However, in matters of frontier conflict, JA Cameron's decisions were unlikely to be impartial. The Scottish former cavalry officer was himself a squatter, with a run named Decameron. His district's occasional court of petty sessions was held at the station of another settler, WH Pettitt, where during the previous twelve months Aboriginal attackers had speared a shepherd and taken sheep. Cameron had issued a warrant for Jim Crow's arrest over that spearing, too.¹³ Like many colonial magistrates, Cameron was burdened with the conflict of interest brought about by his connection to settlers in their ongoing disputes with Aboriginal people over land. The appointment of magistrates in 1840s Port Phillip replicated that of the English magistracy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with justices chosen from their district's landholding class. This also replicated the failings of the English system: a local justice, responsible for both detection and punishment of crime, would almost inevitably hold prejudices that favoured the interests of the recognised landholders (settlers) over those of Aboriginal inhabitants.¹⁴

The ease with which Daniel Cameron's and Horatio Ellerman's word could initiate magisterial action and police pursuit of Jim Crow, and so enforcement of pastoralists' interests in the frontier conflict, highlights the inherent partiality of colonial law. In contrast, the Indigenous population, although theoretically equal before the law as Her Majesty's subjects, had no such ease of access to squatter-magistrates and police. By and large, they would have been ignorant of colonial law's processes for seeking the arrest of a suspected wrongdoer, and would almost certainly have been reliant on assistance from a friendly European. They would also have had to overcome suspicions of a legal system that treated them more often as accused than accusers. For these reasons, they generally took complaints to Port Phillip's Protectors of Aborigines, who held magisterial powers.  Even then, however, any attempt to obtain a warrant faced the further impediment of the unacceptability of the complainant's oath: the same reasoning that prevented Aboriginal people from giving sworn witness testimony in court - that they did not believe in a supreme being¹⁵ - also prohibited the sworn oath required for a warrant, as Horatio Ellerman had made. In this, the legal equality of Aboriginal subjects was considerably limited by practical realities, such as suspicion and lack of awareness, and by the cultural specificity of the law itself, such as its requirement for religious oaths.

The arrest warrant for Jim Crow was itself said to be irregular. In the court case the following year, Crown Prosecutor James Croke would insist that the warrant was issued by a magistrate 'who was not authorised so to act, not having sufficient grounds upon which to do so', and that as a consequence 'in law it was no warrant'.¹⁶ Croke's argument, in part, concerned whether a summons should have been issued instead of an arrest warrant. However, as trial judge Richard Therry noted, what was the magistrate to do: issue a summons against 'a savage of the woods unable to read?'.¹⁷ The judge's observation - that Aboriginal suspects had to be arrested rather than summonsed to ensure their attendance in court - reveals a further limit to equal application of colonial law: Aboriginal people had a different language, culture and unfixed abode. Further, issuing a warrant empowered troopers with the potential to resort to lethal - and legal - force not available when serving a summons. Croke noted in the trial that the troopers could legally fire only with 'a valid authority' (a warrant) or in self-defence. Therry also remarked that 'the law was, that a party being authorised to arrest, and the party resisted, the arrestor was authorised in opposing force to force'.¹⁸ A white settler served with a summons for allegedly using threatening language would not be shot for noncompliance; an Aboriginal suspect such as Jim Crow, accused of the same minor offence and 'resisting a warrant the consequences of which [he] did not understand',¹⁹ could be. Issuing arrest warrants for Aboriginal people was common practice.

Pursuit: Police and Policing
Two police forces pursued Jim Crow. The Border Police and Native Police - two of the five main police forces in Port Phillip District in the mid-1840s - operated on the frontier of settlement. Both were armed and mounted corps, their mobility making them well suited to policing rural areas. The Native Police (1837-8, 1838-9, 1842-53) were Aboriginal troopers under European officers. The Border Police (1839-46) were, until 1845, 'government men' - well-conducted convicts and former convicts, many of them former soldiers transported for military offences - which has raised doubts about their capability and honesty. Unpaid and working only for rations, this relatively cheap force suggests something of the attitude of colonial authorities to frontier policing. They were controlled by the Commissioners of Crown Lands, who also had such bureaucratic duties as collecting licence fees, assessing land and stock for tax purposes, and settling boundary disputes. The two forces frequently operated under the orders of local magistrates. An important function of both was to minimise frontier violence, yet both on occasion ended up in bloody conflict with Aboriginal groups and individuals.²⁰

William Strutt, Aboriginal troopers, Melbourne police, with English corporal, pencil and watercolour, 1850, in Victoria the Golden: scenes, sketches and jottings from nature, 1850-1862.
Reproduced with the permission of the Parliamentary Library, Parliament of Victoria

In the hunt for Jim Crow, however, the two used dissimilar policing methods. At this time Sergeant Bennett of the Native Police had been specifically ordered to take a nonviolent approach in Aboriginal cases. He reported after Jim Crow's death: