenship. These hierarchies, whether legally defined or socially produced through the structural effects of colonization, gender, race, class or nationality, effectively sort populations into categories marked (to varying degrees and in particular contexts) as either full or partial citizens. Bosniak (2006: 134) notes that those defined by law as aliens are not the only groups denied the benefits of full citizenship, highlighting the importance of considering ‘other forms of status inequality’. Her formulation draws attention to the connections and contrasts between legal and social conceptions of citizenship in ways that parallel the links discussed above between territorial (legal) and conceptual (social) borders.
Dimensions of belonging
Although the concepts of identity, citizenship and belonging are closely related, belonging remains the most ‘under-theorised and ill-defined’ (Nunn, 2017: 218). Yuval-Davis (2004: 215) argues that belonging is not reducible to identity, and is a ‘thicker’ concept than even social conceptions of citizenship, since it derives from a deep emotional need. In this article I use the term ‘affective belonging’ to represent this subjective dimension of belonging.
Because belonging is a relational concept and thereby subject to (unequal) relations of power, a ‘politics of belonging’ arises wherever the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are contested (Yuval-Davis, 2010). Indeed, it has been argued that majority attitudes that involve ‘tacit understandings of who belongs and who does not’ are more important than formal citizenship policies in cultivating a sense of ‘having a place in a community’ (Simonsen, 2016: 1153). Different ‘scales’ or ‘spheres’ of belonging can also be discerned, such as the local, national, international, sub-cultural and interpersonal. Migration scholars have focused in particular on ‘national belonging’ or a sense of ‘belonging to host society’, which they link to processes of integration. National belonging has also been cast in terms of ‘commitment to stay’ (Amit and Bar-Lev, 2015; Raijman and Geffen, 2018), which can be negatively impacted by experiences of discrimination.
Of central importance for this discussion is the distinction made by Hage (2000) between ‘passive belonging’ (which he identifies with belonging to nation) and ‘governmental belonging’ (interpreted as right over the nation). As he explains: ‘[G]overnmental power is the power to have a legitimate view regarding who should “feel at home” in the nation and how, and who should be in and out’ (Hage, 2000: 46). It is notable that Hage’s formulation encompasses both territorial and social bordering, as defined above. A sense of entitlement to enforce borders of belonging at both these levels may play out in ‘go home’ statements, which combine both racialized and nationalist sentiments. Nunn (2014) found from her research with Vietnamese Australians that even seemingly innocuous statements such as ‘Where are you from?’ functioned as potent reminders of their ‘constant liminality’. Because the right over the nation (i.e. governmental belonging) is dispersed across the community, national belonging cannot be equated with formal conceptions of citizenship, but is driven instead by ‘the dominant community’s everyday acceptance’ of newcomers (Hage, 2000: 50). As Yuval-Davis (2004: 216) reflects, ‘neither citizenship nor identity can encapsulate the notion of belonging. Belonging is where the sociology of emotions interfaces with the sociology of power.’
Policing and governmental belonging
As an institution invested with state power, police are potential actors in the governance of belonging, although by no means the only ones. Individual police may express their governmental power over the boundaries of belonging in the same way as other members of the majority population, either through respectful and inclusive messaging or via exclusionary or overtly racist actions. In addition, the special role and powers granted to police provide heightened opportunities to communicate messages of (non-)belonging.
The use of move-on powers and pre-emptive street stops can be conceived as expressions of sovereignty over sub-national locations, while systemic practices such as profiling based on aggregate risk reinforce borders of belonging. Although new police technologies enhance these bordering capacities, there is nothing new about the practices themselves. The designation of subordinate groups as ‘police property’, defined by various combinations of gender, class, previous offending, race and ethnic identity has been an ongoing feature of policing: [P]olice patrol the boundaries of citizenship: the citizenship of those who are ‘respectable’ is secured, while those who attack the state exclude themselves from citizenship. Between these extremes are those whose claim to citizenship is insecure and needs repeatedly to be negotiated. Police are the de facto arbiters of their citizenship.
To counter these potentially exclusionary effects, Loader (2006: 202) has advocated ‘democratic’ policing that ‘highlights the role of policing agencies in recognizing the legitimate claims of all individuals and groups affected by police actions and affirming their sense of belonging to a political community’. Loader identifies the role of police in the governance of belonging when he describes them as ‘a social institution through which recognition and misrecognition are relayed’ which contributes ‘a small but vital component of the resources of secure belonging’ (2006: 210).
