This collection of essays from Scribe Publishers is edited by Veronica Gorrie who won multiple awards for her shocking personal account of sexism and racism inside the Queensland Police Service, Black and Blue.

When Cops Are Criminals widens the perspective to a national one, and brings in a number of new voices, while retaining a focus on Australian police behaving very badly.

There are some very hard truths here. Twelve writers bring their lived experience to the page. Stories cover the gamut, from Aboriginal experiences of law enforcement (where skin colour has often been considered a crime), to uninvestigated deaths in custody, to those in uniform becoming perpetrators of the worst domestic violence (and then being shielded by their colleagues), to young people whose lives have been permanently scarred by interactions with those who were supposed to be their protectors.

The book begins with an eye-opening historical essay from Amanda Porter, ‘The most violent organisation in Australian history’, which shows how law enforcement began here with the establishment of the Native Police – effectively an extension of British military power, making use of kidnapped or coerced men, all in aid of the colonial project. This poisonous origin story explains much of what followed, with the police’s primary role being the protection of what white people regarded as their property.

In practice, this amounted to mass murder across Australia, while the law turned a blind eye. The war between settlers and those who were here first, never officially declared, has never ended for many Aboriginal people.

A major problem is that the first police in this country were mostly criminals and drunks. Unfortunately, this nexus has continued, as was revealed by the Fitzgerald and Wood Royal Commissions.

The bravery of many of the contributors to this book is remarkable. Edward Winters’ piece ‘Corruption’ is a harrowing tale of a man who was set up for a crime he didn’t commit, told here for the first time.

Jacky Sainsbury’s essay ‘Being Aboriginal is a crime’ explains why so many are taught to hate and fear the police from childhood, with even very young people being blamed for the decisions of those who preceded them, and then becoming funnelled into the same cycles of crime and punishment.

Jason Tighe-Gong’s chapter ‘Another quiet night in Woolloomooloo’ develops this disturbing theme with another very personal story, this one focusing on the violent crimes of a particular Kings Cross detective and those who protected him.

Keith Quayle’s experience as a young sex worker in ‘Learning How to Run’, details the dangers from police, punters and prison, decades before body cameras and a formal apology from the force for the criminalisation of homosexual acts. Many years on from the trauma he suffered as a youth, he wonders if his waking feelings each morning would be different in a different world: “if those cops weren’t looking for drugs on Black kids, but for paedophilia on respectable white men… What would I feel now if we’d been rescued rather than punished?”

Necho Brocchi widens the analysis to Trans and Gender-Diverse victims of police violence, on the street and in prison, explaining the complications of being both criminalised and trans via a series of powerful personal stories from the incarcerated.

Jacinta Ryan’s essay is called ‘Breaking point: discovering the truth and finding the courage to leave an abusive cop’. While she ultimately got justice, of a sort, after enduring years of abuse, including multiple counts of assault, she chose to share her story to reveal the ‘toxic culture’ of NSW Police.

“It’s an environment where disrespecting your spouse and family is common, and poor or illegal behaviour is often ignored,” she writes. “It’s rife with infidelities taking place in work time (not what they’re being paid to do), and professional misconduct and conflicts of interest are inadequately dealt with.”

This theme is developed via essays from Lauren Caulfield and Jeremy King, showing the situation is no better in Victoria, with the courts also having been compromised in favour of corrupt and criminal police targeting women and LGBTQIA+ people.

Emma Husar tells the story of her relationship with an abusive ex-policeman, later a private detective, who used connections fostered during his time in uniform to stalk and attack her, and later kidnap their children.

There is an essay from Maria Markovska, ‘The police family violence offender: a protected species’, which lays bare the unbalanced power relationship between police and their DV victims, with the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (the police accountability and complains oversight body in Victoria) proving worse than useless.

She quotes her perpetrator: “In the job, when we are out in the van, we fuckin’ own this town… Professional Standards Command just whack people with lettuce and help them get pensioned out and cash in if they’ve fucked up.”

In ‘Just a number’, Kate Pausina shows that the abuse doesn’t stop when you put on the uniform, especially for women, even with the privileges that go with being white. As she explains, “organisations built by men, for men, with very, very low female participation in decision-making, are shown to represent the community they represent. They are not neutral spaces.”

As Veronica Gorrie says, defining victims is the key job of the police. Who deserves help? Who should be ignored? How much effort does a given individual deserve, whether criminal or victim? These daily decisions are profoundly coloured by individual prejudices and police culture as a whole.

As former police officer Gorrie writes: “Police are prolific in committing misconduct and causing harm. Some of them are violent, dishonest, homophobic and racist. The difference between agents of the carceral state with the power to be violent and civilians is simply that the former wear a uniform…”

When Cops are Criminals is vital reading for anyone wanting to understand how things got so bad, and what might be done to create an Australian law enforcement environment with some connection to actual justice.