Zero Tolerance Policing and Arabic-Speaking Young People Submitted by Michael Hartley Kennedy (c)October 2000 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Youth Work with Honours, Department of Social Policy and Human Services - Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Western Sydney, Macarthur. Zero Tolerance Policing and Arabic-Speaking Young People Submitted by Michael Hartley Kennedy Table of Contents TABLE OF CONTENTS III TABLE OF FIGURES V Acknowledgements vi Abstract vii INTRODUCTION 1 Research Critique and Methodology 4 Aims and Objectives 6 Structure of the Thesis 6 CHAPTER ONE: WHAT IS ZERO TOLERANCE POLICING? 9 The Social Contract 9 Zero Tolerance Policing 9 Zero Tolerance Policing in New York. 12 Zero Tolerance Policing in New South Wales 15 How did Zero Tolerance Policing arrive in Canterbury-Bankstown? 16 Conclusion 20 CHAPTER TWO: THE LEBANESE COMMUNITY FROM THE MIDDLE EAST TO AUSTRALIA 23 The Greater Lebanon 23 Class and Group Interaction 24 The Lebanese Community in Australia 26 Three Waves of Lebanese Immigration 26 The Lebanese Community in Canterbury-Bankstown. 27 Conclusion 28 CHAPTER THREE: GANG THEORIES AND THE ARABIC-SPEAKING COMMUNITY 30 The Gang 30 Delinquency 31 Tradition, Status and Masculinity 32 Immigrant Young People and Enterprise 33 Deviance and Labelling 34 Conclusion 36 CHAPTER FOUR: THE IMPACT OF ZERO TOLERANCE POLICING ON ARABIC-SPEAKING YOUNG PEOPLE 39 Gangs or Groups? 41 'Uncompromising' Police and Aggressive Young People 43 The Middle Eastern Kinship Structure 45 Gender Relations 46 Urban Violence and Arabic-Speaking Young People 47 Conclusion 48 CHAPTER FIVE: THE EFFECT OF ZERO TOLERANCE POLICING ON THE POLICE 51 The Accountability for the 'Uncompromising' Policing of Minority Groups 51 Politics and Policing 55 The job 59 Conclusion 59 CONCLUSION 61 Recommendations 62 REFERENCES 66 Table of Figures FIGURE 3.1: ANNUAL UNEMPLOYMENT 1990 - 2000 13 FIGURE 3.2: FBI CRIME RATING FOR NEW YORK, 1994 - 1998 13 Acknowledgements Full thanks to the staff of the Department of Social Policy and Human Services at the University of Western Sydney, Macarthur for their advice and support. Special thanks to my supervisors and friends Vaughan Bowie, Scott Poynting, Elizabeth Watson and Leonie Gibbons for all being so supportive, patient, understanding and wise. Also thank you to all of the stakeholders in this policing debate who have provided me with support. Samira, Fawze, Robert, Allan, Saide, Omar, Dalidah and many other friends from the Lebanese community in Sydney. Joan Locke (Barrister), Marroun Nader (Solicitor), Claire McCauley, Cameron Murphy, Ass Prof Ken Buckley, Dr Tim Anderson, Dr Griff Spragg, Lorraine Murphy and retired Det Ch Insp Adrian Allingham. Bonne d'ami commissaire principal Patrick Yvars, Lucienne Bui-Trong et d'autres collègues à régional de la Police Judiciare, Paris, pour partager avec moi la signification de la liberté, l'égalité et fraternité. My friends in the Solomon family for their kindness and patience in giving me the encouragement to seek more knowledge and share my experiences. Deborah Masters, Steve Knapman, Michael Jenkins, Kris Wyld, Peter Neale and many other colleagues from the ABC and 'Wildside' for their unconditional support. My dear departed friends Detective Chief Superintendent John Anderson (Died 14.10.2000) NSW Police and Captaine Gilbert Sautter (Died 19.8.2000) Brigade de Protection des Mineurs, Paris. Finally, thank you to my wonderful wife Narelle, for her love, encouragement, understanding and support. Abstract In this study I have conducted an extended literature review on the effect that the new 'highly visible... accessible, rapidly deployed' and ultimately 'uncompromising' policing strategies (New South Wales Police Service 2000, p.3)-that is, zero tolerance policing-have had on disadvantaged communities. In particular I want to consider the effect such policies have had on young people from the Arabic speaking community. In adopting a liberal-feminist standpoint as a methodology I have attempted to place myself in the position of examining the data and at the same time give all stakeholders a voice in this very important policing debate. Far from producing Commissioner Peter Ryan's vision of a 'Police Service that is... ethical, courteous, well trained and highly professional' (New South Wales Police Service 2000, p.3), this thesis demonstrates that zero tolerance policing as an organisational strategy is counter-productive. It is maintained by a hierarchical management structure in the form of data-driven performance management or crudely put, 'value for money' policing. Statistically based monitoring does little to 'reward good work and take corrective action on poor performers' (New South Wales Police Service 2000, p.3) as its measurement criteria consider only arrest rates and the 'highly visible' results that produce good media stories. I have also discovered that zero tolerance policing strategies are organisationally discriminatory and racist towards disadvantaged and minority communities, in this case principally the Lebanese community and the concepts measured solely in quantitative terms. A close examination of the literature reveals that operational police are seldom if ever given a voice and that, in many instances, researchers evaluate data solely from within their own ideological framework. As a consequence, the spotlight is seldom upon the criminal justice establishment and its executives or the inadequacies of a capitalist system. After examining a broad range of international data I have argued that the discriminatory aspects of zero tolerance policing are felt by service providers and users alike and that researchers tend to support the professional status quo of elitist criminal justice systems by demanding accountability for zero tolerance strategies from the bottom of organisational structures, thus participating in a culture of blame. I conclude with a call for more research into zero tolerance policing strategies using a framework that listens to all stakeholders and gives them all a voice. Introduction The journey of my thesis about the effect of zero tolerance policing strategies on disadvantaged and minority groups, particularly Arabic-speaking young people in the Canterbury-Bankstown area, should, perhaps, begin with a headline from the Sydney Morning Herald: 'The officer who fired the fatal shot that killed Edison Berrio [an unarmed young person], 22, of Woolloomooloo, had only just returned to duty after an alleged near fatal encounter with another man' (Kennedy, L. 2000) In retracing the changing strategies of policing and social policy design that have led to violent incidents such as this within minority and disadvantaged communities, I must travel back twenty years and reflect on the period when I was working as a detective in the Canterbury-Bankstown area of Sydney. For from 1981 until 1996 I often came into contact with members of the Arabic-speaking Lebanese community and their extended families and the first connection was often with the Lebanese young people themselves. Regardless of how trivial or serious police investigations were to be, the initial exchange in this community always began with a welcome into the family home. Whatever the reason for entering a household one of the first decisions to be made always related to food and drink and whether I would, perhaps could, drink Arabic coffee. On the 2 March 1988 at about 6am, at least a dozen colleagues and I searched the rural residence of a prominent Canterbury-Bankstown based Lebanese family. On our arrival the residents and many extended family visitors were in bed and yet, when police began searching the premises and recording information, they were served with coffee and tea like all the other family members who had been awakened from their sleep. Eventually a very large breakfast was prepared and the police were expected, and happily complied, to join the family in this meal. As is the case with most Middle Eastern families, almost all conversations took place in front of the whole family, whilst usually an adult, not necessarily a male, was maintaining the role of a mediator. In this setting voices became raised and emotional outbursts took place. However more often than not there was an obvious level of co-operation and respect for anyone in a position of authority. Importantly, a moral mandate was always extended to the police, the only proviso being that the officers be culturally aware. This meant that officers should display a reasonable level of tolerance and respect in relation to any legal due process, which involved formal interviews or the loss of liberty (Kennedy 1988). Many of the Arabic-speaking Lebanese community in the Canterbury-Bankstown area live close to other extended family members and are dependent upon government welfare services (Canterbury City Council 1993; 1998). These families suffer social and economic stress, due to poor English language skills, limited education, high unemployment levels and poor labour market opportunities for unskilled and young Arabic-speaking people (Batrouney 1995, ch.9; Humphrey 1998, p. 54). Weatherburn, Lind and Ku (1997) have shown that poverty, unemployment and disadvantage are all part of the social and economic stress, which directly impacts upon unlawful and delinquent activity. In order to critically analyse the impact that 'uncompromising' (New South Wales Police Service 2000, p.3) zero tolerance policing (see, Chapter 1) has had upon minority and disadvantaged groups, it is important to grasp the meaning of why police exist in a capitalist society. The social contract between a society and its police is a liberal-democratic concept in which the rights of the individual have to be considered along with the utilitarian, democratic belief of the most good for the most people (Banks 1999, p. 9). This uncertain, and as will be shown, in practice discriminatory, theory was the basis upon which the modern police force was introduced as an institutional arm of the state. The mechanism, through which most communities extended a mandate or moral authority to police, involved the provision that tolerance and informal discretion should used by the police whilst conducting their business (Milte & Weber 1977). Unfortunately, tolerance and informal discretion were not in evidence on the 3 and 4 August 2000, when members of New South Wales police blocked off whole streets in the Canterbury-Bankstown area in order to search the premises of some members of the Lebanese community for drugs and firearms (Kennedy 1988). This exercise, which required the use of more than two hundred police, the tactical response group, negotiators, police dogs and the police helicopter (Gee 2000; Miranda 2000a), is a clear indication of zero tolerance policing strategies used in New South Wales since 1996 (The Torch 21 August. 1996, editorial), and formally introduced by way of the New York zero tolerance model, Operations and Crime Reviews (OCR) in 1998 (Davis and Coleman 2000). These have seriously eroded the moral authority extended to police by the predominantly Lebanese, Arabic-speaking community. The burgeoning resentment towards zero tolerance policing is also becoming evident in other areas of Sydney where the population is primarily from minority, ethnic or disadvantaged communities (ABC 2000; Maher, Dixon, Swift, and Nguyen 1997). Zero tolerance policing and the use of data driven performance management strategies have made law enforcement an opaque, competitive and politicised business; a business in which tolerance, discretion and informal cautions, because they are unable to be quantitatively assessed, are becoming a thing of the past. Competency is scientifically measured in terms of empirical crime statistics and arrest rates (New South Wales Police Service 1999) which are seen to give a measure of 'individual productivity' and produce 'cost effective policing' (New South Wales Police Service 2000, p.3). In fact, this highly competitive industry based on 'new ideas, business principles and work practices' (New South Wales Police Service 2000, p.3) has created a division in some disadvantaged communities. Resembling a war between opposing armies, police and young people from minority and disadvantaged groups see each other as the enemy. The fact that it is often seen in this way is exemplified in a media report about a police internal affairs investigation into the relationships between young female police and young Lebanese males from the Canterbury-Bankstown area in which the article is headlined: 'Constables sleep with enemy' (Miranda 2000b). After shooting dead an unarmed young person, who was a heroin addict in a stolen vehicle, a young plain-clothes police officer was reported as saying, 'I thought I was going to get hit [shot].' (Gibbs 2000; Kennedy 2000). A coroner's inquest under the New South Wales Coroner's Act (1980) could have examined zero tolerance policing strategies, the data-led performance management system Operations and Crime Reviews, the downsizing of police welfare and assistance at a time when 700 of the state's 14,500 police are on long-term sick report; and why a constable who had recently been on stress leave owing to an assault in which his firearm was taken from him, was performing duties in such a high risk area. Investigating police were directed by a member of the police executive to charge the constable with murder (Gibbs 2000; Kennedy 2000, 2000a, 2000b; Kennedy and Gibbs 2000), ensuring that the coroner's inquest is likely to be only a formal exercise, as legal obligations of sub judice will allow the criminal justice establishment of senior bureaucrats, lawyers and police and their media and marketing network to remain conveniently silent on these crucial issues. For many years now there has been international comment about the fact that young people from ethnic and minority communities present soft targets for zero tolerance policing (ABC 2000; Booth 2000; Green 1999; Hopkins Burke 1998; Humphries 2000; Maher, Dixon, Swift, and Nguyen 1997; Noble, Poynting, Tabar 1999a; Palmer 1997; Penberthy, Melki and Trute 2000; Poynting 1999; Reiner 1992; Shapiro 1997; Skolnick 1999). Even James Q. Wilson, the sociologist who introduced 'The Broken Windows' theory (Wilson & Kelling 1982) which has been a major contributor to the idea of zero tolerance policing, admits that when policing focuses on rules and regulation, rather than using individual discretion, the outcomes for disadvantaged and ethnic communities are generally discriminatory and racist policing (Wilson 1968). This New South Wales experience of policing minority youth, which includes data-led evaluations; the unaccountability of criminal justice and police executives; and the scapegoating of inexperienced junior police for racism, discrimination and the shooting of unarmed people from minority groups, is in many ways a duplication of the New York zero tolerance police experience (Chivers 2000; Choa-Eoan 2000; Flynn 2000; Green 1998, p.175; Herbert 2000; New York Times, 10 December.1999, editorial; Rashbaum & Chivers 2000; Riley 2000). Research Critique and Methodology In this extended literature review I will explore and critically analyse zero tolerance law enforcement strategies and the effect these have had upon disadvantaged and minority groups; the meaning of policing and zero tolerance policing, racism and discrimination; and, in particular, the consequences of zero tolerance policing upon the Arabic-speaking community and the police. I will examine ethical obligations as well as the use of research in which only selected stakeholders are given a voice and evaluation is made solely from within a researcher's personal standpoint. The research data contained in this thesis is from a wide range of authors and texts, including journals, newspaper articles, dissertations, conference papers, internet publications, policy documents and television current affairs programs. I have also included some published ethnographic research with Arabic-speaking young people from the Canterbury-Bankstown area and some contemporaneous notes from my own personal diaries. The research data not only compares but also reflects on the politics and the politicising of policing strategies in New York, New South Wales, France and Britain and the social impact this has had upon minority and disadvantaged groups, young people and the mostly working-class young police. My civil libertarian, human rights awareness has, of course, been an enormous influence on my choice of research subject. It has also influenced the methodology used to critically analyse the gathered data, for I have combined a liberal perspective with a number of feminist-influenced methodologies; a combination which has pushed to the forefront the experiences of the less powerful, and which has foregrounded the subjectivity of the researcher. The thesis embraces the principles of cross cultural and feminist research outlined by Shulamit Reinharz (1992, pp.109-125), who argues that even if a social occurrence is universal each instance must be understood within its particular cultural context. Obviously such cultural specificity represents a challenge to essentialism, a theory that could claim that all Lebanese young people or police have particular qualities stemming from biological factors. For example, such a theory could say that all Lebanese are fundamentalists and terrorists or all police are racist and corrupt; a viewpoint which would be less than satisfactory. The subjective approach I have taken in evaluating the research data is one of inquisitively and honestly placing myself in the position of others. I have also been very mindful of Michel Foucault's (1979) explanation of power, which is seen as a net like structure linking different social positions. Social interactions are viewed as variables or nodes, fed by capillaries. Some nodes are positive, whilst others are negative. There are good and bad nodes but all of them are linked. In such a theory, attempting to eliminate discrimination would be futile because, although most of the nodes and links are positive and well meaning, some of the more well meaning nodes create negative actions even though they are opposed to the outcomes (Smart 1985). A recent example of this can be found in the shooting of Edison Berrio, with which I began this introduction and which I have discussed elsewhere (Kennedy 2000). Michael Crotty (1998, p.74) argues that to enter the attitudes of the community we must be able to take on the role of others, see ourselves as social objects, and adopt the standpoint of others. Bob Connell (1993, pp.39-41), following Lukacs, takes this notion a step further by arguing that socially just research must take as its starting point the interests of the most disadvantaged - and the least powerful - and make its observations and analysis from this perspective. By adopting this concept I am also attempting to give all of the stakeholders in this research a voice. At the core of this research methodology is the central standpoint that there is no one truth, no one authority, and no one objective method, which leads to the production of pure knowledge. As Dale Spender argues (1985, p.5), feminist knowledge is based on the premise that the experience of all human beings is valid and must not be excluded from our understandings. In contrast, patriarchal knowledge is based on the premises that the experience of only half of the human population needs to be taken into account and the resulting version can be imposed on the other. In the course of this thesis I will discuss questions of masculinity and the position of women within Arabic-speaking and Middle Eastern communities as well as examining the concept of masculinity within the same community. This issue of patriarchy is not being examined here simply from the perspective of a pre-industrial Middle Eastern kinship group attempting to settle into a post-industrial Australian society. This obviously brings with it the dynamics of Muslim, Christian, Druze and other minority communities and does not lend itself easily to a gender focused, Western ideological critique. For, as Ghaiss Jasser (1995) has argued, many Middle Eastern women feel equally threatened by patriarchy and western feminism, precisely because many cultural issues are compartmentalised within a western feminist critique. The liberal assumptions that underpin this thesis are of global human rights and notions that disadvantaged and minority groups should be given a voice and equal rights. There is no common ground with economic liberalism or new right economic doctrine in this research. Indeed, managerialist use of quantitative performance indicators and market-like allocation of resources is firmly rejected. I critically analyse the calls by some left-liberal academics for yet more accountability from operational police, which rather naively lend support to these sorts of regimes (see Chan 1997; Cunneen & White 1995; Maher, Dixon, Swift and Nguyen 1997). Rather than challenge the government and police hierarchies, these critics simply exhort politically powerless police at the base of the criminal justice structure to 'cross the Rubicon' and change their occupation's corrupt and racist cultures. Yet they fail to apply this yardstick to their own political sponsors or their likeminded colleagues. Aims and Objectives The aim of this thesis is to examine the experiences of all of the stakeholders who develop, implement and are subjected to zero tolerance policing strategies but, in particular, I will be considering those young people who are from minority and disadvantaged communities. More specifically, the thesis aims to: 1 Explore the origins, rationale and other characteristics of zero tolerance policing. 2 Establish how zero tolerance policing affects minority and disadvantaged communities, in particular Arabic-speaking young people from the Lebanese community. 