The New South Wales police watchdog is reviewing whether it is legal for officers to force people to squat during a strip search.
On Wednesday, the commissioner of the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, Michael Adams QC, told an inquiry into the use of strip search powers by police that he was considering whether the practice was legal.
The LECC is currently investigating the use of strip-search powers by the NSW police and the allegedly unlawful search of a 16-year-old girl at the 2018 Splendour in the Grass festival. It is alleged the girl was strip-searched at the event without a parent or guardian present, a breach of police search powers.
The inquiry has heard the girl, who cannot be named, was left fearful and in tears after she was forced to strip naked and squat in front of a police officer who then “looked underneath” her.
Police in NSW commonly force people to squat when being subjected to a strip search. In September, the police published a new personal search manual for the first time which allows officers to instruct people to squat, lift their testicles or breasts, or part their buttock cheeks.
On Tuesday, the officer who conducted the search on the 16-year-old – but says she does not remember conducting it – gave evidence she commonly instructed people to turn around and squat, before herself bending down “to see if they have got anything inserted inside them in their vagina or anus”.
The officer denied looking underneath people but said she examined them “at a distance”.
On Wednesday, Adams revealed the commission was considering whether it was legal for police to instruct people to squat, saying it had not been “the subject of specific decisions of the courts”.
“The question of whether this is lawful is a matter of present considerations and will be considered in the course of this investigation,” Adams said. “It has not been the subject of specific decisions of the courts and is a matter on which this commission will make a determination or recommendation in due course, assisted by, as I expect submissions to be made by the commissioner of police.
“But squatting is not the only problematic area in strip searches that requires greater clarification.”
The officer was questioned at length on Tuesday and Wednesday about how she came to know she was permitted to ask people to squat during a strip-search.
She had initially said it was in the NSW police handbook – which is incorrect – and later referred to the personal search manual, which was not published until after the 2018 Splendour in the Grass festival.
On Wednesday, she said she wasn’t sure when she was trained to do it but that it may have been during her training at the police academy.
“That is how I have been trained to search and [how] I’ve always done it,” she said.
