Exclusive data covering 4.3 million police searches has revealed a quota-driven culture that boosts search numbers at the risk of abusing police powers.
Walking home from his mum's house. Catching the train. Delivering a fridge with his cousin. Looking for his 10-year-old son to call him inside for dinner.Sometimes he is stripsearched. Other times, it's just a pat down. Often, he says, it's the same officers coming back again. And again.
The police record isn't spotless either. In 2018, Munro made a civil claim against NSW Police, alleging a series of unlawful searches. It was settled out of court.The idea is to reduce crime by increasing police interaction with the community. Some has been obtained from NSW Police through freedom of information requests. Other figures are from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
"There's definitely a class element to it. Over-policing and use of police powers is certainly connected with lower socioeconomic communities … ethnic and indigenous communities," he says. They conduct more than half of searches in some police commands, including Liverpool , the Inner West and Campbelltown .
The idea behind these teams was to get ahead of crime, McKibbin explains. Done well, the approach had benefits, he says, but the focus on numbers worried him. "For those individuals that you were searching and stopping and detaining, even if it was an entirely benign and polite reaction, I guarantee they'll be thinking about that interaction for some time."One kind of case hints at just how deep the problem runs, says O'Brien, who's made a 25-year career out of representing people mistreated by police.
Within Greater Sydney, Indigenous people made up more than half of proactive crime team searches in the police commands of Mt Druitt , Nepean and Campbelltown . "They accused me of snatching a purse or something. They took me to the station and … a woman came up there and said, yeah, that I was the person who snatched her purse," he says.
Ebonie Madden was jailed for six months in 2020 after police searched her and a companion Dylan on a street in the suburb of Penrith in Sydney's west. The focus on numbers formed part of the testimony of the Nepean Proactive Crime Team officers involved in Madden's. "My experience is unequivocally … that a very vast number of those searches will have been unlawful," he says.
"What we found was when we increased the amount of times that police got out and actually talked to the community … the criminal activity flattened out and in fact dropped," he said. UNSW criminal law academic Vicki Sentas says the consequences of slapping quotas on commands have been far-reaching."And what they tell us, if you scrape behind the KPIs, is that police are misunderstanding the legal basis for their searches."
"We are committed to transparency and accountability, and we regularly review our practices to identify opportunities for improvement." Boundaries for some local government areas have changed over the period covered by the data. Search rates for these areas should be treated with caution.
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