3 Establish how zero tolerance policing affects operational police, in particular young police who work in the lower socio-economic communities. While global comparisons inform the analysis, the focus of the thesis is on the communities of the Canterbury-Bankstown area of South-West Sydney. Although I have chosen to undertake an extended literature review to achieve the aims and objectives of this research, there are some necessary shortcomings due to the limited amount of ethnographic data possible. Nevertheless, the research does produce a solid foundation for further research on the subject of zero tolerance policing amongst minority ethnic groups. Structure of the Thesis The critical analysis of the research data gathered will be presented in five chapters. Chapter 1 will examine the policing strategy known as 'zero tolerance policing' which, in the context of this thesis, means the 'highly visible', 'accessible', 'rapidly deployed' and 'uncompromising' policing ideas that inform the 'cost effective' (New South Wales Police Service 2000, p.3) data-led performance system called Operations and Crime Reviews (OCR). Trialed in New York as Compstat, this policy was promoted as a 'get tough' on crime initiative in direct opposition to the community policing strategies that employed a 'softly softly' approach and endeavoured to work within the community to control crime. In both New York and South-West Sydney the introduction of this 'crackdown' on crime was heralded by a media blitz that raised public fears about crime in their midst and created an atmosphere of moral panic sufficient to make the necessary restriction on individual rights appear to be justified. In fact, the thesis will be arguing, both community policing and zero tolerance policing are both management controlled forms of policing that are designed to cut costs and create a business rather than a community service structure for the police force. Chapter 2 will examine the background to Lebanese immigration to Australia, incorporating brief historical sketches of the Lebanon and the three waves of immigration, which have generated very different experiences for Lebanese migrants. It will also analyse the kinship structure and gender relations, which make the Arabic-speaking community so much of an enigma to mainstream Australians. It is the conjuncture of all these factors, the thesis will be arguing, that makes it very difficult for Australia's dominant culture to interpret the structures of the Lebanese community they see in their midst. Chapter 3 will consider the way in which gang theories in the social sciences have been applied to the Arabic-speaking community and the difficulties both the media and those involved in community research have had in distinguishing between a 'gang' and a 'group'. The fact that the distinction is a crucial one in terms of analysis goes some way towards explaining the climate of fear being generated. The kinship structure of the Arabic-speaking community, the thesis will be arguing, clearly makes this distinction a difficult task and the fuzziness of the definitions that have been posited by different sources does little to clarify the situation. Chapter 4 will examine the impact that zero tolerance policing has had on Arabic-speaking young people in the Canterbury-Bankstown area. The 'crackdown' approach has served to alienate the Arabic-speaking community and this, combined with accusations by Premier Bob Carr and Police Commissioner Peter Ryan that the community is sheltering criminals behind a 'wall of silence', has done nothing to improve relations. The Lebanese community in Sydney, as we will have seen in Chapter one, is very much a marginalised ethnic minority group severely disadvantaged by socio-economic factors relating to housing, health, education and employment. As a result it experiences high levels of racism and discrimination. Zero tolerance policing has further marginalised this community and has caused Lebanese young people, who have already been labelled as deviant by the media, to be publicly humiliated in the eyes of their community. This has facilitated the growth of a 'protest masculinity', which has resulted in even more deviant behaviour. The cycle, in short, is self-sustaining. Many in the Lebanese community view zero tolerance policing to be unjust, racist and discriminatory and are progressively withdrawing the moral authority they previously extended to the police. When they are accused by politicians of erecting a 'wall of silence' to protect undesirable elements in the community, this is very much a reaction to zero tolerance policing and cultural and racial vilification. In Chapter 5 I will be examining the effect of zero tolerance policing on police officers themselves. Operational police should be able to see their role as not just a job but as a reputable part of life. Theirs should not be a business or a political enterprise, rather it should be a social contract designed to protect the common good and enforce the common will. Media and research reports that whip up public fears about crime and safety, while at the same time generating a contempt for the police based on universalistic concerns about police corruption and a police culture, which tyrannises rather than protects, only exacerbate the identity problem for individual officers. The impact of New York's zero policing policy on the operational police was largely ignored by the architects of OCR in NSW. Instead, its effectiveness was measured in statistical terms based on 'performance' and cost effectiveness. The fact that it also generated increasing levels of stress both for the targets of zero tolerance policing and for the police officers who must enforce a policy over which they have very little control, was not considered important. The New York outcomes have been mirrored in NSW and, once again, the result is a vicious cycle which feeds on itself to exacerbate rather than solve problems that are ultimately produced by a society divided by an ever widening gulf of inequality and discrimination. The thesis concludes with a summary of the research findings together with some recommendations for future research. Chapter One: What is Zero Tolerance Policing? The Social Contract Although the notion that the police occupy a position of political neutrality cannot withstand any serious consideration, it does not necessarily follow that policing should be overtly politicised as the centrepiece of a party political controversy over its mode of operations (Reiner 1992, p.4). The modern police were established as a deterrent and an enforcement agency in an era that was economically harsh but, in order that police could obtain the necessary moral and legislated authority to operate effectively, its founders saw the need to establish policy on individual rights (Milte & Weber 1977). This flawed, but clearly very expedient, model was calculated to overcome political and social opposition to the idea of a police force. Almond (1997, p.260) contrasts the eighteenth century notion of individual rights, which was protective and designed to restrict the sovereign power of the state, with the modern concept, which must take into account welfare goods such as education and health as well as an elaborate bureaucracy, and which elevates state expansion at the expense of individual rights. This has caused the partiality for individual rights to shift towards economic liberalism and performance management, which is designed to manage people as economic units, in pursuit, it is claimed, of a greater good. Therefore, whilst the social contract which mandates law enforcement officers with legislative power and moral authority was founded on liberal ideals and was designed to provide limits to the levels of constraint the state can impose upon economic and individual rights and freedoms in a liberal democracy (Kleinig 1987, p.16-26), the modern state has modified these freedoms to an ever increasing degree. When a zero tolerance policing strategy was introduced as the main enforcement policy of the late 1990s, visions of a social contract were effectively shifted aside as 'business principles' and the idea of 'cost effective' work practices become the focus of the service (New South Wales Police Service 2000, p.3). Zero Tolerance Policing In order to understand why zero tolerance policing represents a major change of focus for the NSW Police it is necessary to consider other styles of policing to show how these differ. One of the first attempts to identify and evaluate different policing policies suggested that these could best be distinguished as belonging to three different styles (Wilson 1968). Each of these is a response to particular social and political conditions. The watchman style, for instance, emphasised order maintenance rather than law enforcement. Here, professionalism and bureaucracy were minimal and patrol officers used wide discretion in the maintenance of their beats. The service style, on the other hand, emphasised the provision of helpful services to citizens. When offenders are arrested for a crime the favoured reaction is to proceed with caution, avoiding the potential pitfalls of the neglectful outcome of the watchman approach. Finally, the legalistic style is highly bureaucratic and professional in its emphasis on universalistic and impartial law enforcement, with no space to include legitimate amounts of discretion over how rules and standards should be applied. The concept of automatic prosecution is a feature associated with the legalistic style (Wilson 1968) Political and social conditions, which influence law and order policy, overlap with the styles used by policing agencies and force or inhibit change from one policy to another. Corruption scandals, for example, often force a police executive to initiate reform to damp down public criticism. Replacing a watchman style of policing with a legalistic model often takes place when the balance of political power and ideology in a community shifts from the left to the right, favouring business groups, and universal authority designed to keep recalcitrant people in line. The informal and formal discretion used in some policing styles is often ambiguous, a fact exemplified by the legalistic patrolling of black neighbourhoods - perceived as harassment - whilst employing a less aggressive service style policing in middle-class communities displaying 'mainstream family values' (Reiner 1997, p.1021; Wilson 1968). For this reason, despite an executive emphasis on impartial law enforcement, legalistic models are often intolerant and racist. The contemporary zero tolerance policing which was introduced in the late 1990s is referred to by a number of names, including Compstat in New York and Operations and Crime Reviews (OCR) in New South Wales. In essence, these are simply based on the ideas contained in what has been called 'The Broken Windows' theory; a theory which has been generally used to develop any 'highly visible' policing policy such as zero tolerance policing. The whole notion of zero tolerance is the reduction of measured crime rates and the increase of arrest rates and clear-up rates by a policy which gives police little discretion even in relation to petty crime (David & Coleman 2000; Green 1999; Silverman 1998). The hypothesis of zero tolerance itself can be traced to an article called 'The Police and Neighbourhood Safety', which appeared in the American right-wing journal, the Atlantic Monthly, (Wilson and Kelling 1982). The idea is that if a factory or office window is left broken, passers by will presume that no one cares and that no one is in control and, as a result, other windows will be broken. Soon that decay will broaden to the adjoining streets, which will then become menacing and hostile as delinquents move in. Young petty criminals, assuming that social norms are not being enforced, will broaden their scope and will become likely candidates for serious criminal activity. At the same time, citizens in areas of public space, who already feel threatened by homeless persons, beggars, drug addicts and young people in groups, will withdraw from the civil arena (Hopkins-Burke 1998a; Greene 1999; Kelling & Coles 1996; Palmer 1997; Shapiro 1997; Scolnick 1999). The result is social breakdown on a massive scale. Zero tolerance policing in contemporary times had its beginnings in the late 1970s when there emerged a powerful discourse in western society for economic reform, in particular the deregulation of the economy and labour market from government controls. Emmy and Hughes (1991, p.191) argue that this mood reflected the domination of economic liberalism at the expense of individual rights. This so-called 'new right' thinking revitalised the hard core moral values of the family and re-introduced an idea of state based on free market values and the concept of self-help, self improvement and thrift (Giddens 1994, pp.38, 39). Although 'positive family values' may appear to be a crucial component of crime prevention, the values so recognised are more likely to prevail in affluent, stable neighbourhoods, rather than the communities from which most of the zero tolerance arrest data is drawn (Skolnick 1999). Neo-liberals maintain that their creed allows individuals to work harder, save and invest more and become less reliant on welfare and government. Giddens (1994, p.33) argues that economic markets play such a large role in new right concepts they are better explained as neo-liberal rather than neo-conservative. Neo-liberals see property, hierarchy and economic liberalism as the means of participating in the markets and advancing democracy, whereas conservatives see property and hierarchy as a means of resisting economic liberalism and democracy. Either way, the liberal concept of individual rights, which also theoretically protected the poor and minority groups against unjust state power, is overshadowed, some would say overwhelmed, by an authoritarian populism that is only concerned about property rights (Hall et al 1978). The lack of interest in any other form of rights is generally justified under a veneer of utilitarian governance, crudely defined as the most good for the greatest number of people (Almond 1993; Banks 1999, p.9). Community policing was the orthodoxy ousted by zero tolerance policing. This, simply described, involved returning as many officers as possible to foot patrol duties to allow them to once again form community partnerships (Hopkins-Burke 1998, p.14). Community policing requires consideration and discretion when dealing with petty illegal activity involving young people and minority groups in order to avoid alienating group leaders and causing further social unrest (Manning 1996). Silverman (1998, p.57) suggests that police organisations which used community policing as their principal operational strategy, implemented business strategies to validate its existence by cross-referencing crime and arrest statistics with budget expenditure. This propelled the notion of performance management into the direction of community policing. Community policing concepts in Britain and Australia were revised to complement neo-liberal economic policy, with the core objectives carefully redefined in terminology which focused on performance management and superficially overlapped concepts of individual rights and economic liberalism. Community policing is a policy and strategy aimed at achieving more effective and efficient crime control, reduced fear of crime, improved quality of life, improved police services and police legitimacy, through a pro-active reliance on community resources that seek to change crime causing conditions. It assumes a need for greater accountability of police, greater public share in decision-making and greater concern for civil rights and civil liberties (Hopkins-Burke 1998, p.16). The principal executive strategy, in this way, became a combination of community ideas and value-for-money policing (Silverman 1998; Kelling & Coles 1996). The dominance of economic liberalism over individual rights paved the way for neo-liberal governments to impose zero tolerance policing under the mantle of performance management. Zero Tolerance Policing in New York. In 1993 Rudolph Giuliani became the Lord Mayor of New York after a successful political campaign which placed a major emphasis on the slogan 'Quality of life' (Green 1999, p.172; Giuliani 1998). Mayor Giuliani, as a tough 'no nonsense' neo-liberal Republican, took office with a conservative agenda on social policy which undertook to reduce the city's projected budget deficit by reducing crime (Hopkins-Burke 1998, p.17). In 1994 he appointed as Police Commissioner, William Bratton, who proceeded to introduce the crime intelligence information and process database named Compstat. This is described in his book, Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic (Bratton 1998, p.224). The success of Compstat can be seen in the annual Federal Bureau of Investigation report, which measures total crime in 217 American cities with a population over 100,000 (see below, Figure 3.2). In 1994 New York was ranked the 114th worst city; in 1998 it is ranked 166th. Bratton contended that 'get tough' policing was necessary because community policing in New York had been weighed down by a deficiency in quality of life issues, which were considered to be the foundation of the widespread fear of crime among the public (Green 1998, p.172-174). Naturally, Bratton gave Compstat the credit for reducing crime, failing to notice that unemployment in New York City was falling at the same time and that this would have a significant effect on crime rates as well. In 1992 unemployment was 11%; in 1998 this was reduced to 8%; and by 2000 it is 6.2% (United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 2000), as shown in Figure 3.1. Figure 3.1: Annual Unemployment 1990 - 2000 Figure 3.2: FBI Crime Rating for New York, 1994 - 1998 Compstat briefings in New York between the police executive and operational commanders are performance management evaluations, which rely on computer generated crime statistics. The focus is on the response of commanders and the effectiveness of their strategies and actions to prevent crime (Davis & Coleman 2000). Hopkins-Burke (1998, p.20) has examined these briefings, which take place in a military styled central control room similar to a wartime operations centre. Police executives interrogate the management whilst reviewing crime statistics on a screen, which is generally not available to those being assessed. Operational police are never informed whether or not they will be called upon; as a result a revised briefing has to be constantly available. There can be humiliating circumstances for operational management if statistical targets are not met. It certainly appears that the zero tolerance concepts used in such performance management reviews has the propensity to become the principal operational strategy. Compstat has proved to be a politically popular law enforcement mechanism as police discretion has been given a limited role and no crime is considered too small to result in an arrest. Community policing and the ability for police to use discretion has been defined as 'being soft on crime'. 'Cracking down' on criminals, on the other hand, is popularly equated with making the streets safer for a general public plagued by the fear that there is danger everywhere. Zero tolerance concepts are often shrouded in military campaign metaphors - for example, 'In New York city, we now know where the enemy is'. Having 'located' the 'enemy', however, creates an 'us' and 'them' mentality for both sides in any battle. Referring to the police executive and politicians who developed the strategy, one officer stated, 'They have made us the enemy more than we ever were' (Herbert 2000). Bratton encouraged police to stop and search citizens who were violating even the most minor of laws (Green 1998, p.175) because productivity performance indicators were also used to evaluate the 'success' of individual law enforcement officers. This imagery has been taken up by the media as well. In an editorial in the New York Times on 10 December 1999, Choa-Eoan (2000, p.25) detailed the profiles and competency of four New York City police who had been charged and later acquitted of the shooting homicide of a young black man from a minority immigrant community. Amadou Diallo had been shot by police nineteen times and the four officers were referred to, in military language, as 'veterans'. Their competency was measured in the performance management terms of individual felony arrest statistics, citations and unsubstantiated complaints. In reality, three of the four officers from New York were young people under the age of twenty five when they joined the police. All four had less than seven years' service and very limited court experience at the time of the Diallo incident (Fyfe 2000, p.13). Although popular with politicians, the media and the police hierarchy, it is important to stress that the concept of zero tolerance policing is not universally supported by operational police. As one police officer told the New York Times: There is no humanistic or humane approach to the service that we do. It's just numbers, numbers, numbers ... All they want is to get the arrest numbers up ... this all comes from Giuliani's over the top take no prisoners attitude (New York Times 20 March. 