A Canberra family has accused ACT Police of racial profiling after a 17-year-old Aboriginal boy was wrongfully pulled from a bus and handcuffed by officers who had guns drawn.
The incident occurred last week when the boy was travelling solo on a bus en route to a family event before it was pulled over by police.
It’s alleged that officers then entered the bus and immediately approached the teenager with weapons drawn. According to the family, the teen was forced off the bus, pushed to the ground and handcuffed with multiple knees on his back, without police asking for his name or ID documents.
Police discovered they had apprehended the wrong person after comparing the teen to a photo on their phone. The family allege that police proceeded to search the boy even after realising their mistake.
“What happened … was not a mistake. It was not a misunderstanding. It was a gross violation of a child’s human rights,” the family said while demanding action outside the Legislative Assembly this morning, per the ABC.
“This is not policing, this is abuse,” they added, while reflecting on the “trauma” of the teen being “pinned” and “slammed” to the ground with a “gun pointed at him”.
“You terrorised an innocent child … the trauma will not disappear.”
In the wake of the incident, the family said their relative has been unable to leave the house or catch public transport out of fear.
They appeared at the building of the Legislative Assembly to demand answers, accountability and “immediate change to ensure no other First Nations child is ever treated like this again”.
The boy’s family is demanding to see the body-cam footage of the incident, as well as requesting funds for trauma counselling and pleading for a formal investigation. They also demanded the officers involved in the incident be stood down.
In a statement, ACT Police said the boy’s arrest came as officers were investigating reports of both an armed offender and a car-jacker who they believed to be on a bus. They said reports of the offender’s clothing matched that of the teenager.
“A young person was detained for a short period until it was confirmed he was not the alleged offender. We acknowledge this would have been a very distressing incident for the young person and the other passengers on the bus and we apologise for this,” the statement read.
“Given police were responding to multiple eyewitness reports of an active armed offender in a heavily populated part of Canberra, officers acted with the immediate aim of preventing a worst-case scenario from occurring – further harm to members of the public.”
In their own response, various advocates for Canberra’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community issued a joint statement condemning the incident.
“This act of racial profiling is outrageous, unacceptable, and a devastating breach of safety and trust. No Aboriginal child in Canberra should ever face a gun because of police racial profiling,” they said in a statement, per the ABC.
The group described officers’ use of “excessive force” as “unacceptable”, saying it “caused considerable concern for the family and right across the local Aboriginal community”.
ACT Police said they met with the boy and his family to “discuss the incident and the police response”.
“We acknowledge these have been difficult discussions and ACT Policing remains committed to continued engagement and two-way dialogue with the family and wider First Nations community,” they said.
In 2019, experts led calls for ACT Police to record more data, including perceived ethnicities, when stopping people in an effort to curb and track racial profiling across the state.
Last year, a 38-year-old Zimbabwe-born man accused Canberra Police of racially profiling him when they arrested him for ‘trespassing’ in his own home.
Lead images: Getty Images and WikiCommons
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