Gangland and Task Force Gain: an alternative account of Middle Eastern crime in Sydney, Australia

According to prominent public commentators in Sydney, Australia, the city’s many diverse Middle Eastern communities possess extraordinary criminal capacity. Middle Eastern Crime—a distinct ‘type’ of crime—is said to have proliferated throughout the last three decades, with Middle Eastern criminals first establishing a foothold in the city during the late 1990s while the police were incapacitated by a high-profile Royal Commission into corruption. Presenting an alternative account, this article traces how Middle Eastern Crime was borne out of the police’s heteropatriarchal (re)assertion of their crime-fighting credentials after being rebuked by the Royal Commission, which saw the organization’s focus fix upon Middle Eastern people in southwestern Sydney. The article therefore argues that the signifier Middle Eastern Crime denotes an Orientalist police regime, rather than a ‘type’ of crime. In doing so, it demonstrates the conceptual value of considering how police practices, and not just elite discourses, bring race into being.