2000). Zero Tolerance Policing in New South Wales Community policing had first been introduced as the principle operational strategy of the New South Wales police in 1987. The emphasis then was for each police officer to have their service measured according to a statement of values which placed emphasis on 'Integrity above all' and working with the community (New South Wales Police Annual Report 1987, pp.6, 24). The breaking down of the organisation's hierarchical structure from centralised policing to a regionalised was an anti-corruption strategy that took place about the same time. The evaluation process in relation to community policing was directly linked to the operational budgets of decentralised commands. As a result, value-for-money policing prevailed. The New South Wales Commissioner's Annual Reports during the late 1980s demonstrate that a strengthened 'uncompromising' style of zero tolerance internal policing policy became part of the struggle to address corruption at this time. In a discussion on police ethics, ex-Commissioner John Avery said that police in New South Wales had been dragged before the Wood Royal Commission in the same way as the prostitute was dragged before Jesus. Avery argued that the Wood Inquiry was the Royal Commission we had to have, with attacks on innocent police being made by 'the under-informed and social misfits,' but concluding that radical surgery was required to rid the police of the cancer of corruption (Miller, Blackler & Alexander (1997, pp. vii - xiii). In New South Wales, as police had already been socialised to accept zero tolerance internal policing, the shift in procedural policy from community policing towards 'uncompromising' policing almost went unnoticed. David Dixon (1999, p.176) has examined the strategies of Police Commissioner Ryan, who argued that increased crime rates existed because the police service had 'taken its eye off the ball' whilst it cleaned up corruption. The data-led management strategy OCRs, which is directly related to the Compstat model, is also performance based (Davis & Coleman 2000) and the New South Wales Police Annual Report (1999, pp.4-5) quantifies crime reduction in victimisation percentages. Rationalised and improved work practices are increased self-assessment reports, increased numbers of operational police and a sustained level of workplace alcohol breath testing. Employee job satisfaction and motivation is depicted in data relating to complaints against police. How did Zero Tolerance Policing arrive in Canterbury-Bankstown? The politicising of law and order in Canterbury-Bankstown between 1996 and 2000 is well documented. Political and media pressure was placed on a more than willing police executive to stop being 'soft on crime' by initiating zero tolerance policing strategies; strategies which were only officially introduced under the name OCRs in 1998 (Davis & Coleman 2000). This zero tolerance, military style policing was symbolically a declaration of war upon sex workers and Arabic-speaking young people in the Canterbury-Bankstown community. Canterbury Road is the main thoroughfare through the Canterbury-Bankstown area. The five-kilometre section of the road from Campsie to Bankstown, which includes Belmore, Lakemba, Wiley Park and Punchbowl, has been frequented by prostitutes since the late 1970s. Socially, prostitutes are a high HIV risk group who use intravenous drugs and are often disconnected from mainstream health care provision (Erickson, Riley, Cheung & O'Hare 1997, pp. 410). The Canterbury-Bankstown needle and condom outreach program was introduced as part of a harm reduction World Health Organisation AIDS management strategy. The outreach programs allowed partnerships to be developed between police, outreach workers and sex workers. Consultation between police and other welfare professionals allowed the network to maximise the use of their discretion, power and authority to regulate and minimalise the activities of procurers and pimps amongst the sex workers. However, such harm reduction strategies as discretion and empathy conflicted with the rising new right 'tough on crime' politics developing in the mid 1990s. In 1996 the Canterbury Council Street Prostitution committee targeted the Sex Workers Outreach Project in a well organised campaign that treated harm reduction strategies as part of the 'problem' itself. ... the battle to clean up Canterbury Road is not just about ensuring it is properly policed, it is also about ensuring that the associate services which compound the problem like the mobile needle exchange and condom unit are brought into line ... Member for Lakemba, Tony Stewart has applauded the decision to remove the mobile needle service ... removing the needle exchange program from Belmore streets will also help in our fight to eliminate local street prostitution (The Torch 21 August. 1996, editorial). The military style imagery used in the local media about 'the battle to clean up Canterbury Road' and 'our fight to eliminate local street prostitution', together with the editorial fusion of neo-liberal politics with popular law and order issues was enough to create a moral panic scenario; panic which built on the impression that 'soft options' such as the mobile needle exchange and condom unit were playing a major role in creating drug addiction and allowing the proliferation of prostitution in the area. This, it would appear, was a crisis situation requiring extraordinary responses - just as martial law and conscription are made to appear acceptable in wartime. In this way it appeared that the traditional liberal-democratic structures needed to be by-passed in order to force the enactment of legislation for the greater public good (Watney 1987). Assuming the role of a moral crusader disdainful of his own safety, Tony Stewart, the member for Lakemba was praised by the media - along with other 'councillors and residents' - for their determination to 'clear their street of drug addicts, prostitutes and men prowling in cars' (Warnock 1996, p.1). Touted by the media as 'leading the battle for Belmore', Stewart was seen to be selflessly maintaining his campaign despite the fact that he had 'made many enemies' and had 'received death threats to himself and his young son' (Warnock 1996, p.1). Stewart also alleged that he had received death threats after making a speech in Parliament in support of multiculturalism (Chulov 1996, p.12). Such a politicised, moral entrepreneurial stance was very similar to the 'quality of life' campaign used by Mayor Giuliani in New York City in his media and marketing strategy. Like Mayor Giuliani, Stewart also questioned the moral and legislative authority of law enforcement officers and cast doubts on their use of discretion as a tool for dealing with crime. The State Government is to review the way local councils have been administering changes to the Disorderly Houses Act. ... The ALP member for Lakemba, Mr Tony Stewart, said some councils were concerned about the location of brothels and their impact on local communities ... Mr Stewart said the findings of The Wood Royal Commission highlighted the importance of brothel control being out of police hands (Delvecchio 1997, p.2). At this time the professional welfare/ law enforcement partnerships, which supported harm reduction strategies, had fragmented, limiting their ability to act on a concerted front to counter this campaign. The Torch (1997a, p.5), meanwhile, praised a police initiated strategy called 'Operation Crystal', which was a zero tolerance policy relating to prostitutes. Although the Wood Royal Commission proposals in relation to the control of brothels were supported, its other suggestions in relation to harm reduction strategies and 'shooting galleries' (safe injecting locations) were rejected by all major political parties, who recognised that these would be electorally unpopular. Publicising the fact that addicts in the area were using an abandoned garage as a 'shooting gallery' in which to inject drugs, Stewart argued that there was a 'youth drug crisis' in the area (Kent & Chulov 1997, p.10). This was, he contended, because crime had been pushed into his electorate after a sustained police 'crackdown' in the neighbouring electorate. 'Soft' options such as harm reduction strategies and 'soft' policing strategies, which gave too much power of discretion to individual officers, were said to be at the heart of the problem. In this way, as the campaign hotted up, criticism of the police became more precise, with military language employing labels such as 'anti-drugs campaigner' and making the claim that he was 'waging a campaign', or a 'war on crime'. Again, this mirrored the moral panic discourse from New York. NSW MP Tony Stewart, Caucus chairman and anti-drugs campaigner, who was shot at in his car and waited 18 minutes for help, has blasted police in a call for an investigation... [He] claimed police were 'grossly inaccurate and deficient' in their report of the incident... Mr Stewart has been embroiled is a dispute with drug pushers after exposing an abandoned Lakemba shop as a drug 'shooting gallery'... he has also waged a campaign to 'make local police more accountable for their activities' (Chulov 1997, p.17). Such an 'uncompromising' law and order campaign, which created the need for the police to overtly demonstrate that they could act effectively, created a new level of mistrust between police, sex workers and young people. Illegal activity was continually agitated by media and political interests; deviance was amplified and issues relating to unemployed youth, criminal activity and ethnic gangs became topical. As Manning (1996, p.15) has shown, gang behaviour is linked to poverty, family instability, failure at school, substance abuse and the lack of direction and boredom associated with unemployment. Confrontation with the police is counter-productive as it is seen by young people in gangs as a legitimate means to obtain status. Targeting gang leaders, therefore, can simply reinforce the values of the gang and its fraternal culture. Frustrated by a rampant drugs trade in his electorate and the failure of police to make serious inroads, Member for Lakemba Tony Stewart conducted surveillance... Mr Stewart's efforts were forced by a lack of police success in following up his complaints, but he said yesterday he believed the police command in Campsie and Lakemba was finally making a difference in the fight against street level drug dealing (Chulov & Goodsir 1998, p.7). On Sunday November 1 1998 the impact of 'uncompromising' law and order strategies was highlighted when thirteen shots were fired into Lakemba Police Station. The media, politicians and police executive, however, immediately blamed Lebanese youth gangs for the violence. Police blamed the attack (as yet without substantiation) on young men from a migrant community with an unemployment rate of 20% (Long 1999, p.1). Having declared war on Bankstown, gunmen chose Lakemba police station because it is more vulnerable and less protected (Cornford 1998, p.4) Earlier last year, 13 shots were fired through the windows of a police station in Lakemba, after police threatened to crackdown on so-called ethnic gangs dealing hard drugs in Sydney's suburbs (Overington 1999, p.3) Tony Stewart instantly campaigned to 'make kids part of the solution' explaining that young people in the area did not trust police (Humphries 1998, p.5), although this proved to be an empty piece of rhetoric, devoid of substance. In March 1999 gunmen shot at a house which displayed a re-election campaign sign for Tony Stewart and Stewart insisted the incident was part of a campaign to change the law and order focus in the electorate (Kennedy 1999, p.3), hammering home his status as a reformer dedicated to the pursuit of law and order issues regardless of the consequences. Like the murdered MP John Newman before him, Mr Tony Stewart admits he is a controversial figure with his fair share of enemies. The Labor MP has crafted a profile as a no-nonsense anti-gang and anti-drugs crusader and vocal supporter of zero tolerance policing. He has also been the centre of a bitter pre-selection battle for the seat of Lakemba during which he and other neighbouring MPs became embroiled in allegation of branch stacking (Morris 1999, p.3). Such an inflexible approach, whilst proving politically effective for Stewart, merely exacerbates an already volatile situation by preventing police practitioners from using the former discretionary option once open to them. As a result, those sections of the community who previously saw the police as a legitimate social agency with a brief to ensure the preservation and enforcement of law and order in the good of the community, have now withdrawn their support. Conclusion The social contract between the community and the police, as we have seen, is a contract, which requires that the community bestows moral authority on the police to enable them to fulfil their purpose effectively. Within liberal philosophy, the division between individual freedoms and economic liberalism moves from the individualist left to the economic right. Economic liberalism is inclined to theorise society in procedural terms or to use a minimalist approach to individual rights (Emy & Hughes 1991, pp. 201, 202) and at times this orthodoxy endeavours to fit the rights and freedoms of individuals into the utilitarian confines of marketplace capitalism. This, it has been seen, is hard to do. When classical liberal thinking in relation to a social contract between the state and its citizens in resolving disputes was explored in 1690 by John Locke in The Second Trieste of Civil Government, he argued that citizens needed to return some of their rights relating to legal retaliation to a coercive state power able to protect goods and property. This would only be given, however, on the condition that the fundamental rights of individuals were protected (Kleinig 1987, p.16-26). The formation of the modern police, as we have seen, was established in a social contract that attempted to balance the scales determining the level of order and freedom within civil society. The legislated power and moral authority mandated to police officers was conditional upon their use of discretion and tact in managing a diverse and imperfect society (Milte &Weber 1977. pp.19-32). Although there is a persuasive argument that the formation of the new police took into account individual rights as well as the utilitarian concept of the most good for the most people, it must be remembered that at the time the bulk of society were working-class and poor. The shape of society has changed and the working-class bulge previously at the base of the class pyramid has risen upwards and changed the class pyramid into a diamond shape. Just as the initial concept of police, in effect, took into account the powerlessness of the working-class and poor majority, zero tolerance policing tends to discriminate against the poor and other minority groups at the base of the contemporary social structure. In the case of zero tolerance policies, the effect is to satisfy the interests of the majority by discriminating against minority groups. Janet Chan (1997, p.4) has criticised the lack of police accountability in dealing with minority groups, arguing that the police are racist and discriminate against certain social groups through the use of their specific powers. She believes that community policing should be used as a key strategy in any police reform. Unfortunately, although her arguments about police racism and corruption are very sustainable, they do not take into account the full extent of the problem. To argue that police culture is not monolithic or universal and suggest that the police executive seems to be fairly positive about the performance of the organization implies that it is only operational police who are resistant to change (Chan 1997, p.65-66, 214-217). Chan is just one of the many critics who have failed to grasp the 'value-for-money' concept behind community policing or the economic rationalisation that lies behind OCRs. In fact, the effectiveness of OCRs, despite its major socio-legal implications, is being evaluated purely as a business strategy by the Australian Graduate School of Management, Macquarie University (Davis & Coleman 2000). Paul Rock (1997, p.251), as a progressive criminologist, has argued that criminal justice was engineered to keep the public eye on working-class and ethnic communities and divert it away from ills of capitalism. At the same time the criminal justice system itself provides vague rules in relation to police powers; rules which effectively condone police deviation and simultaneously make police the 'fall guys' of the legal system with regard to injustice (McBarnet 1981, p.156). In most instances it is inevitable that essentialist arguments regarding the flaws of police practitioners serve only to assist the neo-liberal concept that policing is a business and not a social contract. As a result the public spotlight is continually dim on issues of poverty, disadvantage and a politicised police executive. The establishment's game-playing and questionable understanding of zero tolerance law and order strategies is exemplified in an article by Jon Smith in the Sydney Morning Herald, which examined the arrest - as drunk and incapable - of sixteen year old Euan Blair, the son of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Cherie Booth QC (Smith 2000). Interestingly, Prime Minister Blair endorsed 'zero tolerance' policing in 1997 in an interview in the magazine The Big Issue (Downes & Morgan 1997, p.106). On the day before the arrest of his son he had suggested that drunken louts causing nuisance on Britain's streets after pub closing time should be marched to the nearest cash machine and made to pay an on-the-spot fine. Clearly there should be more than a degree of concern when a Prime Minister endorses a zero tolerance law and order policy that assumes all young people have a bank account with sufficient savings to pay hefty on the spot fines. Even more interesting is that, within days of this incident, a legal challenge led by human rights lawyer Cherie Booth QC was launched at the United Nations, challenging mandatory sentencing legislation in Australia (Sydney Morning Herald 14 July, 2000, editorial). Is there any hope when the basic flaws of 'police culture' appear to be an expression of the wider social-political culture which exudes complacency, conservatism and a lack of transparency amongst criminal justice critics and professionals (Dixon 1999, p175)? Chapter Two: The Lebanese Community from the Middle East to Australia The Greater Lebanon The contemporary Middle East contains an immense foundation of spiritual and scholastic wealth, which is situated in a context of sometimes crushing poverty. As such, it is a land of economic disparity. The Middle East represents a wide assortment of countries, experiencing a vast array of religious, national and social conflicts and a region of historical significance to the rest of the world (Aubenas and Garcon 2000). According to Massoulie 'Lebanon, with its ancestral rivalries, border problems, social and international conflicts, was a natural battlefield to be fought upon. The Lebanese were caught in the firing line' (Massoulie 1999, p.135). The ancestors of many Lebanese people today formed a feudal, emirate community in the mountains as an ideal refuge for the country's minority groups. The most dominant group were the Druze, a complex community who, for many centuries, were aligned with the Maronite Christian religion. Ghassan Salame explains how this feudal society was first bonded by tribal and sectarian ties, which functioned until the early nineteenth century when a weakness in the Maronite-Druze alliance, that subsequently led to a civil war, was exploited by colonialist European nations. In the aftermath, France, Britain and Turkey intervened, appointing a council which was representative of the various factions but answered to the authority of a Turkish governor. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the council had begun to reject Turkish rule and was moving towards making themselves into a nation-state (Massoulie 1999, ch.7; Salame 1994, ch.3). After the First World War (1914-1918) and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Lebanon became a French protectorate and, by 1920 as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, the country had increased in size from 4,500 to 10,400 square kilometres. Almost overnight the Maronite-Druze majority became a minority and the Shi'ite Muslims became the third largest group in the Greater Lebanon. The French replaced many of the Sunni Muslim bureaucrats with Maronite Catholics and in 1926 the Lebanese constitution was promulgated. It was not until 1943 that a national pact between Maronite-Sunni minorities confirmed the Greater Lebanon to be a country with an 'Arab' appearance (Batrouney 1995, p. 193; Rejwan 1998, p.198). This pact was re-enforced in 1950 when Lebanon broke away from Syria and a laissez faire service economy was predicated upon a weak government and non interventionist state by an 'uncompromising' financial-commercial bourgeoisie (Johnson 1986, p.100; Massoulie 1999, ch.7; Salame 1994, ch.3). A continuous Anglo-American interference in Middle Eastern affairs resulted in the 1956 Suez conflict, the 1967 Israeli-Arab war and the establishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. James Bill and Robert Springborg argue that after these conflicts most Middle Eastern nation states pressured Lebanon to accept PLO refugees, a situation which caused internal unrest in Lebanon itself. Najib Ghadbian explains how the resulting internal conflicts eventually developed into a civil war; while some Shi'ite militia became aligned with Maronites, other Shi'ites preferred to see an Islamic republic. Orthodox Christian and Sunni Muslim militia groups also existed. Some Christians supported the PLO and some Muslims fought with the right-wing Christian militia. Power struggles also took place within each community and, although the civil wars ended in the mid 1990s (Bill & Springborg 1994, ch.3; Ghadbian 1997, ch.3; Massoulie 1999, ch.7), it was not until July 2000 that Israeli soldiers finally withdrew from the Lebanon. Some observers argue that the Lebanese conflicts were not wars about religion and that they came about as a result of a collision of socio-political and international conflicts within a state that was divided into castes and kinship groups and incapable of arbitrating issues relating to a major crisis. It has also been argued that it is the same traditional close-knit communities and kinship groups that have assisted to resolve many of the Lebanese problems (Bill & Springborg 1994, p.95). Regardless of this, between the Lebanese wars of 1975 and 1990 the nation suffered 145,000 dead, 18,000 disappeared and nearly 200,000 injured (Massoulie 1999, p.143). Class and Group Interaction Michael Johnson has described greater Lebanon as a country moving from a feudal system into a distorted service economy, where status is determined by consumption, clientelism and the markets, rather than by the production of goods (Johnson 1986, p.101). The bulk of the Lebanese population are workers and peasants. The working-class exists in both urban and rural communities and includes servants, manual