TANGENTYERE REMOTE AREA NIGHT PATROL. Jenny Walker and Sharron Forrester Tangentyere Council Northern Territory

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1 TANGENTYERE REMOTE AREA NIGHT PATROL Jenny Walker and Sharron Forrester Tangentyere Council Northern Territory Paper presented at the Crime Prevention Conference convened by the Australian Institute of Criminology and the Crime Prevention Branch, Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department and held in Sydney, September 2002

2 Tangentyere Remote Area Night Patrol Paper to be presented at Crime Prevention conference, September, 2002 Tangentyere Council is an Aboriginal, community-controlled resource agency, delivering essential services and programmes to 20 autonomous town camp communities in Alice Springs and the Central Australian region. These programmes and services are designed to support Alice Springs and remote community initiatives in the areas of public health, housing, employment and training, youth affairs and early interventions. Two services that are run by Tangentyere Council are the Tangentyere Remote Area Night Patrol project, and the Tangentyere Night Patrol service. See for more information. The region of the Northern Territory serviced by the Tangentyere Remote Area Night Patrol project is approximately the size of Victoria. The population of the region is roughly 50,000 people with around 27,000 living in Alice Springs. Distances between remote communities are measured in hundreds of kilometres, and Aboriginal populations in the 20 or so scattered settlements vary from 100 to 1000 people. There are many distinct cultures and languages in the region, with 10 major Aboriginal languages spoken. Each community has a unique constellation of families and people, resources, and services available. Alice Springs is the major regional service centre, and many people from remote regions come into town for access to services such as hospitals and courts, to visit family or go shopping, or to party. Tangentyere Night Patrol are the townbased service that looks after the Aboriginal residents and visitors to Alice Springs. A few statistics to fill in this very brief overview The 30% of the N.T. population that are Aboriginal make up 77% of the N.T. s prison population and take up 87% of bed days in Alice Springs Hospital. In 1998/99, 75% of juveniles in detention were Aboriginal, and 14% of Aboriginal students progressed from year 8 to year 12 compared with 80% of non-aboriginal students. Night Patrols arose and exist in that uneasy space between the Aboriginal domain and the whitefella domain. In many areas in the Central desert region, Aboriginal peoples were brought into settlements to sit down together, too close together and for too long to avoid inter and intra-family tensions and disputes arising. A geographical solution moving away was no longer possible. Night Patrols sprang up, but without being named as such. Groups of senior traditional people walked around the new settlements. They kept an eye on things and negotiated between groups or people who were fighting with each other. Night Patrols still operate through negotiation with troublemakers rather than through the imposition of sanctions. The NPs have the language and cultural skills to deal effectively with situations that can be incomprehensible to

3 outsiders. The Alice Springs Police have stated that before the Tangentyere NP came into existence, they were often called to problems between Aboriginal people that they could not understand, which sometimes resulted in the arrest of the wrong people. On one occasion, when the Tangentyere NP was a volunteer service and the workers had no uniforms, the Police attended a fight in a town lease and accidentally arrested a NP worker who was in the thick of the fight trying to sort it out. The Police fully support the NPs and rely on them whenever possible for information and negotiation in situations involving Aboriginal offenders. The first formal Night Patrol started at Julalikari Council in Tennant Creek 12 years ago. Yuendumu had the first remote community Night Patrol a year later a group of women, concerned about the escalating levels of grog and violence in their community. They made a huge difference then, and still do. Night Patrols are an Aboriginal idea. They are based in and come from the Aboriginal people living in the community. This is why they work. There are marked differences in cultural attitudes to justice between whitefellas and Aboriginal peoples. Aboriginal law most closely resembles what whitefellas would call restorative justice. Night Patrols perform a huge range of functions, according to the needs of their communities and the resources they have available. They act as a nexus to connect people and services such as clinics, courts, Police, community government councils, and family. They mediate disputes, remove people from danger, keep the peace at events such as sports carnivals, are consulted by agencies such as courts for input into sentencing, and play a crucial role in the development of community justice groups. I interviewed the radio operator for Tangentyere Night Patrol for our video newsletter the Night Patrol News, and asked her what the major functions of the Night Patrol were. It took her fifteen minutes to list the Night Patrol s activities, and this was without elaboration. Tangentyere Night Patrol is the only funded Night Patrol in the region and the level of finance does not met the costs of the patrol, so the service continues to rely on 6 CDEP positions to function fully. The N.T. Department of Community Development, Sport and Cultural Affairs has funded the Remote Area Night Patrol Coordinator s position for the past 8 years. This position helps Night Patrols in remote communities access training, small one off grants, networks NP s across the region and holds an annual Reference Group meeting. This position is unique in Australia, and has proven that remote Night patrols are more viable and last longer with the support RANP supplies. Most of the remote Night Patrols themselves are staffed by volunteer or CDEP workers. Their activities remain invisible and they do not attract funding commensurate with their skills and the invaluable role they play largely because of problems with accountability, reporting and expectations. NPs have increased in number, and have spread across the country and diversified in their functions over the last decade. Every major settlement in

