POLICING AND CULTURE
Address
by Dr. A.B. Kelly (President 1956-7)
to N.T. Police
Association Annual Conference
25 – 26
August 2003
I thought it would be appropriate at a Union Conference to begin with a
quote from Marx. Marx had something to say about the future. He said: “Why
should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?”
Groucho always put his finger on the crux of the
matter.
More seriously, the future is important. The only guide to the future is the
past. The recent past tells us that for each Police
Officer in
To understand this trend it is necessary to understand culture. We need to
understand what a culture is and what a culture does. A culture can do most of
the policing for us.
The only alternative to heavier policing is more self-policing, more
self-regulation. Self-regulation is only ever the product of a strong cultural
belief system. To understand the future of policing, it is necessary to have a
basic understanding of culture.
Any worker needs to know his material. Police work with
people, so they need to know something about human nature. Our human nature is
the result of our genes and our culture. We cannot do much about our genes.
This makes understanding culture even more important.
CULTURE: An understanding of culture
is important to Police because a strong cultural belief
system largely does the policing for you. In the Territory you have to deal
with people from two vastly different cultures, the traditional Aboriginal one
and the ordinary Australian one.
In the 1950’s both of these cultural belief-systems were working well. The
Serious Crime-rate was much lower in the 1950’s. It was a quarter of what it is
today. There is a reason for this change. Both cultures are in decline. As
cultures decline, self-regulation declines. People loose their self-restraint.
Cultures
exist because people need to find meaning in the world. Every culture is based
on a belief-system that explains the world. An ideal culture will tell its
people who they are, what they are, and what the world is all about. Humans
evolve with and through their cultures.
Human evolution is not like animal evolution. Humans evolve mentally rather
than physically. People evolve by increasing their knowledge of what is real
and their knowledge of what is good. They evolve mentally, or fail to evolve
mentally, through their cultures and with their cultures.
Human cultural evolution and human mental evolution is always a “do it yourself” process, as people make cultures and
cultures make the people of the culture.
How a culture develops, whether it gets better or gets worse, depends upon
whether the foundational belief-system of the culture keeps pace with the
development of knowledge.
The development of knowledge is a process that has four distinct stages. It is
always at least a two-stage process. It can be a three-stage or a four-stage
process. Every culture will reflect the stage that has been reached in this
process of knowledge development. Knowing these four stages can provide the key
to understanding different cultures.
THE FOUR STAGES in the process of the development of knowledge are
Experience, Understanding, Judgement and Evaluation. The first stage of the
process – Experience - is based on our sense experience. This is similar to the
way animals know. But human sense-experience is much wider than animal sense
experience. Animals operate on a strict “need to know” basis. They only know
what they need to know to survive. Animal knowing is an event. Human knowing is
a process.
Humans need to do more than just survive. They need to make sense of the world.
They seek to understand all their experience. Understanding, making some sense
of the world, is the second stage of the human process of knowledge
development. All cultures reach this stage.
The third stage of the process of knowledge development is Judgement. When
people reach this stage they want to know if their previous understanding of
the world is correct. Not all cultures reach this stage. Many cultures have not
reached it yet.
People in
These four stages: Experience; Understanding; Judgement; and Evaluation, can be
continually applied to increase our knowledge of the world. Every culture will
reflect the stage that has been reached in this process of knowledge
development.
ABORIGINAL CULTURE: I got to know
Central Australian Aborigines during the 1950’s. I realised that the difference
between them and other Australians was cultural. I got along well with
Aborigines. I was invited to their secret ceremonies. They wanted to initiate
me. My eventual Doctoral Dissertation “The Process of the Cosmos” was concerned
with culture, among other matters.
The Australian Aboriginal culture is expressed in their Dreamtime stories.
These explain the Aboriginal world. The Aborigines did not question whether the
Dreamtime stories were true. They did not reach stage three of the knowledge
process. Their stage two understanding of the world was never doubted or
questioned.
As a culture, Aboriginal culture was an ideal type. It told its members who
they were, what they were, and what the world was all about. But it was not in
a position to keep up with the development of knowledge. The Aborigines were
cut off from other cultures for some 47,000 years. 47,000 years is nearly half
the lifespan of Homo sapiens as a Species.
Every culture has a belief-system, an understanding of the world, at its base.
The whole pattern of life within each culture develops from this understanding
of the world.
