The police body-cam saga in the US is an hilarious saga of what the kids call a ‘self-own’. The BLM movement demanded all police wear body-cams at all time, to ‘prove’ that they were shooting innocent and un-armed blacks for no reason. Instead the body-cam footage showed the same pattern, over and over: violent, unhinged blacks escalating what should have been routine police interactions and attacking police.
Suddenly, BLM decided that body-cams are ‘racist’.
The ABC in Australia is trying to do the same with metal detectors. Somewhat ironically, even as the ABC fawns over a culture that still hadn’t cottoned on to metallurgy, nearly 10,000 years after much of the rest of the world figured out how to melt shiny rocks.
Every state and the Northern Territory has been expanding police power to stop people and run a wand over them. Queensland went furthest last year with Jack’s Law, named for a murdered teenager: officers may scan anyone, anywhere in a public place, without a warrant and without the blessed phrase “reasonable suspicion”. The other jurisdictions have boxed the same idea into designated places and hours. Crime victims, unsurprisingly, are rather keen on the idea. The activist class is not.
As greater police powers roll out across the country, Aboriginal people say they’re increasingly and unfairly targeted. It’s one of the concerns raised with the ABC Your Say, our project to hear directly from the community. Every state and the Northern Territory have been expanding police powers to stop and search people with a metal detector, with Queensland officers given the broadest remit. Crime victims support the powers, but critics argue they increase criminalisation.
Yes, well routinely having to run the gauntlet of armed thugs roaming the streets does tend to focus the mind somewhat. And you can’t be ‘criminalised’ if you’re not breaking the law. What the ‘critics’ really mean is, ‘Damn, they’re getting caught’. It’s the BLM bodycam saga all over again.
At Mount Isa’s street festival, this grandmother enjoys a family night out, but she also shares serious worries.
So do the victims of Aboriginal violence: most of them Aboriginal women. The grandmother’s worry, as aired, is that there are a lot of policemen in Mount Isa and they keep asking black people for ID and then scanning them. No admission that a metal detector that cannot read skin tone and does not care.
Queensland Police scanned about 161,000 people in the year to June. Eleven per cent were indigenous, against 4.6 per cent of the state population.
A recent New South Wales Government review of its 12-month trial found 10.7 per cent of those searched in the designated areas were First Nations people, although only 3.4 per cent of the state’s population is indigenous.
Gee, why would that be?
[Greg Shadbolt, principal legal officer with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service]: I think we’re talking about two-and-a-half times wounding levels for First Nations Australians compared to non-indigenous peoples.
Golly, it’s almost like they also have a disproportionate problem with carrying weapons. Shadbolt calls Queensland’s regime ‘open slather’. The rest of us call it ‘pattern recognition’.
Victorian numbers, show that suburbs with more Aboriginal, African, Middle Eastern and Pacific residents cop more warrantless searches. Young people too. Almost as if they’re the type most likely to be packing knives.
The whole saga is as ridiculous as the politically correct hypersensitivity that leads to little old ladies in wheelchairs searched for bombs at airports, while Muslims with hate-filled eyes are waved through security. And that is exactly what happened with Mohamed Atta: the airport security desk immediately pinged him as dangerous – then political correctness asserted itself. Atta was waved through… to hijack the plane and fly it into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.
Ben Cannon founded Voice for Victims after a Brisbane stabbing. Youths with knives, he says, caused “a great deal of carnage and heartache” for his family and neighbours. The laws exist because of those incidents, not because the police woke up one morning itching to oppress Mount Isa Aborigines. Queensland, NSW and Victoria Police declined the ABC’s invitation to sit still while the narrative was fitted. Victoria Police did note that stabbings are down 13 per cent in a year. Criminologists, who have never yet met a policing tool they couldn’t declare “no evidence yet”, remain unconvinced. Queensland Police say they work from operational intelligence. How terribly incorrect of them.
If you want the operational intelligence in its raw form, leave the festival and go to Wadeye. Last Sunday evening, Northern Territory officers watched a large group of armed males move on the community, some of them sneaking through bushland to avoid being seen. The group “immediately became hostile”, pelting police and vehicles with rocks, window louvres and metal bars. They ignored orders to disperse. A man with a compound bow put an arrow into a police car. “Tactical options were deployed.” The mob fell back.
Superintendent Virginia Read called it an “appalling display of violence”. Wadeye residents call it a day of the week ending in ‘y’. The violence such as at Wadeye is routine in Aboriginal communities. Even nurses and teachers have to live in houses equipped with panic rooms.
The attack followed a week of unrest in a town of about 2,000 people from 28 clans. Police have been confiscating compound bows and crossbows for months, the racist pigs. Don’t they realise this is just the ‘world’s oldest living culture’ being its Stone Aged self. Only with purloined Iron Age tech.
None of that will appear in the ABC’s morality play except as atmosphere, if it appears at all. The story they want is always the same. Body-cams were supposed to expose the police. They exposed the encounters. Metal detectors are doing the same.
The detector does not know who you are. It only knows what you’re carrying. That, for the national broadcaster, is the real offence.
