Indigenous Community Policing

Synexe has been looking at the ways in which Indigenous Community Policing can provide opportunities for greater levels of safety within indigenous communities.

Community policing provides a way for more formal aspects of the law and justice sector to engage with communities. In an attempt to offer a more culturally appropriate service to the members of their communities, indigenous community groups around the world are beginning to police themselves in an effort to divert their members away from the formal law and justice sector.

The success of groups such as Māori Wardens in New Zealand, the Squamish Nation North Shore Peacekeepers in Vancouver, British Columbia and the Nyoongar Patrol in Perth, Western Australia provide an interesting lens to explore the role that indigenous community policing organisations around the world are playing in policing themselves in an attempt to divert their members away from the formal law and justice sector.

Part of this success can be traced back to issues of cultural legitimacy, appropriateness and trust. However, part of this success could also be traced back to the degree in which they are seen by the community as being distant (but not necessarily separate) from the formal policing sector, and other aspects of the formal law and justice sector.

This distance from the formal sector provides these organisations with an ability to be more flexible with the approach they utilise in their delivery of services as well as helping to increase their level of trust within their respective communities that have a historic distrust of the formal policing sector. In doing this these organisations are able to effectively mediate between the formal and informal aspects of policing in order to provide a service that successfully acts to divert their members away from the formal law and justice sector while also providing a useful point of articulation with that system.