First Nations children are routinely strip-searched by police and it amounts to “state-sanctioned violence”, a defence lawyer has told Victoria’s Indigenous truth-telling commission.
Tessa Theocharous told the Yoorrrook Justice Commission that the constant mistreatment of Aboriginal children by Victoria police was rooted in racism.
The state’s Indigenous legal service separately called for an independent police oversight body to be established because racism was systemic in the criminal justice system.
Theocharous, the principal solicitor at Kurnai Legal, said Indigenous children were routinely subjected to racist slurs, excessive force and over-policing, including unnecessary use of stun guns.
“It’s effectively state-sanctioned violence,” Theocharous said on Wednesday.
“It just occurs constantly and all the time. I know from speaking to other lawyers and talking about their experiences with their clients … they find it really confronting when we speak about the experiences our First Nations clients have with police.”
In December 2021, Victoria police issued a new policy outlining oversight requirements when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are in police custody requiring officers to document their custody decisions and provide supervisors with greater visibility of these decisions.
Nerita Waight, the chief executive of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, told the inquiry that racism within Victoria police was present across the institution and in the “actions of individual officers”.
“In terms of accountability, there isn’t any in terms of Victoria police,” Waight said. “Even when an Aboriginal person dies of police conduct, during the coronial process it is Victoria police that is doing the investigation of that death.”
The co-chair of the First Peoples’ Assembly – the body democratically elected to negotiate the state’s treaty framework – called on Wednesday for Yoorrook to recommend an Indigenous-controlled police oversight body.
A spokesperson for Victoria police said it welcomed the commission and would provide “further comment when appropriate”.
Waight said priority reforms included overhauling the state’s bail laws, including appealing the “exceptional circumstances” threshold for bail.
Following the 2017 Bourke Street killings, the Andrews government tightened bail laws. The reforms made it harder for people accused of serious crimes to be released on bail but have disproportionately affected Indigenous Victorians, young people and women.
In an interview with Guardian Australia, the state’s attorney general, Jaclyn Symes, said she had “unfinished business”, including the possibility of bail reform. But there was no commitment by Labor in the lead-up to last month’s election.
Waight told the inquiry there needed to be “no more Veronica Nelsons” – referencing the 37-year-old Yorta Yorta woman who died at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in 2020, four days after being arrested because she had failed to attend a sentencing hearing for a shoplifting offence. Nelson had been denied bail by police.
The coronial report into Nelson’s death is expected to be handed down next month.
