Are Australia’s police corrupt and abusive? An illuminating new book investigates

Edited by former Queensland police officer and Gunai/Kurnai woman Veronica Gorrie, When Cops are Criminals might suggest a book about high-profile or unusual crimes involving officers. But this collection does not focus on the extraordinary.

As Gorrie explains, her reason for compiling the book was

to draw attention to the harmful behavior that police commit on a daily basis and, more importantly, the impact it has on their victims.

Gorrie’s previous award-winning book, Black and Blue: a memoir of racism and resilience, was an account of her time as a police officer between 2001 and 2011. In this new edited collection, 12 authors – survivors, campaigners, professionals and academics – share their own stories (or those of others they have access to).

Review: When Cops are Criminals – edited by Veronica Gorrie (Scribe)

The overriding theme of When Cops are Criminals is that the police and policing in Australia are systematically corrupt and abusive. Experiences of police misconduct and criminal behaviour – from racial profiling to sexual assault and domestic violence – are shown to be normalised, multi-jurisdictional and persistent.

Each chapter addresses the persistent and systemic racism, homophobia, misogyny, institutionalized toxicity, and dysfunction that enable and justify individual and collective abuses of police power. The book also highlights the limitations of mechanisms designed to ensure effective policing and meaningful accountability.

The chapters focus largely on individual experiences, through deeply personal narratives and victim-survivor vignettes. These experiences are not situated within broader statistical analyses or tested empirical evidence, in terms of the number, type or location of police officers involved in alleged abusive, corrupt or criminal behaviour.

Also, given the nature and purpose of the collection, no specific answers are given by the various police forces or the authorities that supervise these police forces.

However, a wealth of research shows that behaviours such as racial profiling, police domestic violence and unequal treatment of the LGBTQI+ community are persistent across multiple policing areas in Australia.
discriminatory treatment of young people and problematic handling of complaints. Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) has highlighted what it describes as “cover-up” behaviour that can mask police misconduct.

In her introduction, Gorrie notes:

Police are brutal towards many marginalized groups (…) Police use excessive force (…) Police commit crimes while off duty, against their partners, wives, families and children (… and) Officers have been known to exploit other officers.

Personal vignettes

Many of the book’s contributors are First Nations people, while others represent groups whose interactions with police are similarly influenced by sometimes intersecting aspects of their identity: their sexuality, age, gender, or as a victim-survivor of domestic violence. For some of the authors, this is the first time they have shared their experiences openly.

The book begins with legal academic Amanda Porter’s “snapshot of the genocidal dimensions of Australian policing.” Starting from its convict and colonial foundations, Porter highlights the deep-rooted structural underpinnings of policing in Australia: racism, sexism, homophobia and violence. A lack of meaningful oversight and accountability make it almost impossible to paint an accurate picture of Australian police conduct, she argues.

Then a number of personal anecdotes unfold.

Edward Winters describes a series of events in Melbourne in the 1990s, as a 20-year-old Koori man working for a legal service. After witnessing two police officers beating up a white man, Winters explains how he believes the same officers tried to intimidate him and silence him. He was, he writes, held in a police station, where he witnessed more violence, before being transferred to the notorious Pentridge Prison and subjected to a public and invasive body search.

Eighteen-year-old Aboriginal woman Jacky Sansbury has spoken of disturbing experiences with police in South Australia, including being harassed and assaulted “hundreds of times.” Sansbury recalls hiding under a blanket with her siblings as an 11-year-old before “hearing footsteps coming toward the room” and an officer pointing a gun at her. She later reveals how a cousin was left badly scarred after being pinned down by officers on a hot road. Calling for greater police accountability, Sansbury claims that “the system we rely on to protect and serve us is corrupt.”

Jason Tighe-Fong pays tribute to his friend Billy and shares their experiences in Sydney in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Officers, he writes, routinely stopped, abused and beat young Indigenous men as they walked home or went about their business.

As a gay Aboriginal teenager in Sydney in the early 2000s, Keith Quayle was used to running from the police. In his chapter, Quayle describes the violence (including sexual assault and public searches) used by officers, and the fear and hopelessness he felt at the great power differential.

… I wonder what that feeling would be like in another world. If those cops weren’t looking for drugs in black kids, but for pedophilia in (sic) respectable white men. What would I feel now if we were saved instead of punished?

