ABSTRACT
This chapter links various issues which relate policing to space, community and governance. It explores the intersection between the physical world and social world, how both are constructed by particular relations and how policing plays a part in their regulation. The relationship between culture and space, and the regulation of Indigenous people, has been at the heart of much of the interaction between coloniser and colonised in Australia. Public order and public places also need to be considered as socially constructed ‘space’. A public place is not something which exists purely in the defining act of legislation. The social and spatial positioning of Indigenous people is part of the active construction of contemporary relations between the dominant society and Indigenous people. Policing public order is inextricably linked on the one hand with notions of consensus and citizenship, while on the other hand disorder is attached to particular groups who, essentially, are seen as criminals devoid of social and political legitimacy.