labourers, craftsmen and artisans who mostly earn their livelihood in the service industry through the use of physical skills, enjoying some organisational protection through kinship groups and the membership of guilds. The vast majority of direct producers, however, are peasants who work the land under a variety of arrangements, a situation which only serves to enhance their degree of poverty and ignorance (Bill & Springborg 1994, p.126). In Lebanon, the peasant class are mostly Muslims and they are located at the very bottom of the social structure. This class has little power and is exploited and abused by all other classes, including the working-class, clerics, merchants and government officials. The social structure has been developed out of a system of both vertical and horizontal stratification, representing an intricate web of groups that are partitioned along class lines. It is the reciprocal relationship between the group and class structure that builds the coherence into the Lebanese socio-political structure. For this reason there is no grand theory into which Lebanese society can be neatly packaged. The affluent private sector in post World War Two Lebanon grew in the shadow of the state and was assisted by the public sector to gain access to credit, fiscal advantage and other economic actions. In European culture this private sector focus on economic policy often provoked class conflict amongst the working-class and poor and subsequently a demand for political action that was generally not required by the middle-class (Leca 1994, 70-71). In Lebanon the dominant ethnic, tribal, religious and military groups often draw their memberships from different classes with a common group affiliation, which themselves were structured along class lines. Family units tended to belong to a single class not always shared by the broader kinship group and these class divisions tended to retard individual and group mobility. Because the first obligation is to the kinship group (Bill and Springborg 1994, ch.3), there is a propensity for class cohesion to be weakened. This group structure within Lebanese society tends to support a system of mobility where individuals move across class lines and lessen the impact of class confrontation. The Lebanese private sector did not come to the aid of the state and, for this reason, the social structure became more fragile and inequalities became more visible. According to Michael Johnson the social support and welfare system in Lebanon is not dependent upon the state, but rather upon the wealth and status of those at the tip of the kinship structure. The Lebanese socio-political system is a complex alliance of minority groups, controlled by za'im and qabaday, who often gain access to patronage through politics and distribute the benefits to the broader kinship group (Johnson 1986, p.101). The za'im and the qabaday thus play an intricate role in the distribution of social support and employment opportunity. Contemporary za'im are considered to be rural and urban leaders who use their wealth, status and networks to build a clientele of electoral support and, in return, favours are distributed to the clients for political loyalty. Of course this also means the za'im have to purchase the loyalty of the more prosperous clients and, when returned to office, employment, contracts, capital, education and medical treatment are distributed to the loyal client base, which more often than not is also a broader kinship group (Johnson 1986, ch.2). The mixture of manipulation, coercion and consent used by za'im, required the use of a qabaday to organise and control a client base. Johnson (1986,ch.3) explains that in the Middle East being tough or a bully, or just being brave, can all be translated to mean qabaday. In western terms the role is often more crudely reflected as a gangster working for a mafia boss. However, in Lebanon the role can also be very contradictory and ambiguous and much more complex than this simple metaphor suggests. The qabaday is a moral leader, a helper of the poor and weak, and the communal champion. The qabaday of an opposing za'im is often seen to be a thug or a scoundrel and in any event is seldom respected by the middle-class, although the employer za'im is seen as a pillar of the community (Bill & Springborg 1994; Massoulie 1999,ch.7; Salame 1994,ch.3;) The Lebanese Community in Australia The Lebanese immigrants, who began to arrive in Sydney in the late nineteenth century, generally built up small businesses, set up shops or travelled the country areas as itinerant hawkers selling their wares. Many Lebanese became importers, small manufacturers and wholesalers and the traditional Middle Eastern kinship group often ensured that new Lebanese immigrants received goods on credit and an opportunity to begin their own business. This resulted in such a broad trade network that eighty percent of the New South Wales Lebanese community were involved in commercial occupations by 1901. By 1947 there were a combined 1,886 immigrants from the original and the Greater Lebanon and sixty percent of these people were employers or self-employed mostly in small business, warehousing, manufacturing and drapery (McKay and Batrouney 1988, p.667-8). By 2000, there are over 50,000 first generation Lebanese immigrants and a further 66,000 second generation - with an unknown number of Lebanese belonging to the subsequent generations - living in New South Wales (Ethnic Affairs Commission NSW 1998). Sydney is the centre for three quarters of Australia's Lebanese community. Trevor Batrouney estimates the total Lebanese population to be about 200,000. About 40% of the population born in Australia are Catholic, 37% are Muslims and 13% are Orthodox. The Maronites are 75% of Christians, with the balance belonging to various Orthodox denominations. The majority of Muslims are from the Sunni sect; the Shi'ite and Alawite sects make up less than 2% of the Lebanese population. The Druze, whose religious affiliation tends to overlap both Christian and Muslim, count for less than 2% of Lebanese people in Australia (Batrouney 1995, p.194-195). Three Waves of Lebanese Immigration There have been three waves of Lebanese Immigration into Australia (Batrouney 1995, ch.9). The first wave, from the mid-nineteenth century until 1947, became a small business community, who were probably identified as Turks or Syrians due to the complex status of Greater Lebanon. The second wave, from 1947 until 1975, were part of the sustained migrant intake by Australia after World War Two. Most Lebanese emigrated to improve their standard of living and nearly all were Christian, with some degree of formal education. From 1947-61 there were about 400 settlers per year, between 1961-66 this increased to about 800 per year, and after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the civil unrest in Lebanon the numbers increased to about 3,000 a year until 1971-1976 when the numbers actually declined. In 1976 there were 33,334 Lebanese-born people living in Australia. During the second wave of immigration most Lebanese men and women were able to find unskilled employment in the booming manufacturing industry, although many moved into small retail trading businesses by opening milk bars and garages or driving taxis. The third wave from 1975 onwards was a product of the outbreak of the civil wars. More than 16,000 Lebanese moved to Australia between 1976-1981 and most of these were Muslim peasants (Luca 1994; Bill & Springborg 1994). This influx challenged the dominant Maronite Christian community in Australia. Furthermore, economic conditions for the third wave of settlers were different to those encountered by the first two waves. The new arrivals suffered high levels of unemployment and welfare dependence and were the least able of the three waves of settlers to understand their situation or status or even their new country. In May 1983 unemployment was 10.2% for Australian-born people and 33.6% for the Lebanese population. In 1993 unemployment for Lebanese people aged 15-34 years was 43% (Moss 1993). Many of this third wave of immigrants have not only been unable to attain upwards occupational mobility but have also been unable to achieve the dignity of work itself. Collins, Morrissey and Grogan (1995) show that Lebanese unemployment rates have been three to five times the national average for decades. It should not come as any surprise that the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures (1998, p.50-55) show that non-English speaking people have the highest rates of unemployment and, in particular, youth unemployment. The Lebanese Community in Canterbury-Bankstown. In December 1998 Canterbury City Council released a demographic profile of the Canterbury-Bankstown population which shows that the Arabic-speaking community, representing 15.1% of the population, has 12.2% unemployment - one of the highest rates in Sydney. Almost 20% of all households with dependent young people in Canterbury earned less than $26,000 p.a. Youth (13-25yrs) unemployment is 16.9%, and unemployed young people (15-19yrs) represent 20.4%. Some 61% of the population over the age of 15 years have no qualifications. Canterbury Council provides an interpreter service for non-English speaking residents and in the period from January to December 1997 58.1% of the service provision was with Arabic-speaking people. In 1993, Arabic-speaking people made 27.5% of the public housing applications. In 1997, 23.68% of New South Wales public housing was situated in the Canterbury area (Canterbury City Council 1993; 1998). Throughout all of this continued hardship, Lebanese still give their first loyalty to their extended family and their second to other members of their town or village. Despite the difficulties and strains within the Lebanese-Australian community it is the kinship structure which is the most important and enduring of all institutions to all Lebanese people (Batrouney 1995, ch.9). Conclusion In Lebanon, the socio-political system is a complex alliance of minority groups controlled by elected leaders - or za'im assisted by the qabaday or strongman. The political arena was entered in order to gain access to patronage, which could then be distributed amongst the kinship groups and minorities of the alliance (Johnson 1986, p.101). A good example of the za'im's role within the extended Middle Eastern kinship group in the Australian-Lebanese community is provided by Kate McClymont (2000c; 2000d) who examines the historical business affairs of a New South Wales cabinet minister Mr Eddie Obeid and the $5 million worth of business debts, written off by banks during his time in parliament. Mr Obeid and his business partner, Mr Wally Wehbe, borrowed $5 million in order to complete a function centre, an entrepreneurial bid that proved to be unsuccessful. Timber merchant Cesar Sarkis, a friend of the Minister, purchased part of the failed business for $1.1 million, after which a company named Dakmint approached one of the banks, offering to buy out the joint debt for just over $2.1 million. The bank accepted and wrote off about $2.5 million. The contact number for Dakmint was Mr Obeid's phone number at Parliament House. Dakmint's directors, Mr Anthony Khoury and Mr Anwar Harb, are friends of Mr Obeid and Mr Wehbe. Just recently both Mr Harb, the former editor of the Obeid family newspaper El Telegraph, and Mr Wehbe enjoyed a meal at Parliament House as Mr Obeid's guests of honour. Mr Obeid has appointed a former bank executive, who had the ultimate responsibility for the debt, to two government boards. Of course it is not sustainable even to consider this behaviour as the exclusive property of any Arabic-speaking or ethnic community but it is a good example of the way that the community functions. Trevor Batrouney has shown how the first two waves of Lebanese settlers who arrived in Australia met with favourable economic and labour market conditions. This enabled settlers to develop a wide variety of family businesses, which mirrored the Lebanese political system and enabled the community to provide some employment and stability for their kinship groups and at the same time allow a new generation to pursue various professional careers in pursuit of social mobility. The third wave of settlers, however, proved to be doubly disadvantaged. This group of settlers was dominated by peasants with limited resources and education and, therefore, totally dependant upon their physical skills. Arriving in a country during an economic recession, they encountered an economy in the process of downsizing its unskilled manufacturing industries, the traditional employment provider for new settlers (Batrouney 1995, ch.9). The final outcome is that sixty percent of Sunni Muslims and thirty two percent of Christian Maronites are now dependant on state welfare for survival (Humphrey 1998,p.54). As many of the Lebanese community and its young people in the Canterbury-Bankstown area have a high level of dependence on government welfare services (Canterbury City Council 1993; 1998), they have the potential to regress into ghetto dwelling and display all of the characteristics associated with discrimination, disadvantage and poverty. Some individuals within Arabic-speaking kinship groups commit crime in order to insulate themselves and their family from poverty. Mark Findlay has argued that the poor are a product of deeply rooted structural inequalities and that although this does not directly cause crime and not all poor people commit crime, the influence of poverty in committing crime is enormous (Findlay 1999, p.134). When the added stress of zero tolerance policing and the associated moral outrage whipped up by the media, politicians and senior police (Poynting 1999; 2000) is added to their dilemmas, it becomes quite evident this community is being discriminated against on the combined basis of class and ethnicity. Given the history of the Lebanese people, it is very likely that any type of oppression by the state will only reinforce the traditional kinship structure, which Arabic-speaking communities depend upon for support. Chapter Three: Gang Theories and the Arabic-speaking Community The Gang Howard Sercombe has argued that the word 'gang' is 'one of the usefully flexible, yet evocative terms so beloved of journalist.' The whole notion of a group of people comprising a 'gang' allows a mythology to be presented as if it was an objective and scientific fact (Sercombe 1999, p.11). It promotes fear and apprehension in the popular mind and allows what is not necessarily a unified group to become an extremely visible scapegoat for economic failings and social ills. It deflects the necessity of finding real solutions to economic dislocation by channelling attention to a side effect, rather than a cause. It is, in short, a very useful political tool. For this reason the group-gang discourse is used most readily during the extremes of economic affluence or recession. Roger Hopkins-Burke believes that minority and disadvantaged groups, who are traditionally the last to benefit from affluence and the first to be disadvantaged by recession, are effectively disenfranchised by most political systems and are unable to confront the forces which make them powerless. Inevitably, some people in these groups become involved in disorderly and criminal activity and, in so doing, become 'soft targets' for zero tolerance policing practices. For although deviancy can be explained by a number of interrelated and behavioural factors, the crucial factor always appears to be poverty (Hopkins-Burke1998, ch.9). Nevertheless, any calls for increased social support with a view to assisting the disadvantaged and thereby breaking this cycle are often dismissed by the conservative neo-liberals, who prefer to blame increased levels of crime and social upheaval upon the breakdown of traditional family values (Giddens 1994, p.15) rather than poverty. So, although 'the market' is touted by political parties as the dominant dynamic in everyday life, it is convenient to continue to see the blame for any social breakdown as existing within the framework of traditional ideologies such as the family. Jim Ife has argued that postmodern concepts embracing relativism, rejecting essentialism and encouraging the development of alternative realities can embrace many left-wing and anarchist/humanist values. The danger is, however, that an analysis that emphasises individual diversity tends to move the interpretative focus away from the collective experiences of discrimination based on class, race and gender. Worse still, this focus on the individual tends to legitimise neo-liberal or new right views of the market in a deregulated environment, where individuals and groups can allegedly define things in their own way (Ife 1997, Ch. 3) and freely seek their own paths through life. The pressure group, the trade union, or the criminal gang can thus be seen to pose an even greater threat to a social, economic and political order which prides itself on being a freely integrating group of solitary individuals. The situation is, of course, much more complex than this and any analysis within a multicultural society has to include not only class, race and gender but also the overlapping factors of kinship ties, cultural-political allegiances and community solidarity. The analysis of gangs and related groups perhaps would, therefore, be more useful if the postmodern concepts were set alongside or within more structuralist perspectives. Delinquency People confronted by social strain are seldom alone. Albert Cohen believes that if a socio-economically disadvantaged group collectively and simultaneously adopts a solution to their shared problems, it is possible for a deviant or criminal subculture to emerge with its own norms and values. The formation of the subculture establishes goals that become achievable to group members (Cohen 1955, p 59). Members, for example, can gain status by proving themselves to be a successful car thief or drug dealer. Arrest, prosecution and gaol can also be a prerequisite to group membership. Cohen explains that delinquent gangs are primarily a working-class and underclass phenomenon, which emerge in response to the denial of opportunity to compete effectively with the middle-class youth. In the United States the restricted access to material goods was identified as the primary motivation behind the formation of delinquent gangs. These, it appears, could be usefully divided into three groups. The group with the highest status was principally concerned with crimes against property, whilst the next group engaged in gang fighting because recruitment into the principal group was not possible. When recruitment into these two groups was not likely, the last group often removed itself from society and was caught up in drug and alcohol abuse, becoming separate from both the legitimate and unlawful realm of society (Cloward & Ohlin 1960). Research amongst young people in the United States and England has located race as a major feature in youth gangs. Dick Hobbs and Lucienne Bui Trong have both shown that gangs are directly located to an underclass which can be violent, drug orientated and territorially based. Although there are many differences in the United States, England and France, common factors are violence, high youth unemployment and welfare dependency. In many instances young people in these communities have become alienated and believe they no longer fit into the broader society (Bui Trong 1996; Hobbs 1997, p.813). Chris Cunneen and Rob White have examined youth behaviour in Australia and believe it is not only very different to the simplistic way in which the media have portrayed it but is also not as easily explained away as some media critics try to do. Clearly the existence of youth gangs cannot just be attributed to mindless delinquency but nor can it be blamed on over-policing or explained away as a mere figment of media hype generating moral outrage as an explanation for juvenile crime. Cunneen and White (1995, ch.12) raise the important aspects of human rights and the right of individual young people to associate freely in friendship groups. Rogelia Pe-Pua explains that the majority of ethnic young people who 'hang about' in the streets are, in fact, friendship groups who are no longer at school, partly because of lack of assistance, discrimination and language difficulties, which contribute to ethnic young people not completing school. Such issues, however, are seldom addressed (Pe-Pua 1999, p.121). The strains placed on many disadvantaged young people to compete and be successful are indeed tangible and, although gang membership, group conflicts or drug use are not characteristic of any particular groups of young people, the violence and law-breaking activity indulged in by youth gangs is a real phenomenon, not a work of media imagination. Tradition, Status and Masculinity Rivka Savaya (1997) has examined some of the cultural upheavals experienced by the Arabic-speaking community in Jaffa, Israel and these experiences overlap with many of the experiences of Arabic-speaking families in Australia. The Arabic-speaking family unit is a patriarchal extended family arrangement. The dominant tradition is the preferred first cousin marriage, which is designed to strengthen blood ties and solidify the extended family unit, enabling family heads to enlist the support of brothers and sons. Although some Arabic communities can be divided, the traditional family cluster provides a kinship strength which a nuclear family does not provide (Bill & Springborg 1994, p.99-101) and, as a result of this, a united front is projected against all rivals. For this reason, differentiating between gangs and groups of young people can be problematic within an Arabic community and, in a climate of 'uncompromising' law enforcement, the problem becomes worse if the community breaks ties with the police. In Lebanon, the traditional Middle Eastern family, the hamula, which had been the mainstay of the Arabic society, has been seriously eroded by contact with Israel's westernised culture. Young Arabic-speaking people attend schools and are encouraged to speak their minds, to question authority and to dress as they please; within