It can be irritating to be stopped in the street by a police officer who insists on carrying out a body search that can range from a pat down to a demand that you remove outer items of clothing. It is a chilling thought that the police have the power to demand a strip search and this is not restricted to people entering music festivals.
Facts uncovered by Freedom of Information laws reveal that police are expected to meet individual search quotas and meeting these targets is an item in performance evaluations. Internal statistics show that police were expected to perform 241,632 searches in the fiscal year ending in June, 2019, and this was an eight percent increase on the previous year.
These search targets are set by the higher police command and seem to be part of a campaign to have the public obey the police because of the " fear factor ". We obey the law because we fear the consequences of getting caught, not because we are just good citizens who always do the right thing.
Modern thinking requires we submit to searches without protest and senior police thinking is that a little fear is a good thing.
The President of the NSW Council of Civil Liberties does not see it that way. Nicholas Cowdery QC says that the use of targets means there was " great potential for abuse of power ". " If a target is set by superior officers, especially a target that will be relevant to performance assessment, natural human response will be to seek to meet the target by proper or improper means - by fudging, by exercising power where it is not properly warranted "
The outcome of these searches has little relevance to crime outcomes. A police spokesperson said that under state law officers must hold a reasonable suspicion when exercising searches and most ended with no crime being discovered. Sometimes, by sheer chance, the person searched had drugs in their pocket or were found to be carrying a knife.
Location plays a big part in these search laws. Kings Cross area command had one of the highest targets in 20129 with 8800 searches, the equivalent of 44 searches for every hundred people living in the area. It illustrates the odds of being searched if you happen to travel through that sector of the city.
The police will point to reduced crime levels in areas such as burglary, motor vehicle theft and " robbery " to illustrate the benefits accruing from their use of street searches but this is certainly not conclusive. The sheer volume of police on the streets could be linked to a three percent fall in those categories of crime.
The law we get is the law our politicians put in the hands of the police If we have definitive. standards on where, how and why the police should be permitted to conduct body searches we need to make that clear to our parliamentary representative. The degree of policing inn each state is something that the voters decide !
No comments:
Post a Comment