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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
National
Joe Hinchliffe

Queensland police sought youth of ‘certain ethnic backgrounds’ with new search powers, review finds

A group of Queensland police officers.
A Griffith University review was told that some Gold Coast officers ‘looked for groups of young people of certain ethnic backgrounds that they believed had been found with edged weapons previously’. Photograph: Darren England/AAP

Extraordinary stop and search powers to be rolled out across Queensland were used by police to racially profile potential targets during a Gold Coast trial, which an independent review found had failed to reduce violence.

Civil libertarians are warning the decision to expand the use of metal-detector wands by police could amount to “mass, suspicion-less, warrantless” searches that would “inevitably result in unwarranted invasions of privacy”.

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