While some of these reports go back decades, there is little evidence that the key issues raised have actually improved. Earlier this year, legal scholar Dr Hannah McGlade described “a failure of governments to account for and reform racist policing systems and structures” in Australia.

In another chapter, Necho Brocchi, a Spanish-Italian social/policy worker and a trans woman, reveals experiences of racism and transphobia. She shares the stories of three trans and gender diverse people in Queensland – Qtt, Tyty and Princess – whom she has met over the years.

In one example, Qtt tells Brocchi she was choked and “punched” by staff while in juvenile detention. On another occasion, she writes, a police officer “knee[ed]her in the face” in a guardhouse, and she also recounts being sexually assaulted in custody. The problematic policing of trans and gender diverse people is not unique to Queensland.

Police committed domestic violence

Domestic violence survivor and victim Jacinta Ryan has spoken out about the physical, emotional and financial abuse perpetrated by her then-partner, the NSW Police officer. She condemns a toxic police culture that enabled and condoned his violence. It is, she writes, “an environment where disrespect for your partner and family is common, and bad or illegal behaviour is often ignored.” Ryan’s former partner was eventually prosecuted and found guilty of all charges in 2021. A subsequent appeal was unsuccessful.

Interspersed with victim-survivor vignettes, family violence worker and community advocate Lauren Caulfield navigates what she calls the “cascading intergenerational effects” of police and prison responses to family violence. She highlights the specific challenges faced by victims of police-perpetrated family violence, including embedded police cultures of impunity, conflicts of interest, failure to respond to reports of such violence, and inadequate mechanisms to investigate complaints.

Research suggests that police are just as likely as anyone else to be perpetrators of domestic violence. However, Caulfield reveals that in 2021, only 15 NSW officers were charged with domestic violence – a charging rate of 0.08%. This compares to a rate of 0.42% for the general population.

Similar problems are evident in other jurisdictions, including Victoria and Queensland. As Caulfield concludes: “…the wearing of the badge continues to protect and excuse officers who use violence.”

In sharing her experiences with The Policeman (an ex-NSW police officer turned private investigator), former federal MP Emma Husar refers to a “street angel, house devil”. Too often, she suggests, this duality of public and private faces results in the victim being vilified and assumed to be lying, while the police officer who is the perpetrator is defended and supported. The Policeman has not been prosecuted in connection with the experiences described in this chapter. The Conversation does not suggest that The Policeman is guilty of any criminal acts.

Lawyer Jeremy King recounts events surrounding a 2019 Victoria Police raid on the Hares & Hyena Bookshop in Fitzroy, Melbourne. He describes the internal and external accountability mechanisms of Victoria Police as flawed and dysfunctional. A key concern is that police are left to deal with the vast majority of complaints about their own officers. King specifically targets IBAC, which largely exonerated the officers involved in the 2019 raid. In 2023, IBAC received 1,914 complaints about the police but only launched 23 investigations.

The collection closes with Kate Pausina, a 23-year former Queensland police officer, sharing the abuse she experienced after raising concerns about possible police misconduct. She locates much of this within institutionalized sexism and racism, enabled by a “traditionally white, male, hypermasculine culture.”

Bags of hope

When Cops are Criminals spans multiple decades, jurisdictions, and policing institutions. Across these diverse domains, the most obvious constant of shared experiences is the normalization of abuse and the absence of meaningful accountability.

The book challenges the widespread, oversimplified notion that police officers who abuse others or engage in misconduct are proverbial and largely atypical “bad apples.”

It demonstrates the impact of what Caulfield calls “cascading intergenerational effects” on historically overcriminalized and abused populations – particularly First Nations people, migrant and refugee communities, and LGBTQI+ people.

There are small pockets of hope in the collection. For example, the individual officers who support Ryan in her attempts to hold her former partner accountable for his domestic violence; and Brocchi’s recognition of the Queensland organisation Sisters Inside, which supports incarcerated women and girls. Its message is that “justice is a community act.”

These feelings are often understandably lost in the breadth and depth of the experiences described.

Yet When Cops are Criminals emphasizes the power of individual and collective voices, as evidenced by Sansbury’s call to action.

I will not be silenced; I will no longer live in fear. My one voice speaks for many.

This book is accessible, confronting, heartbreaking and infuriating. The details and experiences may be shocking, but for far too many readers they are unlikely to be surprising.