ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that policing cannot be understood without critically attending to its historical foundations in settler colonialism. To build this argument, it sketches a brief history of police reform, using the Australian state of Victoria as case study. The chapter maps key components of the evolving relationship between policing, social power relations, and structural violence. Policing in Victoria was explicitly conceived and utilised in the early days of the colony as a tool of dispossession and capitalist development. Since this time, policing has undergone waves of reform that have not restrained but adapted and enhanced its power and reach. Building from this recognition, the chapter outlines how a range of techniques have been used to police, punish, and invisibilise sexual and gender transgressions. Through a critical reading of historical laws governing homosexuality in Australia, I emphasise the different modes of governance applied to women and men, and to Aboriginal and settler populations. While the so-called ‘decriminalisation’ era of the late 1970s and 1980s may have changed the political and legal terrain for LGBT challenges to policing, Chapter 2 contends that it failed to signal the end of queer criminalisation.