the traditional home this behaviour would be seen as disrespectful. Although this conflict is more difficult for young women than for young men, both necessarily have to straddle two worlds. Arabic men, who are threatened by their wives' elevated status outside the home, simply increase the pressure for traditional values within the home. Unskilled Arabic males unable to secure work become reliant on welfare in order to support their family. This situation reduces their status and destabilises the traditional-mandated masculine authority within the family. Whether members of the Arabic-speaking community acknowledge or resist western values, living between the two worlds creates long-lasting strain and tension (Savaya 1997). The situation is much the same for Lebanese in Australia, with the added difficulties of migration. Poynting, Noble & Tabar (1999) have examined masculinity and ethnicity amongst Lebanese males in western Sydney and argue that ethnocentric attitudes towards young Arabic-speaking males by the media, professionals in education, welfare, criminal justice and others in positions of authority create a 'protest masculinity' in which Arabic-speaking young men, in defence of their dignity in the face of racism, behave aggressively towards those in authority. Immigrant Young People and Enterprise There has been a marked shift towards the analysis of gangs and groups in terms of market choice within territorial frameworks. Dick Hobbs (1997) has examined the decline of traditional employment and small business opportunities for ethnic communities, arguing that industrialisation and globalisation have created an entrepreneurial process that is now dependent upon the affluence created by the prohibited drug trade. Many of the illegal activities associated with this are, in effect, not separate from the influences of mainstream society as, in many instances, the new gang resembles a small business venture, with high failure rates and employees working part-time for less than subsistence wages (Hobbs 1997, p.814). A good example of this situation can be seen in the Canterbury-Bankstown area which, as we have seen, is predominantly populated by Arabic-speaking residents, who have over a period of time been affected by economic, ethnic and class marginalisation. In 1996, non-ethnic residents mounted a campaign to rid their neighbourhood of the drug addicts, prostitutes and men prowling in cars (Warnock 1996, p.1). that they felt were threatening community safety. Certainly, gangs in the Canterbury-Bankstown area show many similarities to the American gangs formed on race, class and territory in the earliest part of the twentieth century. Then, too, the marginalisation of minority groups, uncertainty of employment and the ethnocentric attitude of the broader society influenced the development of these groups, who later took advantage of the prohibition of alcohol and the easy money associated with crime to improve their lifestyle. The solidarity of ethnic kinship groups created a united front against an ethnocentric criminal justice establishment investigating their activities. Hobbs believes that research into groups/gangs of young people from disadvantaged groups should view their activity as a rational attempt to locate solutions to insulate their community from the marginalisation associated with disadvantage and poverty (Hobbs 1997, p.815). Mark Findlay has expanded on this, believing that the existence of youth group-gang structures are not simply a reflection of criminal organisations; that they may, in fact, mirror the gender-specific power relations of certain kinship groups. This misunderstanding that prevails around the ethnic family context of organised crime also affects youth gangs. Findlay argues there is no magical framework in which groups or gangs of young people necessarily engage in drug running for a family engaged in organised crime activity. The employment of young people at the base level of drug commerce should be no more difficult to understand than kinship loyalties towards any successful enterprise. It is simply proof that socio-economic disadvantage imposed on any community by a predominantly ethnocentric society provides few alternatives other than crime (Findlay 2000, p.126). Deviance and Labelling Although labelling theorists question the existence of a consensus of norms, it is generally agreed that a response by social control agents to deviance depends on who breaks the rules, at what time and where (Roach-Anleu 2000, p. 289). Some people who break the rules or the law may be picked out by the police, social workers and teachers, whilst others who break rules continue unmolested. This finding is supported by Rogelia Pe-Pua, who argues that ethnic young people who collectively use public space in the lower socio-economic areas of western Sydney receive more attention from police and security guards than young people in the more middle-class and affluent communities (Pe-Pua 1999). In recent years the zero tolerance policing in Western Sydney has been mainly the result of a media and marketing push by politicians, bureaucrats and senior police for tougher law and order measures to deal with drugs, prostitutes and youth gangs. This campaign, as we will see in Chapter 4, was stepped up after thirteen shots were fired at the Lakemba police station in November 1998 (Chulov & Goodsir 1998, p.7; Cornford 1998, p.4; Humphries 1998, p.5; Long 1999, p.1; Overington 1999, p.3). Explanations about deviance - also referred to as crime - can be found in Howard Becker's labelling theory, which suggests that rules and laws are formed by way of a contest amongst social groups and so something becomes deviant only because there is a law or rule against it. Someone is deviant only if the rule or the law is enforced and the individual is publicly identified. The difference between deviancy and normality is not about individual characteristics; broadly it is about the way individuals have been treated by the agents of social control who are engaged in enforcing social rules. Howard Becker believes that moral entrepreneurs often campaign to obtain a new law, which often includes a prohibition. The bureaucratic professionals who are charged with enforcing the prohibition are less likely to care about the merits of the rule or law, because enforcement is their job. The enforcement of the law is adapted to the practicalities of their work and so the manner in which a law is enforced may be very different to how it was framed (Becker 1964; Cuff, Sharrock & Francis 1990, Ch. 6). Law enforcement in New South Wales changed significantly when zero tolerance policing was officially launched in 1998 by way of Operations and Crime Reviews (OCRs) (Davis & Coleman 2000). This policy ensured that informal discretion by police was minimised when dealing with groups/gangs of Arabic-speaking young people. The performance management aspects of OCR encourage, and sometimes demand, that operational police maintain zero tolerance strategies. Unfortunately, as zero tolerance policing is very public, media driven and data-led, many groups of Arabic-speaking young people become publicly identified as 'deviant'. Earlier last year, 13 shots were fired through the windows of a police station in Lakemba, after police threatened to crackdown on so-called ethnic gangs dealing hard drugs in Sydney's suburbs (Overington 1999, p.3) We are just sitting down in a bunch or a group, coppers will come hassle you out. 'What are you doing' Give us a search. Make us like look bad... What are our relatives going to think? They are going to ring up our parents and say 'Your son was getting searched' y'know? Our parents are going to go off at us and y'know we just flip over it y'know what I mean? (Abdul in Kennedy 2000a). The irony of this situation is that demands for police accountability by critics such as Janet Chan (Changing Police Culture and David Dixon (A Culture of Corruption), who argue that police are systematically corrupt and discriminatory in the use of their powers (Chan 1997; Dixon 1999; see also Cunneen & White 1995, p.215), have overlapped with demands for heightened police action by those demanding a tougher law and order policy. NSW MP Tony Stewart, Caucus chairman and anti drugs campaigner... has been embroiled is a dispute with drug pushers after exposing an abandoned Lakemba shop as a drug 'shooting gallery'... he has also waged a campaign to 'make local police more accountable for their activities' (Chulov 1997, p.17) Mr Stewart's efforts were forced by a lack of police success in following up his complaints, but he said yesterday he believed the police command in Campsie and Lakemba was finally making a difference in the fight against street level drug dealing. (Chulov & Goodsir 1998, p.7) In effect both Arabic-speaking young people and operational police have been labelled as 'deviant'. As Paul Rock suggests, once a person or a group have been publicly identified as deviant, it is difficult for them to slip back into the conventional world, where selective attempts to enlarge the visibility of the rule breaker are becoming more frequent (Rock 1997, p.257). A contemporary dilemma, therefore, exists when both researchers and critics in the media blame the agents of social control for the inadequacies of social policy imposed by the elites who manage the affairs of state. Michel Foucault has argued that a feature of sovereign power is that the executioner is held to account for a death penalty introduced and put into practice by executives of the state (Foucault 1991). This situation causes the media and political spotlight to be constantly moved from those at the base of the social structure to those at the base of the criminal justice structure. This currently ensures that establishment elites such as senior bureaucrats, politicians, government advisers and also executives from within the corporate world who can dominate the policies and activities of state, seldom have to account for the failings and inadequacies of the capitalist system. Conclusion The strain and tension caused by poverty and insecurity are often the features of violent crime and the status of the Arabic-speaking community in the Canterbury-Bankstown area, both as an underclass of unemployed or low income workers and as a minority group, has set the scene for the emergence of 'delinquent' groups of young people on the streets (Cohen 1955). Officers at Lakemba police station ...were huddling under their desks as 15 bullets were fired from a car into the station ... Police Commissioner Peter Ryan took control ... said the shooting was payback for a crackdown in the Campsie and Bankstown local area commands after the murder a month earlier of 14 year old Edward Lee at Punchbowl. 'We are reducing the crime figures, we are capturing the robbers, we are locking people up and this is a retaliation for that' Ryan said on the morning of the shooting. 'What we are seeing here is crime growing in a way where violence is becoming the norm. And it is only amongst certain parts of certain communities and only in certain places in Sydney' ... The next day Premier Bob Carr fingered 'a Lebanese gang' for the brazen violence promoting outrage about ethnic stereotyping that remains potent (Doherty 1999, p.40). This declaration of war against the Arabic-speaking community in 1998 by both Commissioner Ryan and Premier Carr was followed by their unveiling of a battle plan called Operation Command Review (OCR), which was introduced as a prime operational strategy into the New South Wales Police Service (Davis and Coleman 2000). The strategy was for police in the Canterbury-Bankstown area to target groups of Arabic-speaking young people in a very public attempt to 'crackdown' on the 'gangs'. The result has been that the traditional kinship ties and patriarchal structure of the Arabic-speaking community (Bill & Springborg 1994, p.99-101) has branded the zero tolerance policing strategy as ethnocentric. The young men of the community have retaliated, not only with an aggressive protest masculinity, but also with the withdrawal of support for the moral authority of the police (Poynting, Noble & Tabar 1999). This strategy has seriously misjudged the situation and the response necessary to deal with this. Criminal elements within the Arabic-speaking community are, in many instances, just one part of the broader kinship group. Now the levels of informal support and information previously supplied to police have been withdrawn because of community hostility to zero tolerance policing strategies. Arabic-speaking young people, who were searched or arrested and charged by police, have become humiliated and labelled by the notoriety and publicity (Becker 1964; Cuff, Sharrock and Francis 1990, Ch. 6). Zero tolerance policing makes it very difficult for young Arabic-speaking people who are publicly labelled deviant to fit back into the broader community and their delinquency manifests itself into a distinct culture (Cohen 1955). The gang-group structure, in fact, may not simply reflect a simple kinship group who occasionally engage in unlawful behaviour, but rather the same gender-specific power relations within the community family model (Findlay 2000, p.126). The more Arabic-speaking young people are harassed by police, the more stigmatised they become, creating a vicious cycle which further reduces their opportunities for legitimate social advancement. The logical extension of this is that, in some situations, gangs will engage in a family criminal activity to insulate themselves from poverty, for the risk of apprehension is often considered to be low and the group support is maximised. 6.55 am yesterday a convoy of police vehicles marked and unmarked slipped quietly into Telopea Street, Punchbowl. ...Within seconds, two suburban blocks had been sealed and dozens of uniform and plain-clothes officers poured into the street and descended on their primary targets - the occupants of five houses near the Koala Road end. Ten other houses were raided in Bankstown, Greenacre, Brighton Le Sands and Hurstville. By early afternoon police said they had charged two men with being accessories after the fact of the murder of 14 year old schoolboy Edward Lee, who was knifed in front of about 20 people in Telopea Street in October 1998 ... Until yesterday, the spectre of Edward Lee's death had haunted not just Telopea Street but also the police and the local community. Police found themselves hampered on two fronts: strained relations with local ethnic groups and the silence of law abiding residents scared of reprisals if they spoke out (Mercer Jackson & Connolly 2000, p.1). After nearly three years police have arrested some of those alleged to be associated with the death of Edward Lee. The strained relationship between police and the Arabic-speaking community necessitated a major taskforce, which prior to the introduction of zero tolerance policing would have been unnecessary. The 'wall of silence', as it was dubbed by the media, the Premier and Police Commissioner Ryan, simply ignores the kinship structure of the Arabic-speaking family and the right to silence they are entitled to under due process. The OCR. and zero tolerance policing policy of the New South Wales police executive in the Canterbury-Bankstown area has discriminated against many within the Arabic-speaking community and marginalised its own police officers. Once this was a relationship that prospered on tolerance and discretion. When Justice Michael Kirby from the High Court of Australia opened the Australian Institute on 31 May 2000, his opening speech appeared to grasp the main issue relating to the 'highly visible' and intolerant predisposition of the new right thinking in relation to socio-legal policy. 'The shame game,' he said, 'is irrational. It has got to stop' (Kirby 2000). Chapter Four: The Impact of Zero Tolerance Policing on Arabic-speaking Young People Commenting on the fact that thirteen shots had been fired into Lakemba Police Station from a moving vehicle on Sunday November 1 1998, the Premier of NSW, Bob Carr, publicly blamed Lebanese gangs for the attack. The police, he assured the public, were responding to the obvious concerns of the community about public safety and a zero tolerance policy would result in a major crackdown on those responsible. Carr asserted that a 'wall of silence' within the Lebanese community was hindering the police investigation and limiting the effectiveness of their policy. Michael Doueihi, of the Australian Lebanese Association, supported some of Mr Carr's views, saying, 'We have to work together with the Premier and the police and with everybody to clean up our streets' (Garcia 1998) and a number of Arabic elders complained that the influence of the popular media, as well as the Australian education and legal systems, was making it difficult for them to maintain traditional values amongst their young people. Not all members of the community were so willing to take this view, however. Australia's senior Muslim cleric, Sheik Al Hilaly, proclaimed that Australian criminals who spoke Arabic were mostly Australian criminals with Arabic names and said that he was seeking legal advice relating to a discrimination complaint (Collins, Noble, Poynting & Tabar 2000). Clearly, this was a delicate political situation, yet, when tackled over the fact that his remarks had damaged his reputation amongst the Lebanese community, Mr Carr explained that his perspective had been based upon a briefing from Police Commissioner Peter Ryan (English 1998; Garcia 1998; Sydney Morning Herald 3 Nov.1998, p.14). A local politician and 'zero tolerance' campaigner still continued to regale the media about a 'local underworld' with 'Mr Biggs' who distribute drugs and extorted money (Dennis 1998; English 1998; Marsh 1998; Morris 1999; Murphy 1998; Poynting 2000, p.130; Wynhausen & Safe 1998). Certainly incidents similar to that which took place at Lakemba police station will continue to draw polarised politicised comment - marketed to the public as reliable media discourse - as this is a political strategy which fuels mainstream popular support for politicians and senior police as well as 'selling' newspapers and current affairs programs. In this instance the coverage was ferocious and the public was confronted with a rash of headlines designed to alarm: 'Ethnic truth had to be told' (English 1998); 'Ethnic crime rise warning' (The Daily Telegraph 8 June.1999, p.3); 'Time to face up to gangs' (Sydney Morning Herald 3 November 1998, p.14); 'Ethnic Crime' (Sydney Morning Herald 9 June.1999, p.18); 'Violence against police on the rise' (Robinson 1999). With this information continually interwoven in the print and electronic media with other headlines such as 'Angry Muslims seek holy war' (Soetjipto 2000) or 'Hijacker's hero calls for holy war' (The Australian 7 Jan. 2000, p.6), it is inevitable that levels of alarm will continue to escalate in the community and that an ethnocentric bias towards the Arabic-speaking community, particularly young people in public space gathered in groups, will be consciously and sub-consciously perpetuated. 