Raya Meredith was at one of Australia’s biggest music festivals when a drug detection dog sniffed in her direction. The dog then walked on, the New South Wales supreme court recently heard, but police officers stopped her. They took her bag and searched it.
The 27-year-old, who was postpartum at the time, was then taken into a makeshift tarpaulin, where a female police officer asked her to take all her clothes off, bend over and bare her bottom, drop her breasts and remove her tampon. At one point, a male officer walked in unannounced.
The search found no drugs and nothing else illegal.
“It was a horrible thing to go through,” Meredith said in emotional testimony on the first day of a class action against the state of NSW about the search.
But so too, Meredith told the court, was the “gaslighting” she endured for years by the police force who denied her version of events, leaving her feeling “violated, yet again”. Shortly before a class action against the NSW police began almost two weeks ago, the force backflipped and admitted in court documents to unlawfully strip-searching her.
“It was difficult to have police officers, who were there, who saw it, say I was lying,” she said.
Meredith is the lead plaintiff of a class action that wrapped up this week, which was brought by Slater and Gordon lawyers and the Redfern Legal Centre against the state of NSW over allegedly unlawful strip-searches conducted by police, including of children. Three thousand people have signed on to the class action, but the affected cohort could be twice as large.
Police gave ‘absolutely no evidence’
The case did not just focus on Meredith’s evidence or police practices when it comes to conducting strip-searches. A large portion of closing arguments this week went to the police’s conduct throughout the case.
For two years, until just before the proceedings began, the police denied the search of Meredith was unlawful, arguing they had had “reasonable suspicion” based on her demeanour and body language. The police had called 22 witnesses, mostly police officers, to contradict Meredith’s version of events.
But in the days before the hearing began, the police withdrew their witnesses.
Meredith was the only witness to appear, taking the case down from the scheduled 20 days to just five.
The police had also attempted to subpoena Meredith’s medical history even though she had not made a personal injury claim.
“The plaintiff’s evidence was, ‘If I could have walked out of this case then and there, I would have’,” Kylie Nomchong SC, who acted on behalf of the plaintiffs, told the court.
“We say the issue of the subpoena was a strategic one designed to and having the effect of intimidating [Meredith] and that’s exactly what it did.”
Nomchong said the police should pay aggravated damages due to their conduct during the class action. She told the court the police had made the “outrageous” submission “asking your honour to infer that it was objectively necessary to search the plaintiff’s breasts and genital area … without any evidence whatsoever”.
“It’s just offensive,” Nomchong said.
Two of the witnesses the police force withdrew were the female police officer who conducted the search and the male officer who walked in unannounced.
“The only available inference is that any evidence from those police officers would not have assisted the defendant,” Nomchong said.
Julian Sexton SC defended the police’s conduct in the case during his closing argument, saying aggravated damages could not be awarded because Meredith had not been recalled to give evidence about how she felt about NSW police’s conduct during the class action.
However Justice Dina Yehia, who oversaw the case, said she was concerned about their conduct – specifically, the police having had three iterations of its defence before backflipping shortly before proceedings began to admit it did unlawfully strip-search Meredith.
“That is a matter, I’ll be quite honest with you, of grave concern to me,” Yehia said on Thursday.
The judge said she was concerned that the police defence suggested officers had formed a reasonable suspicion to strip-search Meredith based on “things like her demeanour, what was said outside the tent, and [the officers] recalling it was said outside the tent and not inside”.
“There is absolutely no evidence, unless you can take me to it and I’ve missed something,” Yehia said to Sexton.
“All I have is the officers’ statements that say either they don’t remember the search, or both that they don’t remember the search nor remember the lead plaintiff. In those circumstances, I’m just not sure how this could ever have proceeded in the way that it did with the initial pleadings.”
Sexton responded that the defence was based on police “practice” in such instances, adding it was “not [based] on distinct recollections of somebody”.
He also defended the attempt to subpoena Meredith’s medical records, saying, “There is nothing inherently objectionable about issuing a subpoena”, and rebutted claims it was designed to intimidate Meredith.
“It was not issued for an improper purpose. There’s no evidence to that effect,” he told the court.
‘Trying to stop people dying’
In her opening arguments, Nomchong had told the court that Meredith’s circumstance, as lead plaintiff, was not unique, but demonstrative of systemic failures.
“This is an extraordinary case, but not an isolated one; it is at the serious end, but not the most serious.”
She argued the vast majority of strip-searches conducted by state police between 2018 and 2022 at music festivals were unlawful because they did not meet the legal threshold for being carried out in serious and urgent circumstances, and argued they were instead treated as “routine”.
Of issue, Nomchong told the court, was also that police knew drug detection dogs are only accurate 30% of the time. Yet they continue to use them as the primary justification for searches.
“That was something the police service knew yet we saw COPS event after COPS event,” she said, referring to the Computerised Operational Policing System database, “where the only indication for the event was drug dog indication”.
She told the court that before the 2018 Splendour in the Grass festival where Meredith was searched, police had little direction on how to conduct a lawful strip-search, and that officers had received “absolutely negligible” training at the academy and as part of ongoing mandatory training.
She argued this was a statewide issue.
“[This] didn’t just happen during the Splendour in the Grass event; it’s happening across the state in relation to all of the music festivals,” Nomchong told the court.
“Same input, same result.”
But Sexton disputed these claims, saying each case would have to be considered individually. He also pointed to figures that showed there had been few complaints about unlawful strip-searches between 2016 and 2018.
He argued strip-searches at music festivals did fall within legal criteria that police can carry out a strip-search in serious and urgent circumstances, because the searches were “trying to stop people dying”.
“The urgency of the circumstance is that if the strip-search is not conducted, the drug … will either be consumed or disposed of,” Sexton told the court.
He also said that after a dog indicates it has detected drugs, police can then arrest on their own trained assessment such as how a person is behaving.
Turning to claims that police considered strip-searches as a matter of “routine”, Sexton disputed this, saying: “[There’s a] very, very, very small number of people who are being searched.”
The court heard there were 36,000 people at the 2018 Splendour in the Grass. The court was told 148 people were strip-searched and 50 others were searched clothed.
Sexton also contradicted claims by Nomchong that police were not adequately directed or trained.
“This isn’t about teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, this is about an operational order to experienced policemen,” he said.
Closing arguments ended on Friday.
