Dr Eleanor Bland

This paper examines the policing of marginalised groups in colonial Australia, and the legacies of these practices. While scholars have recognised that police officers were at the forefront of the creation of a new social order in the Australian colonies, there have been limited analyses of how officers negotiated their roles and operated in practice within the communities that they policed. Focusing on Queensland, this article examines the ‘suspect communities’ who were heavily monitored and criminalised by police: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, and non-European immigrant groups, primarily from China and Pacific Islands. It draws mainly on the evidence provided by the Queensland Police Gazette of policing practices and arrests, alongside parliamentary reports and relevant newspaper reports on policing, to reveal how policing operated on the ground. The decisions taken by police officers to suspect and apprehend individuals from these ‘suspect communities’ in significant numbers shaped and perpetuated wider societal stereotypes of criminality.  

These policing practices have significant and ongoing legacies in the Australian context for Indigenous Australians and non-European immigrant groups. The targeted policing practices and criminalisation examined here have ongoing intergenerational impacts on marginalised communities, and contemporary neocolonial policing practices continue to perpetuate these patterns. Reflecting on the connections between the historical and the contemporary, this article shows that we need to fully understand colonial and historical policing practices to begin to unpick problematic and deep-rooted contemporary police stereotyping.  

While scholars have recognised the postcolonial legacies of targeted policing practices in Australia, there has been more limited engagement with how this type of policing operated in practice in historical context. By examining evidence from the Police Gazette of Western Australia (1876-1908), supported by police court reports from newspapers, this article suggests that policing in this period was concerned with exercising power over targeted communities and groups. In particular, policing was directed towards three ‘suspect communities’: convicts and former convicts, Indigenous Australians and non-European immigrants. This policing had both immediate and longer-term impacts for individuals and communities, and the impacts have been transmitted through generations and collective memories to the present day. The police targeting practices highlighted here are foundational to the institution of policing, and need to be fully understood if we want to begin to unpick deep-rooted police stereotyping practices.

While the ideals of the police regulation of urban order in nineteenth-century Britain have received significant scholarly attention, there has been limited engagement with how this type of policing operated in practice. By examining for the first time the evolution and genealogy of ‘lurking’ and ‘loitering’, two legal terms that formed a prominent part of the police language of suspicion from the later eighteenth century, this article emphasises the critical role of this legal language in the exercise of police power over urban space. The late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries is revealed as a formative period in the development of anxieties around ordering the urban sphere, in which the legal categories ‘lurking’ and ‘loitering’ evoked powerful concerns. It argues that the police regulation of urban order by targeting the ‘suspicious characters’ who threatened it is a deep structure of policing, which merits further examination to understand deep-rooted police stereotyping practices.

‘Flash houses’, a distinctive type of public house associated with criminal activity, are a shadowy and little-studied aspect of early 19th-century London. This article situates flash houses within a wide perspective, arguing that the discourses on flash houses were part of concerns about the threat of the urban environment to the moral character of its inhabitants. The article draws on an original synthesis of a range of sources that refer to flash houses, including contemporary literature, newspapers, court documents and government papers. It demonstrates that flash houses were part of both popular intrigue about the perceived ‘criminal underworld’, and official concerns about the collusion between police officers and suspected offenders, since police officers allegedly frequented flash houses to gather criminal information. A detailed examination of this term reveals anxieties about the state of the metropolis, poverty and criminality, which were central to the early-19th century consciousness. However, the discussion of flash houses in this context also demonstrates a powerful connection in contemporary minds between the physical spaces of the city and the risks that they posed to inhabitants’ morals. While associations between the physical environment and morality have been drawn throughout history, flash houses represent a paradigmatic moment in this dialogue. This is because different moral concerns coalesced around the discourse on flash houses: anxieties about the criminal underworld, the potential for moral degradation of young people who frequented these spaces, and the corruption of police officers through contact with known or suspected offenders.

This article provides a fresh perspective on the popular political culture of the City of London between approximately 1725 and 1746. While many scholars have recognized that the City was a vital and vibrant arena for popular political engagement throughout the long eighteenth century, they have mostly chosen to emphasize the role that London citizens played in national political narratives. Instead, this article takes as its starting point elections to the Common Council of the City Corporation. These reveal powerful internal dialogues, which emerged from the lowest levels of City government in the 1720s and 30s. Householders raised concerns about corruption in government, and about the accountability of elected representatives; these ideas were forged and sharpened in the neighbourhoods of the City. This article reveals the vitality of popular political activism in the streets and alleys of the City of London.