Empirical research into policing has often found that it falls short of this democratic ideal. Millings (2013: 1075) concluded on the basis of ethnographic work with young British Asians, for example, that police exerted a ‘powerful real and imagined role […] in these young men’s negotiation of belonging and identity’. Parmar (2017) has argued that police conceptions of belonging are racialized and that the production of racialized boundaries is heightened by their increasing role in migration policing. Parmar’s research therefore posits a connection between processes of social and territorial bordering. In my previous research I found that street stops by Australian police were often driven by a belief that a particular individual ‘shouldn’t be here’, a judgement based initially on appearance (Weber, 2011). This social bordering practice was driven in the first instance by routine order maintenance objectives, not the enforcement of territorial borders per se, but could lead to immigration checks (Weber, 2013).
A body of research into procedural justice and legitimacy in relation to the policing of migrants suggests that individuals who are ‘less sure about their place in society’ (Brouwer et al., 2018: 639) and those ‘who feel a more complicated sense of belonging’ (Bradford, 2012: 35) are particularly likely to interpret police encounters as indicators of their national belonging (see also Bradford et al., 2014). Findings such as these led Bradford and Jackson (2018: 585) to describe encounters with police as ‘a key moment in which immigrants establish a sense of place and belonging in their new home’.
Exploring connections between policing and boundaries of belonging
In the remaining discussion I examine everyday policing of refugee and migrant youths and its effect on belonging, as an example of social bordering. I use the well-established themes about affective belonging, the politics of belonging and the governance of belonging, and observations about the role of police as potential arbiters and shapers of belonging, to investigate whether and how everyday policing in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne may be enforcing racialized boundaries of belonging. By expanding the scope of internal bordering to include groups who are legally present but socially marginalized, the study extends the reach of border criminology into the realm of conceptual or social bordering.
As this is an under-researched area, and since my purpose is to explicate the dynamics of social bordering rather than to test pre-existing theories, I adopted an exploratory method for my empirical study (Weber, 2018). As explained by Stebbins (2001), exploratory methods involve being less concerned with executing a predetermined methodology than with remaining open to possibilities in order to break new ground. Exploratory research is therefore a powerful tool for revealing hitherto unseen connections, refining methodologies for further study and raising questions to be examined later using hypothesis-testing approaches.
The socio-political context
The primary data for the study were collected in two phases (described in more detail below) through a combination of focus groups, individual and group interviews involving a total of 85 individuals. Data collection took place at several locations within two local government areas in south-eastern Melbourne served by a single Division of the Victoria Police. The City of Greater Dandenong is a longstanding hub of settlement for refugees, with a reputation for supporting diverse populations. According to the latest census, 64% of residents were born overseas, nearly double the national average. 1 With rising property prices, youth workers advised that many of the communities likely to have the most contact with police had moved further out to the city of Casey. That area is slightly less diverse, but with 44% of residents born outside Australia is still well above the national average of 33%. 2 These adjacent local government areas account for the highest proportion of overseas-born residents (Dandenong) and the highest absolute number of overseas-born residents (Casey) in the state of Victoria (Department of Premier and Cabinet, 2017: 4). Although they are far from the most populous cultural minorities in the study areas, young people from South Sudanese and Pasifika origins emerged from the recruitment process as particularly marginalized, racialized 3 and over-policed groups.
