Charles Rushforth reports for Junkee
The lead plaintiff in the class action suit, Raya Meredith, says she was left traumatised after a police strip search in 2018 at Splendour In The Grass, which was initiated after a police officer informed her that a sniffer dog has detected drugs on her person.
In an invasive search that lasted half an hour, Meredith alleges she was forced to lift her breasts after stripping naked and was directed to show her genitals to an officer to “prove that the only item inserted in her body was a tampon”. During the search — in which officers ultimately found no drugs — Meredith claims an officer also entered the room while she was naked from the waist down, further violating her privacy.
“Since then, every time I approach security to enter a festival or gig, I get scared and wonder if it’s going to happen to me all over again,” Meredith said in a statement.
Strip searches have a dark history in New South Wales, and are legally required to meet a threshold of urgency and seriousness to be legally employed by officers. However, a drug detection by a police sniffer dog — which regularly returns false positive results at a rate of 74 percent — is usually coupled with superficial mannerisms like appearing nervous or intoxicated to justify a search.
A lead solicitor from the Redfern Legal Centre Samantha Lee says that hopefully the class action suit will serve as a “trojan horse” to additionally limit the power being used by police in settings other than music festivals.
“What we’re hoping is that police are not allowed to use strip searches on the suspicion of minor drug possession,” Lee told Junkee. “This would cut out so many strip searches because the majority of strip searches are conducted by police because of suspicion of minor drug possession.”
While strip searches at music festivals have been linked to causing drug overdoses, due to people ingesting dangerous quantities of drugs to avoid persecution by authorities, Lee told Junkee that outside of music festivals police searches predominately affect First Nations people.
Read full article: Victims Of “Unlawful” Police Strip Searches At Festivals File Historic Class Action Lawsuit (Junkee Media, 26 July 2022)
