When Cops Are Criminals ed. by Veronica Gorrie
Veronica Gorrie, the multi-award-winning Gunai-Kurnai author of Black and Blue: A Memoir of Racism and Resilience (2021) is back with When Cops Are Criminals (2024), a new anthology reckoning with the violence and corruption endemic to contemporary policing. As she writes in her introduction, “my main reason for putting together this collection was to highlight the harmful behaviours committed by police every single day, and, more importantly, the impact this has on their victims.”
In a series of essays and first-person accounts from survivors, campaigners, lawyers and academics specialising in police misconduct, Gorrie offers a devastating picture of the reality of life for people who see police officers as more of a threat to their personal safety than any other class of offenders.
When Cops Are Criminals opens with ‘The Criminal Foundations of Australian Policing’. Brinja-Yuin woman and Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne Law School Dr Amanda Porter argues that “Australian policing was founded on crime, criminality, and criminal violence, in the sense that it was forged in land theft, apartheid, kidnapping of children, massacres, and the near annihilation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.” Porter goes onto explain that at the time of First Contact, there was no such thing as a police force in Great Britain, and that ‘nine of the best-behaved convicts,’ had to be appointed by Governor Athur Phillip to guard ships and keep watch overnight. Porter describes the swift emergence of a debaucherous, violent organisation that engaged in massacres of First Nations people across the country, which continues this legacy today.
Alongside academic articles are frightening accounts of police brutality, corruption and racial profiling such as in eighteen-year-old Jacky Sansbury’s confronting chapter ‘Being Aboriginal is a Crime’. In addition to several strong contributions from First Nations authors, Meanjin-based youth worker Necho Brocchi shines a light on the experiences of violence and solidarity amongst incarcerated trans women and other gender diverse people.
Numerous contributors tackle the question of the relationship between policing and family violence, including Maria Markovska, who bravely offers her devastating account of being bashed and permanently injured by her police-perpetrator ‘protected species’ ex-husband. Markovska highlights the way almost all complaints about police sent to the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) are referred to Victoria Police to investigate internally, often by the officers who are the very subjects of the complaint. It’s unsurprising then that most all come back unsubstantiated.
Kate Pausina, a former member of the Queensland police force (like Gorrie herself), exposes her experiences of bullying, negligence and sex discrimination after reporting potentially criminal internal police behaviour.
When Cops Are Criminals is intended to provide a tough wake-up call to the many Australians who, despite the slew of Royal Commissions and coronial inquests, still find the concept of rampant police corruption and criminal wrongdoing difficult to believe.
Since the landmark 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 540 more First Nations people have died in prisons and police custody (as of 2023). Despite the widespread mainstream reporting of death in custody cases such as that of Mr Doomagee’s, the subject of Chloe Hooper’s award-winning 2008 book The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island and 2019 death of Yuendemu teenager Kumanjayi Walker at the hands of Northern Territory police officer Zachary Rolfe, nothing seems to change.
The National Indigenous Times and other Indigenous media outlets lead the way in reporting these ongoing, horrific losses. First Nations truth-telling at Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission led to a historic apology from the Chief Commissioner of Police, who acknowledged the existence of system racism and the hundreds of Aboriginal people who have been subjected to discriminatory actions that have gone undetected, unchecked and unpunished.
But still, the deaths keep coming.
So, what can a book like When Cops Are Criminals do?
In addition to breaking new ground in highlighting the disturbing experiences of women attempting to leave violent, controlling police officer partners, When Cops Are Criminals breaks from tradition by failing to call for a more diverse police force or mandatory empathy training. Instead, When Cops Are Criminals stands squarely in the terrain of the Black Lives Matter movement, the global uprising against race-based police brutality. This campaign continues to call for the police to be defunded, an aim that many who have not been the subject of police harassment and abuse find difficult to accept as a genuine social demand. After all, what would a world without police look like?
While Gorrie’s blistering When Cops Are Criminals doesn’t offer up this vision, it certainly invites the reader to imagine.
Sam Elkin is a community lawyer and author of Detachable Penis: A Queer Legal Saga. Born in England and raised in Boorloo, Sam now lives on unceded Wurundjeri land. He co-hosts the RRR radio show Queer View Mirror, co-edited Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia and is the 2024 City of Melbourne libraries Boyd Garret writer in residence.