The majority of South Sudanese Australians arrived as settled refugees or other humanitarian entrants. Settled refugees arrive with Permanent Residence status but may live for many years without the full legal protections of citizenship. This national group has historically been singled out by political leaders for ‘failing to integrate’ (Nolan et al., 2018; Nunn, 2010). Moreover, youths of South Sudanese origin have been subjected to a particularly virulent and criminalizing media discourse in Melbourne concerning ‘African gangs’ (Budarick, 2018), described by one commentator as a process of ‘media terrorism’ (Wahlquist, 2018). Offenders of Sudanese and South Sudanese origin are the most over-represented group in Victoria’s state crime statistics, although they still account for a tiny minority of crimes committed (Hanrahan, 2018). It has been suggested that much of this offending has occurred in response to discrimination and unresolved trauma (Shepherd et al., 2018). However, repeated racialized reporting that has equated South Sudanese or African identity with serious, often violent, offending, has unjustifiably inflated perceptions of this entire group as an imminent threat to community safety. When the federal Immigration Minister weighed into the debate, claiming that Melbourne residents were ‘scared to go out to restaurants’ due to ‘African gang violence’, 4 social media erupted with images of residents enjoying outdoor dining experiences in the supposedly affected areas. Notwithstanding these efforts to undermine the destructive discourse about this community, the consequences have included increased reports of racial vilification and a rising sense of fear and insecurity among people of South Sudanese origin (Kuek, 2019; Nyuon, 2018).
‘Pasifika’ communities have a longer history of settlement in Australia. This umbrella term refers to nationals of Pacific Island states such as Samoa and Tonga, and their Polynesian counterparts from New Zealand, the Mãori. Apart from those people born in Australia but identifying as Pasifika, the majority have entered on New Zealand passports on ‘special category visas’. These visas allow unlimited stay, but offer no settlement assistance and severely restrict entitlements to public housing, employment, tertiary education and social security. What appears on the surface to be a privileged immigration status has in fact been designed to create an ‘excess of inclusion over belonging’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). With limited access to Australia’s points-based citizenship process, and employed largely in low-paid jobs, many families have been exposed to extreme inter-generational disadvantage and sustained insecurity (Weber et al., 2013). New Zealand citizens (many identifying as Pasifika) are over-represented in the criminal justice system (Liddell et al., 2017), arguably as a consequence of sustained socio-economic disadvantage and intensive policing (Weber, 2013). Reflecting their structural positioning as ‘imminent outsiders’ (McNevin, 2011), New Zealanders, including many of Pasifika origin, now account for a higher proportion of criminal deportations from Australia than any other nationality (Weber and Powell, 2018).
Phase one: Baselining ‘belonging’
Young people were recruited by youth organizations in the study area who were asked to identify young people from migrant backgrounds who were aged 16 and over. Data collection began with five focus groups involving 22 young people (13 female, nine male), most of whom attended a youth leadership group in the study area. In line with the exploratory nature of the study, the sampling strategy did not specify particular ethnic or national backgrounds and no provision was made to compare the responses of first and second generation immigrants. It was anticipated that the majority of participants would be first generation Australian residents, and place of birth was not known to the researcher until consent forms were analysed at the completion of the focus groups. Since the study focused on the dynamics of social bordering practices in the context of ‘everyday policing’, rather than on the enforcement of territorial borders through ‘migration policing’, no provision was made to compare the experiences of citizens and non-citizens and the precise immigration status of participants was not collected.
The majority of participants in this phase of the study were born in Afghanistan and Pakistan and had entered Australia as asylum seekers or refugees, some after traumatic journeys by boat. The focus groups began with an open discussion about what belonging meant to these young people, after which images of typical locations such as schools, local parks, shopping centres, train stations and pedestrian areas were projected onto a screen. Participants were invited to discuss encounters with people in authority they had experienced in these locations that made them feel they did or did not belong. This technique provided rich data about their conceptions of belonging and the influence of a range of actors. However, very few of these young people, particularly those who were actively engaged with youth leadership programmes, reported direct encounters, either positive or negative, with police. Nevertheless, the vocabulary they used to describe their feelings of belonging provided a ‘baseline’ which was helpful in analysing the responses of participants in the second phase.
The words that the focus group participants used to describe their feelings of belonging or non-belonging fell into two clear categories, reflecting one of the distinctions discussed earlier from the belonging literature. On the one hand, some referred to ‘feeling comfortable’, ‘at ease’, ‘peaceful’, ‘feeling free’, ‘feeling natural’, being ‘at home’, ‘safe’, and ‘feeling yourself’ reflected the affective dimension of belonging, which was related to emotional comfort and integrity. Other phrases such as ‘being accepted’, ‘understood’, ‘connected’, ‘loved’, ‘cared for’, ‘being related to place’, ‘not isolated or singled out’ and ‘fitting in’ reflected the relational nature of belonging and the importance of context. Being ‘discriminated against’, ‘stereotyped’ and ‘bullied’; feeling ‘isolated’, ‘unsafe’, ‘powerless’, ‘misunderstood’ and ‘unwanted’ also featured strongly in these young people’s conceptions of non-belonging.
