As a teenager stood alone in the line to enter Splendour in the Grass, a police sniffer dog roaming through the crowd sat down beside her and its officer-handler told her she was going to be searched for drugs. With her hands in the air, three officers surrounding her, she was led through the main gates of the music festival towards the police tents.
“I was really scared because I did not have any drugs on me,” she said in a statement to a recent Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) inquiry into police strip searches in New South Wales, “and I was completely alone.”
As she waited outside the tent, one of the officers confiscated her phone and identification. She was led into the tent by a female officer who told her to remove her jacket, shorts, leotard and, finally, her underwear.
No drugs were found in the strip search. After it was complete, police handed back the teen’s phone and identification and allowed her to enter the festival. When she finally found on her friends, she started sobbing.
“I could not believe this was happening to me,” she said. “I could not stop crying. I was completely humiliated.”
Sam Lee, Redfern Legal Centre’s police powers solicitor, is blunt in her assessment of the Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002, which governs strip searches in NSW. “It’s the only law in NSW that allows two adults holding firearms to order a child as young as 10 to take off all their clothes in a strange environment,” she tells The Saturday Paper. “It fails to adhere to any form of child-protection principles of harm-minimisation principles. It’s an invasive process. It leaves people traumatised.”
“If it was done in any other context, it would be seen as an assault, or indecent assault. But because it’s being done by the police, it’s being legally authorised – or supposedly so.”
Last month, NSW Police Force publicly released a new training manual for person searches.
Nine pages long, it did little to clarify confusion surrounding the legislation. What constitutes the “serious” or “urgent” circumstances in which a strip search may be conducted is not defined.
Without proper guidance there is a risk that officers are commonly breaching the law. Indeed, at the recent LECC inquiry, one officer who conducted 19 strip searches at the 2018 Splendour in the Grass festival admitted none of the searches were urgent and, therefore, were potentially unlawful.
Personal accounts of those who have been strip searched highlight how deeply humiliating and traumatising this policing technique can be, particularly for individuals who have previously experienced sexual abuse.
The impact is also acute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who, according to figures obtained by Redfern Legal Centre, accounted for about 10 per cent of people strip searched in the field between 2016 and 2017 in NSW despite representing less than 3 per cent of the state’s population.
“We see people become more aggressive towards police, more shy of police, and more concerned about going to the police, Emily Winborne, the deputy principal solicitor of the Aboriginal Legal Service in western NSW, said. “It creates distrust.”
Read the full article here (The Saturday Paper, 2 November 2019)
