Camille Elies is used to being stopped by the police. So, when a female police officers approached the 19-year old from Wollongong and a friend while they said in their car at the Lost Paradise music festival in December last year, he wasn’t too worried at first.
“I knew I didn’t have anything on me, no drugs or anything, so it was no problem,” he says.
“But then the dog started sniffing around the car and she started saying ‘you look a bit nervous mate, you look nervous, if you have drugs on you then you might as well tell me now or I’ll take you to the strip-search tent and we’ll find them that way'”.
Eiles was eventually strip searched in a makeshift tent. Two male officers instructed him to lift his shirt, drop his pants and hold on to his genitals while they “walked around” him.
The experience Eiles describes is common in New South Wales, where thousands of individuals are strip searched by police each year. About a quarter of these searches follow an indication by a drug dog and in about two-thirds of these cases, nothing is found.
On Friday, the NSW deputy coroner released the finding of her inquest into the deaths of six young people from MDMA toxicity at music festivals across the state.
Besides recommending a pill-testing trial in NSW and the complete scrapping of the use of drug-detection dogs at festivals, deputy coroner Harriet Grahame said strip searches should be dramatically curtailed to only being used in cases of suspected supply.
“We know strip searches are causing great harm to the community and now we have the deputy state coroner confirming that this invasive practice having a devastating impact on young lives,” Sam Lee, the head of Police Accountability at the Redfern Legal Centre, said on Friday.
“The proposed changes recommended by the deputy coroner are far from radical, but merely reflect parliament’s original intent that such an invasive procedure be only utilised in the most exceptional of legal circumstances.”
Grahame also revealed that the NSW police had sought to stop her considering strip searches as part of the inquest.
Read the full article here (The Guardian, 10 November 2019)
