On the bad days, late at night, “Kate” finds herself back in the tent at a Sydney music festival, a terrified 18-year-old paralysed by fear.
She’s been ordered to strip naked, cornered in the small space and is bending over in front of two female police officers searching her for illicit drugs.
During the search, Kate is repeatedly asked, and denies, having any drugs on her. One of the officers comments on Kate’s tampon before deciding against asking her to remove it. It’s been seven years, but the scene is etched vividly in her mind.
“It was just really dehumanising,” said Kate, a pseudonym this masthead has agreed to use to protect her privacy.
“It was really disempowering. I couldn’t tell them I wasn’t feeling safe, I wasn’t feeling comfortable, because in their eyes I was a criminal.”
When the search was over, the officers confiscated Kate’s ticket and kicked her out of the festival. She left alone, caught a train home and collapsed on her bed. No drugs were found on her.
“They didn’t even tell me it was going to be a strip-search,” she said. “It was just one clothing piece after another. I was just full-blown naked.”
Kate is among more than 70,000 people strip-searched by NSW Police officers in the past decade who did not have illicit drugs on them, according to new data published in a Redfern Legal Centre and Harm Reduction Australia report that analysed 10 years of the policing practice.
According to the data – which had to be obtained by Greens MP Cate Faehrmann after NSW Police rejected Redfern Legal Centre’s requests under freedom-of-information laws – 82,471 people were strip-searched between January 2014 and December 2023. Of those searches, illicit drugs were found on 11,136 occasions – or 13.5 per cent of the time – according to the data, which takes in all strip-searches in NSW, including in-custody searches.
In 2016 alone, less than 1 per cent of the 14,279 people strip searched were convicted of drug supply offences, while 11.78 per cent – or 627 people – received a conviction for drug possession offences, according to the data.
Those numbers point to the unnecessary and unlawful use of strip-searches in NSW, says Samantha Lee, Redfern Legal Centre’s police powers and administrative law supervising solicitor.
More than 3000 members joined the class action, brought in 2022 by legal firm Slater and Gordon and Redfern Legal Centre, which argues strip-searches conducted at music festivals between 2016 and 2022 were illegal. The lawsuit is the biggest class action ever brought against NSW Police, with damages of up to $150 million being sought.
NSW Police’s use of drug detection dogs has also drawn criticism, with new data in the report showing 60 per cent of the time, dogs provided incorrect indications that individuals – who were later strip-searched – were in possession of illicit drugs.
Among the report’s seven recommendations is that police immediately abolish the use of strip-searching based on suspicion of minor drug possession; the strip-searching of children under 18; and the use of drug detection dogs at music festivals. It also recommends publicly releasing annual data on the number and outcome of strip-searches conducted each year, as well as the annual cost of deploying drug detection dogs.
Source: New data shows 87% of NSW Police strip-searches find no drugs, report reveals