A recent incident involving the ARIA
award-winning Indigenous artist, Christine Anu and some of Redfern Local Area
Command’s finest, was beat-up from non-event into a smorgasbord of rhetoric by
online readers of the Daily Telegraph’s society pages.
The story is that the loud speaker of a
police car blasted the 13-year old son of Dianne Nyoni, a friend of Ms Anu, as he and another boy played
with cap guns in Alexandria
Park. The boys became
petrified by the action of the police, raising fear in Ms Nyoni that the police
may draw their weapons in response.
The reason the race card comes out is
because the boy is of an African-American background. it goes further when Ms
Anu’s intervention into the incident led to the officer asking whether she and
Ms Nyoni were partners. The assumption caused a reaction from the two to which
a second officer replied, “It’s the area that we live in.”
And that area is South
Sydney – an area with a high indigenous population. So, drawing on
the officer’s comment, it would be wise to assume that police in South Sydney are under instruction to view all women in
pairs as likely to be in same-sex relationships, or should this assumption only
be applied to those with a dark complexion?
Another incident that involved local police
unfairly targeting some young Aboriginal boys occurred outside Erskineville
Oval earlier this year. It was alleged that two young Souths players were
unfairly targeted by a police officer simply because of the colour of their
skin.
In recent years, NSW Police have been
making efforts to ensure better relations between Local Area Commands and their
indigenous populations, including a white paper on how this is being pursued,
though in reality it would seem that little has changed since the days of the
doco Cop it Sweet. And while the recent Aboriginal Strategic Direction affirms
“communication and understanding between police and Aboriginal
people” and an “environment free of racial discrimination and harassment”
there may be further work to do.
Source: South Sydney
Herald November 2007 www.southsydneyherald.com.au