Shortage of space prevents a full discussion of the diverse experiences reported by these young people. At the risk of over-simplifying, most focus group participants said they generally felt at ease in multicultural environments at schools, places of worship or within the broader community, and also within their own families and cultural groups, but were sometimes less comfortable in contexts dominated by the majority Anglo-Australian population. As one participant explained: ‘I don’t think anyone feels isolated in Dandenong because of multiculturalism […] It’s different if you leave Dandenong, it doesn’t feel like you belong there.’ As for national belonging, it was notable in the discourse of these young people that they frequently used the term ‘Australian’ as if it did not apply to them.
Public transport, particularly trains, emerged as places where young people often had encounters with authorities and members of the public that conveyed messages about belonging. Many participants said they had been checked by Public Safety Officers (PSOs) 5 or ticket inspectors, in several cases nearly every week, and often when other travellers around them were not subjected to the same kind of scrutiny. One young woman described being ‘arrested’ by a ticket inspector and placed in plastic handcuffs when she was wrongly accused of not offering her seat to a passenger holding a baby, even though the circumstances would not have triggered the limited powers of arrest and detention vested in these public transport employees. 6 Some other passengers had defended her, which she said ‘gave me a sense of feeling part of the community’.
Views about shopping malls as sites of belonging or non-belonging divided to some extent along gender lines. For a number of female participants, the major mall in their area was intimidating. They described it as a site scarred by a history of drug use and violent crimes, the location of a ‘prank with an ISIS flag’ that had ‘made everyone scared’. 7 Several of the young men were more concerned at being treated like suspects. One said he was made to feel uncomfortable on a daily basis since shop workers followed him around whenever he entered a store ‘as if they expect me to steal or do something’. Another young man who said he otherwise liked spending time at the mall said: ‘I’d rather go to Coles or Safeways to get cash out. I feel uncomfortable at the ATM. People are staring, looking in from the outside to where the ATMs are. I feel like I don’t belong.’
The discussions about place-based experiences provided insights into all three dimensions of belonging: the ways in which teachers, public authorities and members of the public assume roles as arbiters of who does and does not belong (governmental belonging); disputes over belonging in which acts of exclusion may be met with responses of rebuttal, avoidance or solidarity (politics of belonging); and the deeply subjective feelings of belonging or not belonging that result from these interactions (affective belonging). Acts of kindness and acceptance by members of the wider community were deeply appreciated. Enforcement officers on public transport and private security guards in retail outlets were the closest encounter most of these participants had with any form of policing. These authorities were generally employed to reassure the public about their safety in public places. However, the experiences of unfair targeting described by some young people seemed to place them outside the boundaries of ‘secure belonging’, at least in certain contexts.
Phase two: Investigating policing and belonging
Because participants in the first phase of the study did not identify many encounters with police, several new youth organizations were approached to help broker contacts with ‘hard to reach’ young people from migrant backgrounds. This new appeal for participants eventually led to four further focus groups involving 33 young people from socially marginalized backgrounds, two with young people identifying as Pasifika and two with young people of South Sudanese origin. Three of the focus groups had a mixture of genders, and the fourth featured all male participants, all of whom were part of an organized programme. In addition, youth workers brokered interviews with five young people from African backgrounds.
In this phase of the research, I foregrounded discussion of policing encounters in the focus groups. I asked participants to identify the locations in which they had experienced encounters with police using images on flashcards, and then opened up a discussion about what was good and bad about these encounters. Participants were then invited to use post-it notes to specify how they had felt in these situations, and were finally asked whether these good and bad experiences changed how they thought about the police, themselves and the society they lived in. This approach produced a rich vein of information about experiences with police, the vast majority of which were negative. There was less opportunity in this format to discuss belonging directly, but the ‘baseline’ vocabulary that had been identified with belonging in the first phase re-appeared frequently.
The accounts of young people were supplemented with five group interviews involving 19 adult members of the local Pasifika and South Sudanese communities, some of them trained community workers. Although the primary intention in interviewing adult community members was to obtain further insights into the experiences of young people known to them, many adults also reported personal experiences with police that were relevant to their own perceptions of belonging, and to their perceptions about acceptance of their community within the wider society.
