‘Immortalising the golden age of Middle Eastern crime’: police-media liaisons, essentialism, and epistemic violence

This chapter considers how the work of professional police staff brings race into being, focusing on police media units and research gatekeepers. Although the institutionalised practices of such staff are often overlooked as sites of racialised police power, this chapter argues that police-media liaisons and research gatekeeping can facilitate racial essentialism and produce epistemic violence, as well as legitimating directly and physically violent policing. To illustrate its key contentions, the chapter takes the policing of so-called Middle Eastern crime in Sydney, Australia, as a case study. It details how the police’s media unit leveraged the organisation’s influence over the traditional media and channelled police knowledge claims attesting to the criminal capacity of Middle Eastern people into popular reporting, while research gatekeeping practices obstructed the author—a person of Lebanese heritage—from producing an alternative account of the policing of Middle Eastern crime. The chapter therefore implicates the work of professional police staff in propping up an Orientalist regime of policing in Sydney. But while the chapter concentrates on one Australian city, it will be of interest to scholars in other jurisdictions, demonstrating that racialised policing is not limited to the targeted use of legal powers on the street but also extends to the police’s ability to shape public knowledge about race and crime.