CULTURE AND CRIME: In the 1950’s
Territory Aborigines had a living culture. Compared to the present, there was
very little crime among Aborigines. Their culture policed their behaviour. Most
Aboriginal crime was the result of a clash between actions that were considered
right in their culture, but were considered wrong in our culture.
There were hardly any signs of Aboriginal social breakdown. Petrol sniffing was
totally unknown. The general standard of Aboriginal health was good.
Drunkenness was very rare. Even drinking was rare. It was an offence for
Aborigines just to drink liquor. It was also an offence to supply an Aborigine
with liquor, punishable by a long Prison sentence. It was seldom worth the
risk.
The elders of the tribe, the custodians of the stories of the culture, and of
its ceremonies, were held in high regard. Each cattle station and
What Police can learn from this is how important it is to
preserve a cultural belief system. A strong cultural belief system tells its
people how to act. It does most of the policing for you.
A culture without significant contact with other cultures for 47,000 years does
not give the people of the culture much opportunity to develop their abstract
reasoning ability. That development begins when stage three judgements are
applied to old beliefs. Stage three begins when people begin to reason in an
abstract way. Significant abstract reasoning first began in
Margaret Bain, who studied Aboriginal thought processes at the Finke in the
1970’s, shows the difficulty that Aborigines had in coping with abstract ideas
in her Masters Thesis. This Thesis has been published as: “The Aboriginal–White
Encounter” (SIL-AAIB Occasional Paper No. 2).
ABORIGINAL POLICY was changed
radically in the 1960’s. Ideas that might have been appropriate to a stage
three or a stage four culture were imposed on the
people of a stage two culture. The results have generally been a disaster for
Aborigines.
The underlying assumption behind the 1960’s changes to Aboriginal policy was that
different cultures make no difference to people. Tell that to the victims of
the Bali Bombers. Cultural differences can make a deadly difference.
When Aboriginal Policy was changed in the 1960’s the nature of Aboriginal
culture, its belief-system and its thought-world, were ignored. Governments
failed to recognise that the Aboriginal thought-world is different from ours.
There is no doubt that all the actions that have led to the destruction of the
Aborigines and their culture since the 1960’s, were done with the best of
intentions. But they were done in almost total ignorance of the cultural
reality, with inevitable consequences.
We can learn a lot from what has already happened to Aboriginal culture. Now
let us consider what is happening to the ordinary Australian culture.
THE AUSTRALIAN CULTURE came from
The early Christians applied Judgement, the third stage of the knowledge
process, to their foundational beliefs. When they thought they had it all
worked out they formulated their ideas as Dogma. Western Culture is in decline
because the Christian belief-system is not being re-examined in the light of
advancing knowledge.
One result of that decline is that today, for each individual Police
Officer in
In a recent study, Nicole Billante of the Centre for
Independent Studies has shown that in the last 40 years in
Nicole Billante argues: “the freedom to do something
is dependent upon our knowing when to restrict our behaviour. When people
fail to regulate their own behaviour, we are left with no alternative but to
try to regulate it externally.” [with Peter Saunders,
“Six Questions About Civility”
The only source of any internal regulation of behaviour is the belief-system
that informs the culture. We have seen the effect the disruption of the
Aboriginal culture has had on Aborigines. From the Crime Statistics it appears
that the rest of
POLICING POLICY: While crime
has been expanding, and the willingness of people to restrain their own
behaviour has been declining, libertarians have been busy removing restrictions
on public and private behaviour, as if people were becoming more responsible,
rather than less.
Libertarians are making the control of public behaviour more difficult. Police are expected to prevent anti-social behaviour and
criminal activity while fettered with restrictions that were appropriate to a
more civilised, more cultured time.
The current presumption of innocence, and the restrictions that are placed on Police in maintaining public order, and in investigating crime,
were formulated when our cultural belief-system was very strong. It was a
different social environment from today’s society. The majority of people
placed restrictions on their own behaviour.
As the self-regulation of behaviour diminishes, in step with the diminution of
the cultural belief-system, it will have to be replaced with more external
regulation of behaviour, rather than less. That means more policing – both more
Police and more regulation.
The only alternative to heavier policing is more self-policing, more
self-regulation. Self-regulation is only ever the product of a strong cultural
belief system, one that is appropriate to the knowledge stage people have
reached.
One alternative to self-regulation is illustrated in this quote from a