Indigenous Australians use tech to expose police abuse

Activists in Australia say such videos of police officers abusing indigenous Australians are an important way to expose systemic brutality, and they have begun teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people how to use technology to protect their rights — and themselves.

“We know the brutality,” said Mervyn Eades, a relative of William Farmer, an 18-year-old member of the Nyoongar people, who was intentionally struck by a police car in Perth in May. “We have been living and breathing it every day.”

“But if it’s not on camera it never happened, our boys and girls are ‘making it up,'” he added. “It is the legacy of the white man’s legal system, but vision, a picture — it’s worth 1,000 words.”

Eades knows the power of such images. He posted a video to Facebook of the altercation between the police and Farmer that went viral. The video helped lead to the suspension of the officer driving the car and an investigation by the Western Australia Police Force.

This month, Eades invited civil rights activists from the National Justice Project, a Sydney-based nonprofit legal service, to Perth to teach indigenous people how smartphones and social media can be used to expose police misconduct. Inspired by Black Lives Matter, the legal activists have traveled across Australia hosting workshops as part of a program called Copwatch.

Indigenous Australians are disproportionally targets of the police, increasing the likelihood of their arrest, abuse and imprisonment. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are incarcerated at 13 times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians. They make up 27 percent of Australia’s prisoners, compared with 3 percent of the overall population.

The Copwatch workshops, activists said, are intended to teach people their legal rights and how to safely record interactions with police officers.

“Stand back, don’t become part of it, de-escalate,” said George Newhouse, a lawyer for the National Justice Project, relating some of the advice his colleagues offer. When recording video, he added, “make sure your footage is saved to the cloud. In some situations, police try to delete videos.”

Participants were also instructed to disable the facial-recognition and thumbprint-scanning features used to unlock some smartphones because they can be used by the police to access a person’s device against his or her will.

Copwatch has also developed an app that can be used to record and store interactions with the police, as well as to alert a user’s contacts if that person is in a potentially dangerous situation and where.

The power of such recordings was on display in a Sydney courtroom last month during an inquest into the death of David Dungay Jr., a 26-year-old member of the Dunghutti people. Dungay died in 2015 after being restrained facedown by prison guards and injected with a sedative.

In a video recorded by one of the guards, Dungay is moved from one prison cell to another. “I can’t breathe!” Dungay is heard screaming at least 12 times on the tape. As officers escort him, hunched over, to the second cell, one is heard telling him to stop spitting blood in order to breathe. Dungay, whose family’s lawyer says he had schizophrenia, diabetes and asthma, later died in the prison’s hospital.

Among the presenters at the Copwatch workshop was Shaun Harris, whose niece, Julieka Ivanna Dhu, died in police custody in Western Australia in 2014. Dhu, a 22-year-old Yamatji woman, was arrested on charges related to unpaid fines but died in custody from septicemia and pneumonia after she was denied medical care, according to the findings of a police investigation.

Using footage captured on a closed-circuit camera from inside her cell, Dhu’s family has taken her case to the Australian Human Rights Commission.

“That footage,” Harris said, “will be vital.”

The proliferation of recordings capturing abuse of indigenous Australians by the police, particularly in Western Australia, has led the authorities to acknowledge the scale of the issue.

In a speech last month, Commissioner Chris Dawson of the Western Australia Police Force recognized the “significant role” the police had played in traumatizing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

“Today on behalf of the Western Australian police force, I would like to say sorry to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for our participation in past wrongful actions that have caused immeasurable pain and suffering,” he said.

Last week, Dawson announced that body cameras would be required for all officers in Western Australia.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.