Hybrid Justice (ii): Night Patrols and Place-Based Sovereignty

Abstract

This chapter considers Indigenous community patrols (Night Patrols) as a form of community-owned and designed safety initiative. Their service represents a reaction to the “bare life” policing of Indigenous people, which is overwhelmingly concerned with protecting white property and white order. Instead, Night Patrols are a form of place-based sovereignty enactment that focuses on maintaining the wellbeing of local Indigenous people and strengthening community bonds. They facilitate Indigenous mobilities that have long been confined by the colonial project. They extend inter-cultural struggle in two respects: through their mediation of police power and through their negotiation of government regulation. The increasing incursions of Indigenous mobility since the Northern Territory Intervention (2007), we demonstrate, has threatened the Night Patrol as well as other freedoms of Indigenous people to travel on roads and in vehicles. These settler state interventions have rendered the road or the bush track another camp in the settler colonial archipelago. Alongside these interventions has been Indigenous peoples’ appropriation of the vehicle for refusal, resistance and resurgence.