Gangland and Task Force Gain: an alternative account of Middle Eastern Crime in Sydney, Australia

McElhone, Megan (2023) Gangland and Task Force Gain: an alternative account of Middle Eastern Crime in Sydney, Australia. Critical Criminology , ISSN 1205-8629.

Abstract

According to prominent public commentators in Sydney, Australia, the city’s many diverse Middle Eastern communities possess extraordinary criminal capacity. Middle Eastern Crime – a distinct ‘type’ of crime – is said to have proliferated throughout the last three decades, with Middle Eastern criminals first establishing a foothold in the city during the late 1990s while the police were incapacitated by a high-profile Royal Commission into corruption. Presenting an alternative account, this article traces how Middle Eastern Crime was borne of the police’s heteropatriarchal (re)assertion of their crime-fighting credentials after being rebuked by the Royal Commission, which saw the organisation’s focus fix upon Middle Eastern people in south-western Sydney. The article therefore argues that the signifier Middle Eastern Crime denotes an Orientalist police regime, rather than a ‘type’ of crime. In doing so, it demonstrates the conceptual value of considering how police practices, and not just elite discourses, bring race into being.

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