'Cabramatta', a documentary screened on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Four Corners program in 1997, represented an attempt by the national broadcaster to cover all sides of what was already seen to be a serious situation that was developing in Sydney's southwestern suburbs (Hardaker 1997). To do this the program's team interviewed a number of people who, they hoped, would give their viewers an understanding of the complexities involved in the worsening situation developing there. For example, from his perspective as a youth worker from Open Family Australia, Vincent Doan was asked about the pervasiveness of the drug scene amongst the youth with whom he was working: In Cabramatta people looking at drug, it's like a normal thing. It's not big deal any more...sometimes they're dealing in front of me, so what?...People get used to the ambulance coming, like 10 times a day. People get used to someone just drop dead in front of them, and you know, because of an overdose (Hardaker 1997) From his perspective Sergeant Gordon Connolly, spokesperson for the Cabramatta Police Station, saw things differently. He explained the strategy taken by the police in regard to this same problem in terms of maintaining control: 'I suppose all we're doing, we're keeping the lid on it, so to speak. If we weren't doing that, they'd probably be selling heroin over the counters in some of the shops' (Hardaker 1997). However, a young Asian male in custody, when interviewed about crime in Cabramatta, saw things differently again. Speaking about the way he had been recruited and his initial fears about entering the drug scene, he told the interviewer: By chance I met this guy ... He asked me to join him in a business venture. The business was selling heroin. At first I didn't want to enter that trade. I was scared that I might fall into the trap of using it, I might one day become a user. It would destroy my life completely. Then I could no longer be my mother's dutiful son (Hardaker 1997). The manager of Minda Juvenile Justice Centre explained the predicament of such young Asian males in custody from the Cabramatta area from a legal perspective: A lot of these kids are in this position not by choice, it's by necessity. A lot of these kids are pushed into these positions. There's a social or anti-social organisation that involves young people at the very tail end of that organisation, and they're the ones that come before the courts (Hardaker 1997). Dr Lisa Maher, who had conducted research amongst young Asian heroin users in the area, had this to say about the problem: 'We found that encounters between the police and young people from South East Asian backgrounds are conducted in a climate of fear, hostility and racism' (Hardaker 1997). Drugs and criminal activities, it would appear from these extracts, were a very real part of everyday life for the people interviewed for the Four Corners program in 1997, although this is obviously not the case for all residents in the community and should not be seen as such - a fact that wasn't adequately touched on in this program about a 'problem', not a community (Dreher 2000). Maher et al (1997), who interviewed one hundred and twenty three young Asian heroin users in South Western Sydney, claimed to speak for all Asian young people, and about most of police, even though they conducted no interviews with Asian young people outside the heroin sub-culture nor within the criminal justice community (Maher et al 1997, p.6). Nevertheless, they concluded, the fact that young people were often searched and detained, often without legal authority and in a manner which was demeaning, was offensive to the broader community (Maher et al 1997, pp.56-57) In contrast, Connolly (2000) and Murphy (2000a) have argued that the community would support an even harsher police initiative. Cabramatta community leaders Thang Ngo and Ross Treyvaud continue to complain vocally and publicly about the intimidating presence of drug addicts and the lack of police initiative in dealing with gang violence - which includes more than forty shooting incidents in the first half of 2000 (Connolly 2000; Murphy 2000a). This is despite the fact that since 1997, 9,000 people have been arrested and 13,000 charges have been laid by police (Power 2000). This polarisation is the result of a type of methodology that seldom includes the view of all stakeholders and evaluates information only within a critical framework that reflects the mind-set of the researcher (Webber Bessant & Watts 1999). For while the wider community obviously does not collude in drug use and crime and is increasingly alarmed by reports that they are living in a war zone, not a suburb, they do not necessarily support an excessive police reaction either. Nor do they want their community painted as a nest of criminals, drug addicts and thieves. The balance that is necessary here is missing from all these disparate pieces of research. It is also, unfortunately, missing from the police response. Gangs or Groups? While not disputing that there is a serious problem festering in Sydney's southwest, it is important to ask whether the Arabic-speaking young people who congregate around railway stations or shopping centres are really a gang at all. Could it be that they are nothing more sinister than a group of friends and relations? To answer this question we will need to look closely at the situation, for there are various factors that need to be considered before simply passing judgement and raising the stress levels of an already stressed community by invoking the spectre of criminal gangs. In her briefing paper entitled 'Dealing with Street Gangs', which was researched for the NSW Parliamentary Research Service, Fiona Manning has argued that a group can be nothing more than a collection of young persons assembling in public for social purposes (Manning 1996, p.6) but that a gang consists of several young people who regularly act together in an illegal or threatening manner with some form of ongoing organisation. Rob White, in his recent research about 'youth gangs', has taken the matter considerably further, arguing that the term gang is purely an emotive one and that it possesses no rigid meaning in either social or legal terms. Often the term describes any group of young people undergoing any type of activity, ranging from meeting friends in a public place to defending a particular patch or territory. In fact, White argues, most bands of young people on the street in Australia are not gangs but groups. Furthermore, a good deal of the criminal behaviour of the type categorised as being the activities of gangs is inward rather than outward looking and can be linked to self destructive behaviour such as alcohol and substance abuse (White 1999, pp.36-38). Fiona Manning, however, prefers to stress that it is the illegal or threatening manner of a gang that essentially distinguishes them from any other band of young people - a football team, for example - who are mostly seeking entertainment. While these groups may occasionally engage in illegal acts, violent or criminal activity, she argues, is not a major activity of such groups (Manning 1996, p.7). Clearly, the attempt to rigidly define the difference between groups and gangs has the potential to produce a very blurry image indeed; an image that continues to resist any attempt to provide it with a coherent high fidelity definition. Nevertheless, Lucienne Bui Trong, an executive police officer in France who has studied groups and gangs of Arabic-speaking young people from lower socio-economic suburbs called 'Banlieues', has examined the situation of such young people in the context of classical violence and urban violence. Both, she argues, are firmly linked to unemployment, poverty, immigration and inadequate social support. Classical violence, in this analysis, is portrayed as being inspired by drug addiction and/or profit and, although it is primarily the domain of individuals, there is also a gang rather than group explanation for it. Urban violence, for the most part, is related to anger and destruction - for example, hostile gatherings of young people, arson and the destruction of public buildings. Most aspects of urban violence vary depending upon where the incidents take place. Urban violence perpetrated in town centres, shopping centres or public transport is often linked to groups of young people who travel from the lower socio-economic suburbs. Bui Trong explains that 'this behaviour can be spectacular and villainous, however the rudeness is often linked to the youth of the participants' (Bui Trong 1996, p.6). Urban violence committed within the 'Banlieues', on the other hand, often stems from informal bands of young people belonging to ethnic and minority groups who gather together by chance and engage in opportunistic activities. Although these young people are not grouped together in gangs, nevertheless they do tend to develop a territorial culture, bound together by feelings of solidarity and a strong anti-establishment sentiment. As Bui Trong argues, 'this feeling is often motivated by revenge against a system in which it is difficult to find a place' (1996, p.10). 'Uncompromising' Police and Aggressive Young People The dominant belief that young people engage in unlawful activity by virtue of various structural or background characteristics has been challenged by Webber et al (1999), who have examined opinions that youth law-breaking is connected to unemployment. The prominence of delinquency in the 1950s and 1960s, periods when there was full youth employment, is cited as a contradiction to this thesis. Webber et al argue that moral issues about the protection of territory and kin; about the need for respect and the defence of honour are more likely related to the issues of violence than singleminded notions about material existence. This position is partly supported by the following interview, which I conducted with Robert, a 23 year-old Australian-Lebanese male, who describes what happened when police executed a search warrant upon his parents' house. They come to search the place and they was pushing my mother and father about. Y'know all they was doing was trying to fill themselves out y'know [big-chested masculinity] and they started pushing us and threw us in the slammer [charge room at police station] and charged us with this and that (Kennedy 2000a). Robert, in short, retaliated against the police because of their lack of respect and aggressive behaviour towards his parents. Nevertheless, any notion that materialism and class can be dismissed or even diminished in any evaluation of unlawful and violent behaviour amongst young people is obviously open to challenge. Much of the interview content in the ABC's documentary 'Cabramatta' supports this aspect (Hardaker 1997). Comparing unemployment and crime statistics in New York provides a much simpler and much more graphic demonstration. For, while between 1993-1999, felonies have dropped 44.3%, homicides 60.2%, robbery and burglary by almost 50% and rape by 12.4%, over the same period unemployment in New York City was dropping too. Unemployment was 11.9% in 1993, reducing to 7.3% in 1998 and 6.2% in 2000 (Green 1998, p.172-174; United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 2000). Yet there are distinctive cultural factors which must be considered as well. As discussed in Chapter 2, there is a divergence of ethnicity and economic disadvantage in the Canterbury-Bankstown population. For the Arabic-speaking community, which represents 15.1% of the population, also has 12.2% unemployment - one of the highest rates in Sydney. Almost 20% of all households with dependant young people in Canterbury earned less than $26,000 p.a. Youth (13-25yrs) unemployment is 16.9%, and unemployed young people (15-19yrs) represent 20.4%. As many as 61% of the population over the age of 15 years have no qualifications. With time to kill and resentment against authorities they perceive as racist, these young people are already alienated from mainstream society. If they are also the targets of seemingly arbitrary police harassment, this growing level of alienation could breed violence. This is supported by an interview I conducted with Abdul, an 18-year-old unemployed Lebanese Sunni Muslim. Describing his various interactions with younger police in the Bankstown area, he said, 'Yeah well, the police look at it like y'know if people are in a bunch or a group, they take a look at the ethnic background and they automatically think they are dangerous' (Kennedy 2000a). Abdul then proceeded to explain that there is a sense of shame which comes with being publicly questioned and searched by police. We are just sitting down in a bunch or a group, coppers will come hassle you out. 'What are you doing?' Give us a search. Make us like look bad in front of. How about if one of our relatives driving past and we is getting searched by police, y'know? What are our relatives going to think? They are going to ring up our parents and say 'Your son was getting searched,' y'know? Our parents are going to go off at us and, y'know, we just flip over it, y'know what I mean (Kennedy 2000a). In this way, the opinion of parents and relatives are very important to young men such as Abdul and to understand just why this is so, we need to return to those same cultural processes which, in the final analysis, play a central role in this whole problem. Vuong Nguyen and Mai Ho have argued that Asian immigrant parents try to limit their children's input with peer groups to avoid the introduction of inappropriate virtues. As a result, some move away from their family and culture because of the unreal expectations placed upon them (Nguyen & Ho 1995); others try to straddle two cultures and reconcile expectations with lived experiences. In a period of economic uncertainty, this becomes increasingly difficult. When the Arabic elders complained that their youth was out of control at the time of the Lakemba Police station incident in 1997 (English 1998; Garcia 1998; Sydney Morning Herald 3 Nov.1998, p.14), they blamed the influence of the popular media, as well as the Australian education and legal systems, for breaking down traditional values amongst their young people. In many ways this is true but, like any partial truth, it is simultaneously only a distorted fraction of the whole problem. The difficulty is not created by a simple explanation such as cultural breakdown. Rather, it is an uneasy mix of cultural change and continuity, combined with a lack of understanding on the part of the mainstream culture to appreciate the stresses and strains being experienced by the youth they are attempting to control. The Middle Eastern Kinship Structure As we saw in Chapter 2, one of the reasons why it is difficult to distinguish whether groups of Arabic-speaking young people really constitute a gang, is because of the dynamics of Middle Eastern kinship groups. The traditional extended family provides a kinship strength far greater than that of the nuclear family (Bill and Springborg 1994, p.99-101), as it projects a united front against all rivals. In a climate of zero tolerance law enforcement, this obviously creates a great difficulty for law enforcement agencies such as the police and the legal system. According to Trevor Batrouney, almost all members of the Lebanese-Australian community agree that the family is the single most important institution and the traditional kinship group remains very dominant (Batrouney 1995, p.197-198), although there can also be complexities because of the obligations attached to family and community leaders. As we have seen the fluid role of the qabaday and the za'im in the Lebanese community, both perform overlapping roles, which can be politicised. These sometimes includes unlawful activity, whilst at the same time there will be a continuing engagement in legitimate community interests (Johnson 1985, ch.2-3). Ali, a 25-year-old Lebanese Sunni Muslim, explains his kinship obligation to his heroin-addicted brother in this way: At times I tried to disown my brother when I was trying to steer him back on the right track, but whenever he called out for help I would go and pick him up. Whenever I would say 'This is the last time'! I knew there was no such thing, because things don't work that way' (Kennedy 2000a). Samira is a 20-year-old Lebanese-Australian Christian, who has observed family disputes with police and other government agencies. A lot of old traditions stand, because everyone around you understands why you're doing it. If we were to go and live somewhere in Cronulla [a predominantly Anglo, middle-class suburb] or something we would start acting like the Aussies act. If we were to go to Cabramatta we would act like the Vietnamese act. We would not do what the old style Lebanese people would do because we won't fit in; but here because everyone backs everyone up and everyone does have that old tradition, so everyone can actually use it (Kennedy 2000a). A detailed observation of the Arabic-speaking community in Sydney reveals that young people, gangs, groups and relatives are often bound together by kinship ties which overlap with other kinship groups. Nor do all groups of Arabic-speaking young people necessarily involve themselves in unlawful activities. However, kinship ties do ensure that any zero tolerance policing policy will be seen by most as being directed towards the entire Arabic community. Ali explains his view of this prejudice. ... They cannot make it so obvious they are harassing somebody because he is Lebanese. We have a family friend who is almost in his 50s. He has never committed crime in his life; he is a self-employed builder. Soon after the incident of the shooting at Lakemba Police Station he was pulled over. As soon as the police officers saw he was Lebanese they pulled over his vehicle and it was searched. Nothing was found, but he was harassed because he was Lebanese. He was a hard-working citizen who I don't believe has ever had a traffic ticket (Kennedy 2000a). By 1998, when the New South Wales police executive officially introduced OCR as its principal operational strategy, zero tolerance policing had already been established as a strategy to deal with the Arabic-speaking community. After the introduction of OCR, Commissioner Ryan insisted that Lebanese people should acknowledge the existence of criminals in their community and assist police to identify them (Humphries 1998; Penberthy, Melki & Trute 2000). Scott Poynting has observed that it is contradictory for the police to initiate zero tolerance policing against an entire community and to accuse them of maintaining a 'wall of silence' to protect criminals from arrest, then, in a bizarre strategy, demand that the oppressed and beleaguered community assist them in solving crime (Poynting 1999). What should also be stressed is that the views of a police executive or the police union should not be automatically accepted as being representative of what all police think. As a result, the degree to which the discrimination exemplified by OCR and zero tolerance policing is organisational, cultural or the result of policy should be of prime concern. Unfortunately, it is not. Gender Relations Another factor which is distorting this already difficult situation is the product of gender relations. The masculinities of these Arabic-speaking young men are constructed within social relations of ethnicity, which includes incidents of prejudice and racism. These young people feel alienated from the society in which they live; they are often unable to find legitimate employment and feel powerless in relation to mainstream Australian society. As a result what has been theorised as a 'protest masculinity' has been constructed in response to ethnocentric behaviour linked to social control (Poynting, Noble & Tabar 1999). When linked with the traditional kinship ties (Bill and Springborg 1994), protest masculinity plays an obvious and important role in the violent interactions between police and Arabic-speaking young people. This is clearly a very potent and self-perpetuating situation. Whilst the experience of Arabic-speaking women with zero tolerance policing is seldom one of direct contact with police and authorities, the effect is, nevertheless, a critical one: a fact which is rarely acknowledged and is certainly unappreciated by the police. Trevor Batrouney has explained that, due to the sex role differentiation, both Muslim and Christian families are similar in the Lebanese community. Boys dress in masculine clothes and behave aggressively; girls are dressed in feminine clothes and encouraged to be graceful and modest and are strictly supervised and expected to assist with family and household duties (Batrouney 1995, ch.9). The status of Arabic-speaking women within western society is a very complex one. Even if Arabic-speaking women were to oppose being subjugated by men, at the same time they are made angry at the feeling that they are being forced to embrace western standards and discard their own cultural identities. Dr Ghaiss Jasser, an Arabic feminist, argues that there is little effort being made by many western researchers to view things from the perspective of the Arabic-speaking world. 'Le voile en deux maux' or 'The veil and two evils' explains how in the early 1990s Muslim females were turned away from French public schools if they wore the veil. They were unable to stay at home without the veil and unable to go to school with the veil. Ghaiss Jasser challenges all western people to explain ethnocentric western-Christian behaviour related to Arabic-speaking Muslims, which proclaims the superiority of western Christian culture over Middle Eastern culture. Dr Jasser is particularly critical of western feminists who use the Koran's apparent misogyny in an attempt to elevate western Christian culture (Jasser 1995). Zero tolerance policing can have a bizarre impact on Arabic-speaking women who are devoted to their own culture, even though it may contain oppressive elements. In fact, many Arabic-speaking women see themselves as being predominantly misunderstood and discriminated against by the cultural mainstream of western society. Add to this an actively anti-Arabic and extremely zero tolerance policy of police coercion and we have a very dangerous situation which can only get worse as long as such coercion continues to persist. Urban Violence and Arabic-Speaking Young People For these reasons, if we are to understand the impact that zero tolerance policing has on Arabic-speaking young people and their community, it is important for researchers to consider the perspective of the community they are investigating. Shulamit Reinharz has examined cross-cultural research methods and argues that even if an occurrence is universal, each instance must also be understood within a particular culturally specific context (Reinharz 1992, p.109). This challenges essentialist notions which, in this instance, could claim that all Arabic-speaking people have the inherent propensities for crime or violence. If we revisit 1998, the year OCR was introduced to NSW, we will see that this was also the year in which 'Operation Innsbruck' was introduced in the Canterbury-Bankstown area. This was also an 'uncompromising' policing strategy which had been implemented to deal with street crime and youth gangs. By November 1998, it had clearly created a marked impact for the police. Many young people in this area had clashed with them, culminating in the incident when thirteen bullets had been fired into Lakemba police station (Doherty 1999; Morris 1999; Wynhausen & Safe 1998). Urban violence, as defined by Bui Trong (1996), has been found to progress in stages. These vary depending upon the level of social control used to repress the incidents. Beginning with vandalism, petty crime and opposition to authority by words and gestures, the next level of urban violence can also include vandalism against police premises and schools. This stage, it is argued, does not appear to demonstrate the will to hurt people but only to damage things - buildings, for example, such as the Lakemba Police Station. As theorised, it can, however, include the use of gunshots, arson, the theft of weapons and the use of petrol bombs. These actions can often be interpreted by the perpetrators as an attack upon the broader establishment due to the fact that there is still a lack of confrontation with people as individuals. Escalating to the next stage of urban violence, people in uniform are targeted and assaulted, as well as authority figures such as teachers, prefects and others who might be seen as representing the establishment. Violent riots and civil unrest are only characteristic of the final stage (Bui Trong 1996). As is evident in the Canterbury-Bankstown area, zero tolerance law enforcement is a part of the growing problem. As such it escalates it rather than supplying a solution to it. In fact, it can render the police powerless to deal with successive stages of urban violence because many of the perpetrators see themselves as participating in a political struggle. This can only be complicated by a situation in which the community becomes sympathetic to the perpetrators as they, too, begin to identify with such anti-establishment sentiment; a sentiment which is not specifically an anti-police position but a rational response to the