Young people’s experiences with police
In this section I provide an overview of the what, where and when of young people’s encounters with police before analysing their responses in light of the three themes identified in my review of the belonging literature: namely, the governance of belonging; the affective dimension of belonging; and the politics of belonging.
Young people identified public places such as parks, shopping malls, public transport, while walking on the street or driving, as the situations where they most often encountered police. In all but one of the focus groups, these participants had also encountered police in their homes and at police stations. The young men from the organized programme responded almost unanimously to this opening question with the emphatic response ‘everywhere’. They felt that police were pervasive in their lives, walked into their homes at will and appeared at social gatherings they attended with friends.
While many participants said they had never experienced positive interactions with police, some good experiences were reported. In one focus group involving young South Sudanese people, positive interactions with police were said to have ended once the media onslaught against their community had begun: ‘[p]olice used to come to the school as part of a reaching out programme. We went with them on foot patrol. We played soccer and basketball against them. It was around 2007–8 before everything was in the media.’ Even so, the view that ‘some cops are mean, some are OK’ was widespread. A young person who took part in a small group interview identified by name one straight-talking sergeant who had treated him with understanding: He’s like ‘Fuck I’m sick of arresting you mate.’ […] He goes ‘When are you going to pull your head in? […] If you need any help, come to us’, this, this, that. He offers you jobs and he offers, like, ways to help you.
However, when invited to discuss both positive and negative encounters with police, reports of negative encounters were far more prevalent. The most widely reported experience was excessive and unwarranted surveillance, primarily via traffic and street stops. These practices were perceived by those without offending histories as information-gathering exercises about their identity or associates, or as ‘tests’ of their attitudes towards police, with the potential to escalate into trouble; and by those with offending histories as the price of ‘being in the system’. Sudanese mothers also disclosed that they were followed by police cars for no apparent reason while driving in their neighbourhoods, and some were distraught about heavy-handed visits to their homes for seemingly minor matters.
Many reports concerned individual police misconduct and potentially criminal behaviour, and these were far from isolated. Young people complained about punitive use of pepper spray and reported being strip searched, beaten, racially vilified, having dogs set on them, having evidence fabricated against them, facing spurious charges, being tightly handcuffed and placed in painful and sometimes dangerous restraint positions. Youth workers and parents also reported knowing about, or fearing, many of these practices. Lack of courtesy, sarcasm, not being taken seriously and being approached aggressively and with disrespect were much-discussed themes. The frequent issuing of fines for minor or non-existent infractions concerning public drinking, vehicle defects and ticketing matters—in one case inadvertently failing to ‘touch off’ an electronic train ticket, which would have had the effect of over-charging the young person for their journey—was widely seen as petty and vindictive. The pervasive concern among young people about routinely being treated with disrespect was echoed by many of the parents.
Police and the governance of belonging
Previous research in Melbourne found that ‘almost all the young people we interviewed reported police engaging in racist name calling, taunts and telling young people things like: “go back to your own country”’ (Smith and Reside, n.d.: 9). In my study, although racist taunts were widely reported, explicit statements about returning to countries of origin were more often attributed to actors other than police. But virtually all the second phase participants reported unfair targeting by police which they attributed to their race or visible difference. In these encounters, police can be understood to be exercising ‘governmental belonging’, effectively deciding ‘who should “feel at home” in the nation and how, and who should be in and out’ (Hage, 2000: 46).
Many instances were reported of both racism and ‘xenoracism’, which targets a wider range of displaced and unwelcome ‘others’ (Fekete, 2001). An example of the latter would be the frequent reports in the first phase of the study by young Afghan women of hostile encounters with the public which they attributed to their wearing of the hijab. A young person of Pasifika background said ‘I know I’ll be looked at in a certain way […] they stereotype people.’ However, it became clear in the second phase that reports of discriminatory policing had a strong focus on race as determined by skin colour. One South Sudanese participant said: ‘I don’t know why police are stopping me, just for being a black person.’ Another observed: ‘[t]he person who committed these offences is African, so you being African fit the description of the criminal, so it must be you’. Participants said they were routinely ‘racially profiled’, giving examples of being singled out from mixed-raced groups in shopping centres, train stations and on the street. Although these experiences were widespread, it was conceded that ‘some cops are more discriminatory than others, some are more fair’.
