Chapter 5: No Justice, No Peace: Police Necroautomobility and Lack of Accountability

Across settler colonies, the police vehicle has been used to drive First Nations peoples to their deaths. The late Māori scholar Moana Jackson refers to the police conducting ‘Māori death chases’ (Hurihanganui, 2018). This has a haunting resemblance to Australian police death chases of First Nations peoples. We argue that this is not a coincidence, but a product of settler-colonial authority that is intent on running down First Nations peoples – to remove them from their lands, to invade, claim and possess. The police death chases reveal the vehicle as a source of state necroautomobility. First Nations lives are sacrificed to the colonial project through the police vehicle. It is an expression of police brutality that is fuelled in direct and systemic racism.