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11 Current Issues in Crim. Just. 74 (1999-2000)
When 'Zero Tolerance' Looks like Racial Intolerance: 'Lebanese Youth Gangs', Discrimination and Resistance

handle is hein.journals/cicj11 and id is 78 raw text is: When 'Zero Tolerance' Looks Like Racial Intolerance: 'Lebanese Youth Gangs', Discrimination and Resistance I agree with Michael Antrum's comment (1998:200) that, 'Zero tolerance, age and race discrimination is not intelligent policing'. He proposes that a more rational course in dealing with youth crime would be to ask 'young people themselves what might work', and how they can help to diminish crime. Nowhere is the counter-productiveness of 'in your face' police patrolling more obvious, nowhere is the need for community consultation with youth more pressing, than in the Canterbury-Bankstown area of western Sydney following last year's moral panic about 'ethnic gangs' (Poynting et al 1998). In this comment, I will focus on just one contradiction: that between inducing resistance and resentment in ethnic communities by a 'zero tolerance' blitz, and demanding assistance from the same communities in investigating crime. At a recent public meeting called by the Ethnic Communities' Council of New South Wales with Police Commissioner Peter Ryan, the Commissioner reiterated that one of the greatest difficulties faced by the Police Service in its relations with ethnic communities is the 'unwillingness of community members to come forward and report crime' (Ryan 1999). This complaint is not new, but it has been too little tested empirically in relation to specific communities in critical sites. Nor, to the extent that it may be accurate, have the commonsense explanations offered been sufficiently corroborated to be useful for informing policy and practice. One of the explanations offered by Commissioner Ryan was that there was widespread fear of the police in many ethnic communities, because of cultural memories of (presumably improper, corrupt and/or violent) practices of police in their countries of origin. This superficial understanding, while doubtless containing a grain of truth, systematically distorts and oversimplifies the social reality, diverting attention from other causal factors and deeper explanations. As David Dixon (1998:2) argues, it 'should provide the beginning rather than the end of an attempt to understand'. Dixon provides a trenchant critique of this ideology, based on extensive empirical work among the Indo-Chinese community around Cabramatta in south-west Sydney (Dixon 1998:2-5). Maher et al (1997) found that young South East Asian immigrants in fact had much higher expectations of probity, equity and justness of law enforcement in this country and were disappointed when these did not match the reality of their experience. Such questions now urgently need thorough empirical investigation in relation to the Arabic-speaking community of the Canterbury-Bankstown area. Certainly, in relation to last October's killing of teenager Edward Lee in Punchbowl and the gunshots fired on the Lakemba Police Station in November, the media reported police complaints of a community 'wall of silence' in relation to the offences (Bearup 1998; Kennedy 1998; Poynting et al 1998; Trute & Stevenson 1998). The Sydney Morning Herald reported, 'Senior police admit they don't know whether fear or loyalty is motivating the silence' (Kennedy 1998:1). A further question needs to be asked in each case. If fear is the motive, is it fear of 'ethnic gangs' or is it fear of the police, exacerbated by high profile 'get tough' campaigns? If the motive is loyalty, is ethnic solidarity against the pressure 'to come forward and report crime' actually strengthened by police 'zero tolerance' tactics?

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