Many participants with Pasifika backgrounds confirmed that South Sudanese young people were targeted by police with particular intensity, suggesting that skin colour was the salient factor. One young person reported hearing a police officer say: ‘“[y]ou know how those Sudanese people are.” And I was just like “Whoa, well how are they?” They are always going to have an outlook on a certain race as being criminals.’ Another Pasifika participant reported having attended a party with a friend who he described as ‘big and black’. When the police arrived, he claimed the police ‘harassed him and threatened to take him to the station when there were other fights going on around him’, despite the fact that his friend was the ‘only sober one of the group’. Participants from South Sudanese backgrounds also identified this putative ‘hierarchy of discrimination’. One said: ‘[t]here used to be fights between Africans and New Zealanders at Dandenong train station. When the African gets beaten up they don’t do anything. When it’s the other way round they follow up.’ Another argued: ‘[t]hey don’t care about the white or Asian who is doing the same thing. They come straight to the black person.’
An experienced community worker from a Pasifika background confirmed these observations about racialized targeting: You have like, Sudanese kids here. You’ve got our kids there. You’ve got the Australian kids and they all walk straight past the Australian kids and head straight for the Sudanese to start harassing them and moving them on. [You mean the police?] Police, security, all of them.
Her account also highlighted the fluidity of the boundaries of belonging enforced by police. She noted that her own community ‘were there first—a few years ago’, whereas the stigma associated with the South Sudanese community was ‘created a few years ago’, coinciding with the negative media campaigns.
Perhaps one of the most explicit examples of the racialized governance of belonging by police was reported by a young African man who had arrived in Australia as a recognized refugee. He recounted how a police officer had whispered in his ear as he arrested him—apparently mistaking asylum seeker boats for 18th-century slave trade vessels—‘[d]o the cuffs remind you of when you were back on the boat?’ The young man’s response had been ‘[m]ate, I came on a plane bro […] You came on the boat.’
In addition to their treatment as suspects, adult participants also complained of being treated with disrespect and having their concerns ignored when seeking police services. Their stories aligned remarkably with accounts provided by Vietnamese Australians in previous research undertaken by this author (McKernan and Weber, 2016). A South Sudanese mother lamented that police ‘don’t listen to black people, only white people’, citing an experience following a minor car accident. A focus group member said she had gone to the police station to report a stolen phone but ‘felt like I was annoying them’. Another participant remarked: ‘[t]hey take a long time to come to your assistance, but if I’ve been causing trouble, they come quickly to pick me up’. Another said, ‘the police made me feel like I wasn’t a victim, but like I was doing something wrong’.
One South Sudanese woman, a grassroots community worker, summed up the feelings of many when she said: ‘I think police are good for some people. But not for us.’ Asked for her views on how negative encounters with police might affect young people’s sense of belonging, she said: Imagine if the police themselves are your worry. They are your fear […] This is the problem with our young ones […] So they are always in […] defensive position because they know the police is there, not for me. Not because they are criminals, not because they are doing something wrong. No. It’s just because the police doesn’t like me.
Policing and affective belonging
In conjunction with their self-appointed role in the governance of belonging, police have the power to influence subjective feelings of belonging or non-belonging through their encounters with young people. The words used by participants in this study to describe how they felt after positive experiences with police tended to be straightforward; they said they felt ‘good about myself’, ‘safe’ or ‘happy’. The vocabulary used to describe their feelings after negative experiences was far more varied, and fell into distinct categories. Some participants expressed negative feelings that were directed towards the police such as ‘angry’, ‘annoyed’, ‘frustrated’ and ‘furious’. Others described their own internal feelings as ‘bad’, ‘upset’, ‘unhappy’, ‘traumatized’ or ‘shocked’. Others concentrated on the treatment they had received, such as ‘let down’, ‘mistreated’, ‘isolated’, ‘misunderstood’ and ‘not heard’. Some others demonstrated anxiety about the future, saying they felt ‘worried’, ‘paranoid’, ‘anxious’, ‘scared’, ‘stressed’, ‘unsafe’ and ‘frightened’.
