Almost 300 children strip-searched in NSW Police State

Police in Kings Cross clearly targeting an Indigenous man
with a sniffer dog, pulling it close to the man by its lead.
The dog made no indication.

NSW is descending further into something resembling a police state, with thousands of citizens being strip-searched in the name of drugs prohibition – a regime with little or no rational justification.

Most people searched are young or Indigenous, according to a report in The Sydney Morning Herald.

"The number of NSW Police searches has increased by almost 50 per cent in the four years from financial year 2014-15 to 2017-18," says the report. Almost 300 children, one as young as 10, were searched.

Two-thirds of the searches turn up nothing, and among the "successful" searches police say they have found items such as vehicle number plates.

I'm pretty sure I would be able to detect number plates on a person without stripping them.

Other searches turned up such deadly items as "art" or "stationery".

The justification for the searches can only be described as dodgy: "Under NSW law a police officer can carry out a strip search if it is necessary for the purposes of the search and if the seriousness and urgency of the circumstances make it necessary," reports the SMH.

I'm not sure how "serious" or "urgent" it is to detect someone carrying an amount of say, cannabis, so small it can't be detected without stripping the citizen. Or stationery for that matter (I'm guessing that may have been a case of shoplifting, another "serious" and "urgent" matter it would seem).

Most of the drugs-related searches are triggered by indications from a sniffer dog. In other words, the search victim had been doing nothing wrong and was apparently no threat to others.

Not only are people being subjected to inconvenient and embarrassing searches on the mostly inaccurate say-so of a dog, many find the experience traumatic, and if entering a music festival, innocent ticket-holders are then denied access to the event. The dog is effectively judge, jury and 'executioner'.

It is not clear how this practice protects any citizens from harm or prevents crime. If anything it is likely to spark anger at police, damaging police public relations. At the very least it can be seen as 'the tail wagging the dog'!

The elephant in the room is of course prohibition itself, a failed regime that is being dismantled in many states and nations around the globe with no adverse results – indeed, repealing prohibition seems to be of benefit by any measurable metric (also boosting public revenues). Portugal is the poster-nation in this regard. But the entrenched conservative dogma of people like NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian ignores such reality and continues to ramp up aggressive and intrusive police behaviour. Justice is a distant loser in this strange and obsessive regime.

Postscript: It emerges later that the police often video strip searches with their body cams. Even more humiliating.