Introduction

Poor relations between police forces and Indigenous communities throughout Australia have been a regular source of local, national and international criticism of the failure of governments to improve standards of policing and eradicate racist behaviour in public institutions. Numerous government inquiries over recent years have investigated the factors impacting on relations between Indigenous people and the police. At a broad level, policing is a state activity fundamentally captured within the wider historical trends of colonisation and nation-building, which occurred at the expense of dispossessed Indigenous peoples. Colonisation is the process of subjecting a particular cultural or territorial group of people to the control of another group. It is a process which necessarily involves the exercise of power and a range of political strategies to ensure subjection. It is a process which implies exploitation, violence and cultural domination.