ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how police are reckoning with historical queer injustice through the discourse and performance of apology. In 2014, Victoria Police became the first police force to apologise for its past mistreatment of LGBT people when it issued a formal apology for the Tasty nightclub raid. The apology represents an attempt to cleanse and redeem the institution of the negative image of police resulting from popular representations of the raid as ‘overkill’. The chapter develops an analytical framework for conceiving of the institutional apology as a practice of ‘doing history’. Through the Tasty apology, police reconstruct and retell queer history such that past mistreatment is evacuated of police agency. Yet the progress of the present remains a credit to police initiative and goodwill, rather than a product of the sustained efforts of LGBT activists calling for state agencies to take responsibility for the harms of the past. The chapter illustrates how state institutions navigate queer hopes for accountability through techniques of historical closure, such as periodisation and the demarcation of different eras of policing, and how LGBT people are extolled to invest in the future of police.