perceived need to support ties of kinship in the face of attack. Conclusion We have seen how, in 1998, when thirteen shots were fired at the Lakemba police station (Doherty 1999) and politicians and senior police were quick to blame the onset of such violence on gangs of Lebanese youth (English 1998), OCR was implemented as the principal operational strategy by the NSW police executive (Davis & Coleman 2000). This stepped up the zero tolerance policing being directed at Arabic-speaking young people in Canterbury-Bankstown (Overington 1999). Far from 'solving' what had been so readily identified as the 'problem', such single-minded targeting has created an even greater problem for both the police and the local community. For, as we have seen, kinship ties and family solidarity within the Arabic-speaking community will always mean that defining and identifying what constitutes a gang as opposed to simply a group is an extremely difficult task. As a result, zero tolerance policing was, and still is, being enforced in a discriminatory and racist manner which demonstrates a serious blindness about the cultural complexities of the situation (Bill and Springborg 1994; Bui Trong 1996). This blindness has not only alienated the local community but has worsened rather than contained the situation. Even Arabic-speaking women, who have not been directly affected by zero tolerance policing because it targets young Arabic men, are becoming increasingly alienated by the constant stream of western criticism regarding their culture (Jasser 1995). Already they have had to parry accusations that they are being as exploited because they continue to live within a rigid patriarchal kinship group. Although, at least by western standards, this may be the case, many Middle Eastern women feel alienated by the feminist line that seeks to 'educate' and 'liberate' them. This situation can only serve to strengthen family ties and bolster the feeling that the community is under siege by the dominant culture which surrounds them. Accusations that a 'wall of silence' within the community is hampering the police effort to restore control in the area, also represents a cultural blindness which is exacerbating rather than improving the situation. Ethnocentric zero tolerance policing creates and then feeds what has been conceptualised as protest masculinity and enhances the perceived need to protect territory and kin amongst Arabic-speaking young people. The defence of honour and the need for respect all become major issues within the Middle Eastern kinship group and zero tolerance law enforcement only paves the way for further hostility towards the police (Poynting et al 1999; Webber et al 1999). Although the destruction of public buildings, including police stations, should still be viewed as a protest against the establishment rather than violence directed against individual people, it has been shown that this can very easily progress into riots and civil disturbance if these early stages are oppressed by aggressive means. The perpetrators in such cases are often a mixture of young people who are united by kinship ties and a distrust of authority (Bui Trong 1996). The inability of researchers to understand not only the cultural specificities of the situation but also its cultural and economic complexities, highlights a problem with the research. Perhaps the demise of the welfare state has made it necessary for radical research to concentrate on escalating issues of inequality but, certainly more importantly, inadequate understanding of the depth and breadth of the situation has led to a fragmented approach which pits one aspect of the whole against other parts of that same whole. This fragmentation has created a blunt research instrument, which moves the spotlight away from the whole picture to focus it down onto soft targets which are easily isolable and just as easily dismissible. Meanwhile, those responsible for the reduced social support accessible to minority and disadvantaged groups should shoulder the blame for the politicised conflict between heroin addicts, young ethnic people and the police. In fact the double-edged irony of zero tolerance policing is that it marginalises not only ethnic youth but also young police, all of whom are attempting to exist and work in a competitive society with ruthless performance management frameworks, which monitor 'uncompromising' (New South Wales Police Service 2000, p.3) - and ultimately discriminatory - methods of social control. Chapter Five: The Effect of Zero Tolerance Policing on the Police The Accountability for the 'Uncompromising' Policing of Minority Groups Obviously the police culture is not a freestanding phenomenon but is a living representation and a living microcosm of the conflicts and contradictions in a class society. Australian society today, as we have seen, is currently dominated by the tenets of economic liberalism (Reiner 1997), although these are often somewhat distorted by legal and social pressures. Nevertheless, within these relatively inflexible boundaries, as a microcosm of the society it serves, police culture is not monolithic and invariant and is structured from above by executive ideologies. For this reason, while accounts of deviancy within policing organisations may be descriptively true, explanations of police corruption need to consider a range of different positions from the apex to the base of the broader criminal justice structure (Reiner 1997, p.1023). For it is these, which determine police culture, practice and accountability. Stereotyping or labelling by police is governed by the style of policing adapted for the specific community. However, only a few critics take into account the data-led specificity of contemporary operational police work or the fact that most operational police have only a limited access to information and knowledge, which appears to go hand in hand with limited discretion. This is in contrast to others in socio-legal professions and, ironically, to police executives. It could be argued that there are different standards about propriety being applied to those at the top and those at the bottom of the police organisational structure. For example, an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in April 2000 told its readers that 'Assistant Police Commissioner Alf Peate ordered a delay in a search for drugs in the house of John Marsden, a member of the Police Board. Shortly after Superintendent Small, who initiated the information for the search, was transferred' (McClymont 2000a, p.3). An earlier article in the Sydney Morning Herald in February 2000 had reported the following courtroom exchange in which Marsden had told the court that 'A lot of my sexual partners have been clients of mine - one way or the other'. In response to this statement 'Barrister Mr Stitt asked him to repeat what he had said... 'There is nothing unethical about that,' replied Mr Marsden. 'That's what the Law Society rules are sir' ...' (McClymont 2000, p.3). Clearly, it is reform implemented and monitored by a police executive, which will effect and marginalise the police at the bottom of the hierarchical structure. Criminologists argue that police form stereotypical opinions about the criminality of minority groups and that this effects the way they deal with such minorities. Janet Chan, for example, cites the 1992 ABC drama 'Cop it Sweet' by Jenny Brockie as evidence of police racism against Aboriginals. Chan acknowledges that it is often the police officer's perceptions of what is suspicious and who is respectable that can lead to stereotyping and prejudice, arguing that police cannot claim professionalism and fairness if they allow racism to become part of their occupational milieu. Maher et al (1997, p.53) and Janet Chan (1997, p.20, 21) cite Robert Reiner when they argue that racism and ethnic stereotyping are the reasons many people from ethnic minorities in low-income communities are likely to be stopped, questioned and arrested by police (Reiner 1985). In fact, Robert Reiner (1997, ch.28) takes the argument much further by differentiating between individual and institutionalised racism, pointing out that it is feasible in some communities and specific circumstances that minority groups do commit more crimes. The evidence that black people are disproportionately at the receiving end of police powers is overwhelming. What remains contested is the extent to which this is due to more black offending or to discrimination by the police because of individual or institutionalised racism (Reiner 1997, p.1011). Cunneen and White (1995, p.211) also explain the contradictory demands in relation to the social control and criminal investigation aspects of policing as well as facilitation traffic control, lecturing , domestic, immigration and welfare matters. The widespread cynicism of police amongst disadvantaged young people also occurs because of the regularity of police intervention in their lives that is perceived as over-policing. Unfortunately, the critics of law and order policy seldom examine the hypothesis that police are similarly seen as the enemy by minority groups, whether they display individual prejudices or not. What is often left to one side is debate on the more complex realities of law enforcement and order maintenance styles implemented by the police hierarchy. There is no question that, regardless of the style of policing used, black people, ethnic minorities and the poor are disproportionately at the receiving end of police power, both as suspects and as victims. However, it is not the case that simply being a member of the police community essentially gives an individual a particular mindset although it is clear that there is an institutionalised racism at work in the police force itself. An argument that police are not prejudiced is as difficult to sustain as the essentialist notion that most police are prejudiced or racist. In New South Wales a good deal of academic opinion on police racism flows from the Anh Hai study conducted by Maher et al (1997), which was about the perceptions and experiences of young Asian people and policing. A total of 123 young Asian heroin users were interviewed in relation to their experiences with the police. The executive summary of the study reads: The results are disturbing. Encounters between police and young Asian background people are often conducted in a climate of fear, racism and hostility. We found that these young people are subject to routine harassment, intimidation and mistreatment by members of the New South Wales Police Service ... The study also provides evidence of questionable and unlawful conduct on the part of police officers in relation to the seizure of drugs and money (Maher et al 1997, p.v). There has been a general acceptance in professional circles that the NSW police hierarchy were still committed to a principal operational strategy of watchman-service style community policing. Janet Chan, a criminologist who has published books and articles about 'police culture' (Chan 1997; 1999), maintained in 1997 that she had extensively researched the issues of policing and racism and come to the conclusion that 'It was safe to assume there had been a degree of cultural change amongst relatively senior officers' and 'that senior police seemed fairly positive about the performance of the organisation' (Chan 1997, p.214). Maher et al (1997, p.vi) also argued that 'policy commitment to harm minimisation does not filter down to the police on the street or their practices.' Both Chan and Maher et al suggest that problems within the police force exist mainly at the lower and middle levels of the organisation. Resistance to change, and in particular lack of 'policy commitment to harm minimisation', they believe, is the province of middle level management and operational police. They suggest that the hierarchy is battling to reform this inflexibility. Interestingly, at the time these reports were being written senior NSW police were already in the process of evaluating the New York police's zero tolerance policing strategy called Compstat (see Chapter 1). As a result, OCR, which as we have seen is a version of Compstat (Miranda, 2000d, p.1; New South Wales Police Service 2000), was implemented in 1998 as the principal operational and performance management strategy of the NSW Police (Davis & Coleman 2000). Compstat, as this thesis has shown, is about data-led, 'uncompromising' policing; a policing strategy which is not supportive of community policing or of harm reduction. Police were not interviewed during the Anh Hai study and many were already protesting that there was little examination of the legalistic, value-for-money policing they were being expected to put into practice. David Dixon, who was a co-author of the Anh Hai study, has argued later that police informants often have reasons to provide inaccurate information because they are used in areas of police work where corruption is endemic. Misinformation can have serious repercussions (Dixon, 1999, p.51). Yet the status of the same drug addicts and informants was taken to be totally acceptable in the terms of academic research and Maher et al (1997, p.vii) even raised concerns about members of the police attacking the integrity of the principal researchers by making false and defamatory allegations. This concern failed to extend to include the young police who, without being interviewed, often felt demoralised by being stereotyped and labelled. In thus criticising Anh Hai I am certainly not suggesting that there are no intolerant or corrupt police but that operational police have been disadvantaged by research which appears to accept the assurances of senior management without considering the relative powerlessness of police officers at the middle and lower levels of the organisational structure. Research should begin with the premise that the meanings and ideas of all participants are of equal importance and that all stakeholders should be given a voice. In this case, this would include not only Asian young people but the police as well. In some instances they are, after all, one and the same. The interpretation of the information from research subjects requires the researcher to be transparent and see things from the position of all others. Michael Crotty has argued that to understand the attitudes of the community we must be able to take on the role of others; we have to see ourselves as social objects and we can only do that by adopting their standpoint (Crotty1998, p.74). Robert Connell (1993,p.41) takes this a little further by suggesting that intellectual work has to be done from the point of view of the least advantaged. Of course young Asian heroin addicts are very disadvantaged. However, within the police hierarchical and criminal justice occupational structure, operational police are also disadvantaged. The existence of institutionalised prejudice within policing can partly be explained by the concepts of value-for-money and zero tolerance policing styles, which are themselves both intrinsically prejudicial and discriminatory (Reiner 1997, p.1011). This can only be compounded when police have their competency assessed by a performance management policy. Any semblance of zero tolerance policing will justify the targeting of minority groups, even if an officer is not individually prejudiced. The most predictable outcome is that 'uncompromising' policing immediately places the officer at odds with minority groups and the poor (Wilson 1968). Stereotyping is an inescapable product of the suspiciousness which is widespread in police work. Robert Reiner believes that is not its survival that should cause major concern, but the degree to which it is established and proves useful, in contrast to any discriminatory way it is applied (Reiner 1992, p.115). OCR promotes discriminatory law enforcement and individual police are viewed in the light of their organisation's principle operational strategy. Whilst 'police culture' has become a cliché in public discourse, it is the politicians, police hierarchy and the media who react to public fear by offering hopeless solutions and simplistic slogans such as zero tolerance, tough on crime, tough on the cause of crime (Dixon 1999, p.175) which 'police culture' must then carry out. As Robert Reiner (1992, p.115) argues, the collected works on racist policing often reflect the structure of power in society and also serves to reproduce that structure. The notion that police are racist and discriminatory because they stop and arrest more people from minority groups perhaps should be measured against a similar concept that magistrates are racist and discriminatory because the majority of people who are convicted or sent to gaol are from disadvantaged communities. Whilst police may once have been the gatekeepers of the criminal justice system (Cunneen & White 1995, p.198), trends of 'uncompromising' law enforcement and the withdrawal of informal discretion means that many other occupations and professionals are now the de facto gatekeepers to the criminal justice system. Politics and Policing For those in the police service, it is the loss of public confidence and mandated authority, which is one of the most difficult aspects of modern policing. The complex dilemma of New York police, who have to deal with an 'uncompromising' executive as well as 'uncompromising' strategies, is explained in the following quotes. ... and a number of officers from a variety of ranks said that many of their colleagues, caught between the scorn of some communities and the pressure to reduce ever-declining crime rates, had begun to count the days to their retirement at twenty years. Some are sporting hats that say '20 and Out', one officer said (Flynn 2000). ... interviews with 18 officers, most of whom were white, indicated that Mr Giuliani's relationship with the 40,000 member police force was a complex one ... even if debates had made it appear at times as if he and police officers spoke with one voice, from the same side of the issue (Flynn 2000). For two years New York City has been struggling to attract potential recruits to take the Police Department's admissions test ... Professor Skolnick said the prosperous economy had caused the decline ... he also said the cases of Abner Louima tortured in a Brooklyn police station ... and Amadou Diallo who was killed by the police had raised awareness of racial tensions ... discouraging some applicants (Chivers 2000). The same resistance between operational police and their executive is mirrored in New South Wales. When Commissioner Ryan attended the 2000 biennial NSW Police Association Conference, his support for OCR and zero tolerance strategies were simply confirmed. There were no concessions to the fact that 'uncompromising' policing is causing conflict with the public. Commissioner Ryan (2000) has also confirmed that he believes operational policing is a young person's job, on the basis that young police are better suited to wrestling with drunks, or being attacked by other fit young people. Jude McCulloch makes a valid point when he says that unsupervised, immature young male police will use policing to test their manhood through physical confrontation (McCulloch and Schetzer 1993, p.15), especially as zero tolerance policing has a tendency to promote confrontation and restrict alternative methods of resolution. Contrary to Peter Ryan's opinion, experience and maturity are essential parts of the diversity required in any law and order service delivery. ... it is grossly unfair, in my view, for men and women over 45 or 50 to wrestle with drunks in the street, to be attacked by healthy, fit young people ... 'The Police Service should be recognised in terms of operational policing as young person's job'... it would also eliminate the huge number of people who take long term sick leave... Andrew Tink mentioned the 700 odd long-term sick. How many of those truly, if you could sit them down and say: 'why do you feel stressed out? Why are you on long term sick leave?' They would say to you. I really don't have the heart for it any more (Ryan 2000). White & Cuneen (1995, p.206-7) have examined the link between police and young people and consider that, as harassment, intimidation and violence are at the centre of most complaints, the relationship is often spoiled by conflict. Perhaps it would be useful if researchers made more of an effort to examine these same operational police independently of their organisation? This would certainly assist them in determining whether the conflict inherent in the relationship between police young people and minority groups is a product or a cause of bad policy. Commissioner Ryan acknowledges that OCR policing is data driven, 'uncompromising', 'difficult and stressful' (New South Wales Police Service 2000, p.3), although he does not acknowledge that the implementation of OCR in 1998 has anything to do with the reason so many police are resigning or requiring long-term sick leave. Certainly, this reflects the post Compstat human resource problems of the New York Police Department (Chivers 2000; Flynn 2000). His main concern - and the concern behind current policing policy - is, above all, with economic costs, not human costs. Mark Robinson (1999, p.3) reports that, while crime levels had dropped and arrest rates had increased for the first time in more than a decade, this has come at a considerable cost for the NSW Police Annual Report (1999) indicates that assaults against police had risen almost ten percent, with an average of thirty-one officers being attacked every week. In spite of this, blame for individual or organisational stress is still conveniently moved from the executive and placed squarely at the feet of middle management. The subject of OCRs was mentioned this morning. They have proven to be an outstanding accountability mechanism ... The focus of the OCRs is on our core activities of reducing crime and improving public safety ... It does and it will place commanders under great deal of pressure to account for the management of their command ... In a financial sense ... An operational sense ... A people management sense... let us be quite clear about what OCRs were intended to do. They were intended to put people under pressure ... And it has worked ... But what, if anything has gone wrong? ... The OCRs were never intended, there was never a direction given, nor has any pressure been applied by any of the executive, to force Local Area Commanders and their staff to spend inordinate amounts of time preparing for an OCR ... (Ryan 2000). Andrew Tink, who as Opposition police spokesperson has raised the issue of police stress in the past, on this occasion raised the issues of growing resignations and falling recruitment numbers. ... why is it that out of a class of 403 in CEP 5 [Police Academy], only 340 were attested and what happened to the other 60 or 15%? ... why is it that May's Police News shows that 20% of the resignations in February were probationary constables and a further 30% were constables - that is to say 50% of the resignations were by people new to the service... (Tink 2000). Within one week of the conference, Police Association research director Greg Chilvers issued a public statement to the print media stating that five percent of the State's police were on sick leave. ...five per cent of the State's police force are on sick leave ... I don't know any organisation which could sustain that. And what they are doing is speeding up the medical exit process - it's crazy. That's not solving the problem; the problem is much deeper than that. They need to start addressing the underlying problems, the lack of support and the way they treat people (Jones 2000, p.25). In one command, one in seven of the police - including the commander - were on stress related sick leave. When relieving staff were appointed, the temporary commander commented 'We have always maintained our response times, but this has let us get some pro-active policing done, target property offences and our drug problem' (Jones 2000, p.25). The commander's priority is clearly demonstrated by his remarks. Arguing that police do not enjoy the prospect of being granted additional powers would be very foolish. What is very questionable, however, is whether most police fully understand the whole concept and political outcome of being granted these additional politicised powers. When suspects, perpetrators or victims from minority groups become part of a dispute involving police it is the police practitioner, more likely than not, who will be immediately seen as 'the enemy' in the incident. Inexperienced police with a limited range of options tend to use a chemical or physical restraint at the first sign of trouble, causing an already strained relationship to deteriorate even further. 