4 Central Australia has had a NP as some stage. Many flounder through lack of support, and through unrealistic expectations being placed on them by their own community or whitefella institutions. However, when they are operating with appropriate support, they can provide an effective peacekeeping and crime prevention service in remote Aboriginal communities. The type of Night Patrol a community has and what they do varies with the resources and people power available just as each remote community is unique, so is each remote community Night Patrol. The Ali Curung Night Patrol and Safe House women have reduced levels of drunkeness and domestic violence to almost nothing. There is a section on the video we will show after this talk featuring this group. Laramba Night Patrol improved the health of their families by stopping grog and fighting, and card games for money. That meant money stayed in the community and was spent on food and clothing instead of going into town with the big winners. Papunya NP operated effectively for a time, curbing violence and alcohol abuse, before being overwhelmed by the rise of petrol sniffing in their community. Harry Blagg, in his recent profile of Night Patrols across the nation notes that many of the more urban Night Patrol services are most often focussed on youth and youth issues. This is in direct contrast to the Northern Territory, where Night Patrols deal mostly with adults, grog and other substance misuse, and violence. The social engineering performed by Night Patrols is at its most effective when based in the Aboriginal domain of family roles and relationships, with whitefella sanctions such as Police and courts used as a negotiating tool. Night Patrol workers are citizens, with no legal powers. In Western Australia, the government tried giving their community wardens the W.A. equivalent of Night Patrols - some limited legal powers. This led to the collapse of the wardens, as their legal powers removed them from the ambit of the grassroots community, with disastrous results for their credibility and effectiveness (H. Blagg, pers. comm. August 2002) Night Patrols in remote areas are primarily accountable to their families. Remote community councils are not necessarily representative of the groups living in the settlements the traditional power locus often operates outside the administrative domain, and with very different agendas. For example, it is a primary cultural imperative to annex and direct resources to family the basic unit of Aboriginal culture. Arguably one of the greater achievements of Australian Aboriginal peoples is 50,000 years of continuous culture, developing refined and sophisticated social, legal, political and health systems but without ever developing government. Whitefellas tend to operate through institutions and agencies whitefella relationships and obligations are not articulated through the complex and pervasive prescriptions of kinship systems. Many remote communities are

5 community in name only an aggregation of families would be a more accurate description. Community tends to be an administrative unit, useful to the whitefella domain for resourcing and negotiating with disparate groups of people. The problems faced by remote Aboriginal communities and towns are complex and inter-related. Attempts to address these problems from the whitefella domain are too often uni-focal, poorly conceived, short term, and underresourced. Many Aboriginal attempts to deal with post-colonial issues of grog, substance misuse, violence and abuse have foundered on the fragmentation and collapse of traditional authority, poverty, illness, and cultural distortions. Mutual misunderstandings and cultural clashes fuel mutual mistrust between Aboriginal peoples and whitefella agencies such as Police, courts, government and funding agencies. However, when the mix is right and mutual respect prevails, improvements in quality of life and service delivery for Aboriginal peoples are marked and immediate. To quote Ron McNamara of Laramba Night Patrol We got both laws behind us now. Aboriginal cultural imperatives are very different to those assumed and imposed by whitefella organisations. What this means in practice is that Night Patrols' actions are sometimes in conflict with whitefella laws. The current debates around recognition of customary law are attempting to address some of these issues, but as William Tilmouth, thetangentyere Council CEO recently observed, most of these debates are about trying to incorporate customary law into a whitefella framework, rather than recognising customary law as a legal system in its own right, with its own set of principles and rules. Aboriginal people live their law every day. Tangentyere Night Patrol is the urban service for Alice Springs. Their work is very different in some crucial ways to the work of the remote community Night Patrols. They trade off the advantages of having services such as the sobering up shelter, women s refuge, hospital and Police at hand against dealing with people who have come into town from around the region without the benefits of family connections and shared language. People come to town for access to services such as medical, legal, social security, renal, sports and social reasons. Many of these people become economically trapped in Alice and end up in cycles of grog use and abuse. Tangentyere Night Patrol respond to the various crises that arise from this. Alice Springs is not a designated dry area. Expectations are high, and resources always lag behind need. Something all the Night Patrollers have in common with each other is that they are true heroes. Every time I have asked a Night Patroller why they do this difficult and dangerous work, they say to help my people and to make a difference.

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