Anh Hai: Policing, Culture and Social Exclusion in a Street Heroin Market

Abstract

This paper reports research on how Indo-Chinese youth experience and perceive policing in Cabramatta, a predominantly Vietnamese community located in South Western Sydney. Interviews were conducted with 123 Indo-Chinese youth involved in heroin use and/or distribution. Results indicate that encounters with police were often conducted in a climate of fear, racism and hostility. Many were subject to routine harassment, intimidation and mistreatment. Young people were detained and searched unlawfully and in a manner interpreted as denigrating and offensive by the wider Indo-Chinese community. We also found evidence of questionable and illegal conduct by police officers in seizing drugs and money. Young people's perceptions of their treatment by the police are shaped by their political and economic exclusion which, ironically, is compounded by their cultural inclusion. Far from expressing the world view of an alien underclass, participants in the study assessed police activities according to mainstream normative values. Using empirical data we develop and extend the notion of social exclusion as a complex and internally contradictory process characterized by the interplay and possible conflict between its cultural, political, and economic dimensions.

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