Many responses suggested that young people’s sense of their social standing had been challenged by their experiences. This category included feeling ‘offended’, ‘awkward’, ‘uncomfortable’, ‘humiliated’, ‘belittled’, ‘like a joke’, ‘not taken seriously’, ‘disrespected’, ‘ashamed’, ‘powerless’ and ‘feeling like shit’. Other terms emphasized the process itself, when young people felt they had been ‘judged’, ‘discriminated against’, ‘picked on’, ‘targeted’, ‘profiled’, ‘stereotyped’ and ‘stigmatized’. Some comments suggested that interactions with police had prompted them to reflect on how they were being perceived by others, noting there was a ‘bad image on Africans because of some crimes others have done’; that their experience with police had ‘made me think about my appearance and my image’; or had made them feel ‘not trustworthy’ or ‘seen as a bit of a threat’.
Finally, participants were asked how their experiences with police had made them feel about the society in which they lived. One person said s/he felt ‘welcomed’ after a good experience. But others said they felt ‘like an outcast’, ‘alienated from society’, ‘marginalized’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘unsafe’, ‘disadvantaged’, ‘discriminated against’, ‘not welcome’, ‘rejected by society’ and as if ‘no-one cares’. Moreover, on more than one occasion, participants expressed concern for the next generation based on their own experiences, suggesting that their racial or ethnic identity, rather than place of birth, was the source of the discrimination they faced: ‘I’m scared for the children younger than me because of how we Africans get approached by police.’ In a statement that resonated with the research on ‘commitment to stay’ (Amit and Bar-Lev, 2015; Raijman and Geffen, 2018)—a concept closely related to belonging—one young man who had experienced sustained racist violence from police said: ‘[m]y kids won’t fucking grow up here […] They might be born here but they’re not going to grow up here. No way, not with the hatred.’
Policing and the politics of belonging
Police participate in what Yuval-Davis (2010) calls the politics of belonging when their treatment of migrant groups conveys messages about belonging to the wider population. As an experienced community worker from the Pasifika community explained: There are people that are there in that space who are witnessing all of this […] And if that person’s innocent, hasn’t done anything, and they are being picked on by police officers, then you can imagine what type of conclusions people are drawing as to what type of person that young person is […] When they see groups of certain kinds of young people standing together, they’ll cross the road.
Participants from South Sudanese backgrounds reported seeing people hold onto their handbags or cross the road when they saw them approaching. They said: ‘[y]ou feel like they are going to look at you like you did something wrong’; ‘[p]eople are scared to sit next to us on the train’; ‘[p]eople walk the other way. They put their phones in their pockets. No one thinks that you are innocent.’ Another young person added: ‘[p]eople at shopping centres assume that black young people will take stuff from them and don’t feel safe’. However, being seen as a threat could have the effect of increasing their own sense of insecurity. One young person worried that groups in the wider community might ‘take things into their own hands’ because they think that a ‘group of black youths are a threat’ or ‘loud teenagers are dangerous’.
Senior police in Melbourne have often attempted to counter sensationalist and criminalizing narratives promulgated by sections of the media. 8 However, police actions on the ground tend to reinforce these stereotypes. One participant explained that ‘when other people see black kids being stopped by police, then it gives them an idea that black people are not good, that they are bad’. A Pasifika community worker accused police of ‘fearmongering’ by telling ‘white people’ not to park in certain areas for fear of attack. A South Sudanese mother also said that unwarranted visits to her house by police had prompted her neighbours to complain to the housing association that her home was a ‘gangster house’.
Many research participants acknowledged that police, in turn, were influenced by other players in the politics of belonging. One young person explained: ‘[p]olice make you feel like you don’t belong because they are influenced by society’. Factors identified by numerous participants included the attitudes of shopkeepers, teachers, train passengers and anyone from the wider community who expected police to protect them from the real and putative threats posed by criminalized groups. Most notable among these wider influences was the pervasive influence of the media. One participant argued ‘I feel like those feelings don’t come from the cops, it’s more from society, from the news and social media, pointing out Africans and Sudanese etcetera. It makes you feel like you don’t belong.’ Another one claimed that: ‘[t]he media make it sound like the cops aren’t doing their job, and then the cops react to that and then they go harder’.
