A young woman was subjected to a strip search at the Knockout Circuz festival in December 2017 after a drug detection dog indicated that she was in possession of illegal dogs.
The female police officer conducting the search told the woman she would drag the process out if she didn’t hand over the drugs, as the “dogs are never wrong”. The canine was mistaken, however, and the woman did not have any illicit substances on her.
The officer ordered the woman to remove all her clothes and then repeatedly told her to squat and cough.
“These kinds of actions by police re not only appalling, but they’re very likely unlawful,” said NSW Greens MLC David Shoebridge. “What we see across the state is an unsupervised, ad hoc use of strip searches: sometimes for legitimate purposes, but, quite often, for intimidation.”
Figures going back to the end of last decade show that when a sniffer fog makes a positive indication no drugs are found two-thirds to three-quarters of the time.
"That’s police officer who is either grossly misinformed or deliberately lying," Mr Shoebridge said in regard to the officer’s assertion that drug dogs are accurate. ‘The dogs are notoriously unreliable. That’s a police officer that needs to be disciplined.’
Over a four-year period ending in June 2018, strip search use increased by 47 percent, with the practice becoming almost a routine procedure in NSW.
In December last year Redfern Legal Centre launched the Safe and Sound campaign, which calls for an overhaul of strip search laws to ensure they are clearer and better defined.
“The idea that a police officer may have used a strip search as a scare tactic is quite simply abhorrent,” said Samantha Lee, head of police accountability practice at RLC.“Any police officer thought to have used a strip search as a threat or form of intimidation should be immediately referred for disciplinary action.”
Redfern Legal Centre has called on the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC), which launched an investigation in October last year into NSW police use of strip searches, to investigate the officer mentioned at the inquest.
Read the full article here (Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 16 July 2019)