'Shoot him,' the male officer yelled as Ali Hamie stabbed him in the head, neck and chest with a shard of glass ... with four shots from her service revolver, she became what is believed to be the first female police officer in NSW to shoot someone dead ... the male officer believed to have been a police officer for two years attempted unsuccessfully to subdue the man by spraying him with capsicum spray ... the victim pushed the male officer to the ground and started to stab him with the large shard of glass in the head and neck ... the female officer also tried spraying the man with her capsicum spray ... this also failed to subdue him ... A number of shots were fired (Kennedy, L 2000, p.1). In New York comments about the damage to the police force because of the stress and strain suffered by individual police who are poorly prepared to implement 'uncompromising' law enforcement are now becoming very newsworthy. This extract is from the New York Times: ... the damage they have done to this job - I won't see the repair of it in my time ... He [Giuliani] and Mr Safir [Commissioner] remain committed to policies that push cops who are deficient in judgement, training and supervision into situations they are not prepared to handle. Inevitably some of those cops will degrade, maim and kill the innocent (Herbert 2000). A paradox for most police, however, is how can they possibly perform their duties in a broad context which simultaneously satisfies demands for zero tolerance and community policing? In New York on June 15, 2000, a large group of young men, who were affected by alcohol while celebrating National Puerto Rican Day, abused and ripped the clothing of numerous women in a wild rampage. Although three of the women ran to a nearby group of police and asked for help, the officers did nothing to stop the assaults. It was only because onlookers had videotaped some of the incidents, that the police were able to release the photographs of seven suspects, all of whom were black or Latino (Rashbaum & Chivers 2000). Obviously, the individual police officers, who had disregarded the three women's pleas for help, were also the subject of the resulting public outcry: Politician, Pat Buchanan said ... Morale has been undermined by the 'liberal cop bashing' ... Commissioner Safir said ... 'It shouldn't be used as an attempt to create some prejudicial attitude about the parade, and it shouldn't be used to attack a police department that does a very good job ... Internal Affairs have been ordered to deal with the officers who failed to stop the assaults (Riley 2000, p.17). As Crotty (1998, p.74) argues, to enter the attitudes of the community we must be able to take on the role of others. It is not difficult to imagine what would be the likely consequences for any police officer attempting to engage with the drunken men who were in the process of assaulting and abusing numerous women. Similarly, any attempt to interview or arrest a perpetrator would have been interpreted by some liberal minded citizens as harassment or racist. An internal investigation revealed that when the assaulted females requested assistance from police on traffic duty they were told to contact 911, the emergency phone number (Riley 2000a). The police concerned would not leave their delegated parade routes. The three civilian 911 operators also responded inadequately, causing delays. These are the negative consequences of a military style, aggressive, policing policy; a police force which is managed like a business rather than a social contract. The job A vital quality of police thinking is that policing is not just a job but also a respectable way of life with a worthwhile purpose. Policing is not conceived as a business or a political enterprise but rather as part of a social contract representing the thin blue line between order and anarchy or the protection of the weak against the strong and predatory. This genre, of course, is not itself without flaws. As Robert Reiner suggests, there can be no doubt that adrenalin and machismo play a large part in the hedonistic, action centred aspects of policing. However, the core of the police outlook is the subtle intermingling of action and cynicism. When these hedonistic aspects become blurred, they can feed off each other. Given the right circumstances of aggressive policing and pressure for results, the concepts of due process can be easily strained and damaged (Reiner 1992, p.111). Even Ian Ball, who is generally optimistic about the OCR process in New South Wales, has expressed concerns which are shared by many other critics: Staff have expectations of their commander, too, and generally find command and control freaks create environments, which are less than healthy to work in ... [although] I don't have a difficulty with the OCR process conceptually ... The process does not take into account any of the human issues (Ball 2000). Conclusion As we have seen, James Q Wilson (1968) examines different policing styles and outlines watchman, legalistic and service as the three prominent models. The legalistic styles are accused of racism, with no informal discretion on how rules and standards should be applied. The service style favours cautioning for crimes and is only considered possible in middle-class communities. The watchman style emphasises order maintenance with wide informal discretion. The main thrust of my argument begins with the premise that police discriminate against minority groups and that generally minority groups in society are stereotyped and situated at the base of the social structure. However research professionals seldom see things from the position of the other when dealing with police and there is evidence that operational police, situated at the base of the criminal justice occupational structure, are also labelled and stereotyped as a result. As this thesis has already shown, the politicising of law and order issues has turned what was originally designed to be a policing social contract into a data-led business, supported by an OCR and focused on arrest rates and crime levels. In both New York and New South Wales the welfare of operational police has become a secondary issue, with experienced police on long-term sick leave and junior police resigning because of stress (Doherty 2000). Jenny Brockie examines the willingness of some senior police to embrace any change, which empowers police to question what they did and why they did it? This concept also requires senior police to behave appropriately. A senior executive officer commented. 'Behavioural change is not something that you can quantify' (Brockie 2000). On the 19th April 2000 Commissioner Ryan received an honorary doctorate at Macquarie University and is member of the newly established advisory council on the University's graduate school of management. 'He said one of his ambitions after 37 years working in the public service was to improve the way the public service does business' (Macquarie University News 2000). Operational police should be able to see their role as not just a job but as a respectable way of life. Theirs is not a business. Nor is it a political enterprise. Rather it is a social contract representing the thin blue line protecting the weak against the predatory (Reiner 1992). Zero tolerance policing, however, is far from this and it has a well documented history of being at odds with the public and obsessive about data. The liberal concepts of tolerance and discretion have been placed to one side in preference of 'value-for-money' policing. The state and its criminal justice executive forfeit moral authority when 'uncompromising' policy is presented to citizens as if they and the police are enemies, which is more often than not the only outcome of such policing strategies. Conclusion The aim of this research has been to explore the circumstances in which 'uncompromising' law and order strategies have been developed and implemented and, in particular, to explore the effect that such strategies have had upon ethnic young people from disadvantaged communities. It is the contention of this thesis that this situation has never been examined from the perspective of all participants simultaneously. Instead, law and order activists, politicians and the police hierarchy have tended to blame ethnic gangs and prescribed a 'crackdown', which violates individual rights, as the solution to criminal activity and drug dealing. The media, too, while demanding such strategies amidst a welter of fear inspiring headlines about gang violence and rising crime rates, have continued, at the same time, bludgeoning police officers for their racism and corruption. The long-standing critics of police organisations, who see themselves as crusaders exposing the many failings of 'police culture' while actively pillorying police officers and middle management for their lack of flexibility, fear of change and their refusal to use harm reduction rather than 'uncompromising' policing strategies, continue to exonerate the police hierarchy from any responsibility for such organisational failings. Nowhere has there been any attempt to comprehend the position of the police officer, who is often young and very poorly prepared, and 'expose' the very real causes which have created the 'police culture' which is so much the subject of social criticism. In fact, as this thesis has shown, the situation is an extremely complex one. For the problems currently being experienced both by young ethnic men in southwestern Sydney and the young police officers who harass them - often unjustly - are products of one and the same political and economic process. In order to fulfil the aims of this research I have conducted an extended literature review of policing strategies and the manner in which they are imposed upon disadvantaged groups. This thesis has combined documentary analysis of both secondary and primary sources, including a wide range of contemporary media material, supplemented with interviews and historical diary notes. The limited findings of this literature review reveal a complex web of positive, negative and neutral interactions that are all linked together through the stakeholders affected by zero tolerance policing. The Lebanese community in Sydney, as we have seen, is very much a marginalised ethnic minority group; a group which is severely disadvantaged by socio-economic factors relating to housing, health, education and employment and experiences high levels of racism and discrimination. 'Uncompromising' policing has further marginalised the Lebanese community. It has caused Lebanese young people to be labelled as deviant and publicly humiliated and, in the process, has facilitated the growth of a 'protest masculinity' which has assisted the construction of even more deviant behaviour. The Lebanese community views 'uncompromising' policing to be unjust, racist and discriminatory and is progressively withdrawing the moral authority it extends to the police. When they are accused by politicians of erecting a 'wall of silence' to protect undesirable elements in the community, this is very much a reaction to 'uncompromising' policing and cultural and racial vilification. Zero tolerance policing is a conservative policy, which falls outside the liberal-democratic principles of justice. It represents, in fact, a direct break with the social contract originally implicit in policing. In the pursuit of quantifiable data and performance-based assessment which makes a mockery of the intuitive skills of service policing but which gives the general community a misleading notion of reduced crime rates, a safer society and a productive 'value-for-money' police service, the police have lost sight of the real socially based moral contract. Zero tolerance is also discriminatory in its effect upon operational police, who are seen by disadvantaged communities as an invading army and seen by the community as corrupt, gung-ho and often immoral. High levels of resignation, sick leave and recruiting difficulties are all indicators of the toll exacted from both experienced and inexperienced operational police. Humiliated not only by a populist media but also by the silence of a police executive whose orders they are following, many police officers feel as alienated as the young ethnic persons they are targeting. Cohen's deviancy theory (Cohen 1955), as this thesis has shown, has a very useful place in the evaluation of this continually escalating situation. Assertive policing does not have to be 'uncompromising' or be judged successful on the basis of increased arrest rates and a lower crime levels. It is, however, like any law and order policy, very dependent upon the goodwill and legitimate support of any community it purports to serve. Essentially any policing strategy can only be successful if the entire police organisation, including the executive pays heed to the civil rights and liberties of that community, which must include the use of tact, discretion and consultation with all sectors of a community. These standards cannot be met whilst competency of service providers and the success of the policy are measured solely in terms of quantitative outcomes (Chemerinsky 2000; Hopkins-Burke 1998b). Recommendations Regardless of the fact that 'uncompromising' policing in the form of Compstat or OCR is a top down policy, recent publications about the excesses of modern policing (Chan 1997; Maher et al 1997) have made findings and recommendations without consulting any police at the base level of the organisation. Erwin Chemerinsky (2000) has argued that this is a serious flaw in any analysis and cites an evaluation of aggressive anti-gang policing and corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department, where all blame is apportioned to middle-ranking and junior police by a state appointed board of inquiry (Chemerinsky 2000). Chan (1997), Chemerinsky (2000), Dixon (1999) and Maher et al (1997) all recommend improved individual training and greater accountability in order to establish a more professional police service. These recommendations ignore the determination of a police executive driven by its own performance management strategies. Tremain (2000) has described how the officer in charge of the Bankstown Police was transferred to the NSW Police Academy and put in charge of all training in September 2000 because his performance indicators statistically demonstrated a high level of arrests attributable to his leadership. In Superintendent Madden's own words, 'Arrests have been higher in the past few years than ever before. We are certainly putting more people away.' Maddens standpoint suggests that future police training in relation to human rights and tolerant/discretionary policing will probably be subordinated to these performance management criteria. Lou Cannon recently examined the LAPD 2000 corruption inquiry, in particular the actions of Rafael Perez a Los Angeles police officer sent to gaol for corruption, which began with the use of aggressive policing strategies in dealing with gangs from the Los Angeles disadvantaged and ethnic communities. Cannon was present in court the day Rafael Perez was sentenced. Perez claims that it was the aggressive LAPD culture itself that corrupted him. In a tearful statement at his sentencing earlier this year, Perez said he had become consumed by the 'us-against-them ethos of the overzealous cop' after he transferred to Rampart Crash. His was a cautionary tale. 'My job became an intoxicant that I lusted after,' he said. 'I began to lust also for things of the flesh. The end result: I cheated on my wife, I cheated on my employers and I cheated on all of you, the people of Los Angeles'. Perez warned rookie officers not to be seduced by the 'pressure of status, numbers and impressing supervisors' or by 'flip, awful statements' like the one that appeared over the door of Rampart Crash, 'We intimidate those who intimidate others' (Cannon 2000). This statement from Perez and the data from this thesis establishes that there is a need for further research into the effects on both the police and the community of zero tolerance policing. James Q Wilson, one of authors of the 'Broken Windows' theory upon which OCR has been based (Wilson and Kelling 1982), cautioned policy makers in the late 1960s (Wilson 1968) that 'legalistic' policing, which rejected discretion and was based on rigidly enforced rules, would be discriminatory and racist towards disadvantaged groups. Despite this, it has become the preferred style of policing in lower income areas, with the 'service' style of policing that favours discretion being considered possible only in middle-class and higher income communities. It certainly appears that the hierarchy in the NSW Police Service has maintained a rhetoric supporting community policing, while transforming the work of the police service into an accounting-driven aggressiveness directed against the communities they are supposed to serve. While this is often justified by populist appeals to increase arrest and incarceration rates, policy makers would do well to consider the way such public fears are generated by a headline hunting media interested in the financial benefits of a 'good story' and a research base which largely ignores the complexities that this thesis has uncovered. The lessons that need to be learnt are that future research should be independent of the New South Wales Police Service and its executive. Furthermore, in order to make any findings and recommendations valid and reliable, the research should include a large ethnographic interview component in which all stakeholders, from the effected community to the operational police, are given a voice. This thesis has never maintained that operational police are the innocent victims of a scurrilous fiction that distorts 'police culture'. Ultimately, the key to change in the workplace lies in the training given to police officers, however, accountability for a top down policy such as OCR needs to be qualitatively measured at the top as well as the bottom of the organisation's structure. Qualitative measurement, as opposed to quantitative measurement, must measure the ability for the organisation to fulfil the terms of the social contract that, although it is presently being ignored, still exists between the police and the community they serve. Treating the New South Wales Police - or any police force for that matter - as a performance driven business structure simply ignores the basic fact that policing is not a business but a community service. In a democratic society - and especially in a capitalist society driven by a growing political, social and economic gulf between rich and poor, powerful and powerless - it is more important than ever to ensure the protection of the common wealth. It is clearly time that our government rediscovers and renegotiates the social contract that morally binds it to the people who elect it as their representatives and give organisations such as the police service a mandate to enact both the common good and the common will. This mandate, however, can only be based on a sense of mutual trust, rather than on the levels of fear and force that are the products of powerlessness. Before this can be achieved there is an important lesson that should be learnt from the evidence of Rafael Perez, the Los Angeles police officer who discovered too late that he had been corrupted by 'pressure of status, numbers and impressing supervisors' and by 'flip, awful statements' such as 'We intimidate those who intimidate others'. Perez concluded his courtroom evidence with the plea that 'Whoever chases monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster himself' (Cannon 2000). 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