One way that excluded groups can respond to exclusionary politics is by asserting their belonging through acts of citizenship (Isin and Neilsen, 2008). One young person articulated the link between (a social conception of) citizenship and belonging in this way: ‘[i]f the police do listen to you then that means they value you as a human or as a citizen, and when they don’t it’s like they’re telling you “You’re not one of us”’. Challenging the power imbalance by demanding fair treatment and recognition from police was one way of asserting equal citizenship: When we come here we think we belong here. We are citizens here, not just come and go back. But not anymore because of the crisis created by media and government. The government should treat us as their own people. But they give authority to police more than us […] We are good people. We take care of this country. If this country accommodate us well we can do something good.
Zedner (2006: 427) observed more than a decade ago that populations are increasingly divided into those who are included and those who are excluded from the ‘orbit of protection’. Many research participants felt their exclusion from the orbit of protection very keenly. One South Sudanese mother expressed their despair: ‘[w]e brought those kids in this country to have a good future […] We came here because we know this country is secure. Now we don’t have any security.’ Another mother whose children had been terrified by aggressive intrusions by police into her home, ended her account with a demand for inclusionary policing: ‘[s]o, we need police to treat the people in a good way. We need to feel safe, because it’s their job to look after us and protect us’.
Conclusion
This qualitative study, while exploratory and limited in scope, has revealed the dynamics of the social borders enacted through the policing of belonging and identified many avenues for further research. The focus group approach did not take into account possible differences in experience and affective responses between the overseas-born participants and the small number of participants who were found to have been born in Australia; nor did it distinguish between individuals with more or less secure immigration status. Further exploration of gender could also have enriched the analysis, particularly in relation to the Afghan group where the wearing of a hijab appeared to be a salient factor in the gendered politics of belonging. Finally, systemic factors that may encourage racialized policing, most notably risk-based or intelligence-led policing, have not been canvassed here for reasons of space, although their effects were certainly apparent.
Placing over-policed migrant communities at the heart of the inquiry has revealed a number of ways in which police patrol and reproduce dynamically changing boundaries of belonging. Police assume a role in the governance of belonging when they select individuals for unwarranted intervention based on their racial appearance or other ethnic or cultural markers, or fail to extend the expected courtesy and protection to members of these communities when they seek police assistance. Police become actors in the politics of belonging when they convey to wider audiences that certain ethnically and racially defined groups present a special threat to the safety of the wider community. On the other hand, inclusive policing that extends respect, courtesy and understanding as far as possible to all sections of the community potentially expands the boundaries of belonging, and can generate powerful feelings of affective belonging. While this study has not directly examined police decision-making processes, the practices reported here by the subjects of policing strongly suggest that perceptions of race and difference are often constitutive of police judgements about who belongs in the community and nation. In turn, these communities experience policing through the lens of wider processes of racialization to which they have been subject, as with the sustained media vilification directed towards South Sudanese refugees in Melbourne.
Exploring the theoretical continuities between territorial and conceptual borders (using the categorization of Geddes, 2008), or between borders and social boundaries (as distinguished by Fassin, 2011) has confirmed that ‘policing as bordering’ does not simply apply at a metaphorical level, but operationalizes the same underlying logic of selective in/exclusion. This research suggests that discriminatory policing enacts a socially constructed border based on markers of non-belonging in a community, and sometimes a nation, that is mediated by race and other forms of visible difference, rather than by immigration status, at least in the first instance. While the study has identified theoretical links between social and territorial borders based on a shared dynamic of differential inclusion, it was not designed to investigate empirically the relationship between the two. Recalling Agamben’s concept of ‘inclusive exclusion’ (cited in Aas, 2011), there is scope for further research into the ways in which borders of belonging created through differential policing practice intersect with territorial borders mediated by immigration law, to create doubly exclusionary regimes of criminal deportation.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for the practical assistance provided by Youthlinks, Youth Support and Advocacy Service, the Centre for Multicultural Youth, the Federation of South Sudanese Associations in Victoria, Afri-Aus Care and the Daughters of Jerusalem Youth Action Group.
The enthusiastic and expert research assistance provided by Rebecca Powell and Meg Randolph was also indispensable to the writing of the article and is acknowledged with appreciation.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding to conduct this research came from an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT140101044) awarded to the author.
