Welfare checks performed by police at South Hedland police station on Aboriginal woman Ms Dhu were lacking in “quality,” one of Western Australia’s top police officers told a coronial inquest on Thursday.
Dhu, a 22-year-old Yamatji woman whose first name is not used for cultural reasons, died at the Hedland Health Campus on 4 August 2014, after 43 hours in the cells at the South Hedland police station.
She was supposed to be checked at least once an hour, and her condition, particularly any significant changes in her condition, noted in the computerised custody records system, assistant commissioner Duane Bell said.
At the final day of the coronial inquest at Perth magistrates court on Thursday, Bell, who has watched all four weeks of the hearing from the public gallery, said that only three of those hourly checks had actually been missed, “so the quantity was there”.
“It was the quality that I think was another matter,” he said, adding later: “The cell checks were completed, it was the response I think that wasn’t attended to.”
Bell said excuses given by some officers that they were unable to perform the regular cell checks or answer when Dhu pressed the intercom in her cell because they were attending other duties should not have arisen.
“It’s excusable to not do other things, to ask someone to come back to report an offence,” he said. “It’s not excusable to neglect your lockup duties.”
Bell said that from the evidence he had heard, he saw “objective signs that Ms Dhu needed early medical attention”.
Bell is the last of 18 police officers to give evidence at the inquest in the past two weeks. Dhu’s family members, medical staff who attended her on three separate visits to Hedland Health Campus, and medical and forensic experts gave evidence over two weeks of hearings in November and December last year.
He told coroner Ros Fogliani that at the time of Dhu’s arrest, police had no option but to arrest someone on a warrant of commitment for unpaid court fines, like the one issued on Dhu. Dhu’s warrant was for $3,622 in unpaid fines for seven different offences.
“A warrant authorises police to get a person and take them to prison for a period of confinement to cut out a court fine at a present rate of $250 a day,” Bell said.
Jailing is the final option for dealing with unpaid fines, after suspending the person’s driving license or seizing assets. Those two options, he agreed, were “absolutely” less available to Aboriginal people.
Bell said he was unable to say how many people Aboriginal people had been picked up and held in police cells on a warrant of commitment because the police computer system did not differentiate between types of warrants and allow those statistics to be pulled. That system has since been changed, but Bell said he was unlikely to get an indication before the middle of the year.
Dhu’s family have campaigned to abolish the practice of jailing people for unpaid fines. The premier, Colin Barnett, promised to reduce Aboriginal deaths in custody and reduce rates of Aboriginal imprisonment when confronted by Dhu’s grandmother, Carol Roe, and mother, Della Roe, outside state parliament in 2014. Barnett gave that task to a justice working group, made up of the police minister, Liza Harvey, the corrections minister, Joe Francis, and the attorney-general, Michael Mischin. Bell chairs another committee that reports to that group.
WA has the highest rate of Indigenous imprisonment in Australia, particularly among young people. The report on ways to reduce the rate of Aboriginal incarceration is also due in the middle of the year.
Police do not currently have a discretion not to arrest someone if a warrant for unpaid fines is issued. Bell said WA Police have requested the discretion not to arrest someone until it would be possible to transport them to prison, so they don’t remain in police lockup for more than 24 hours, and discretion to release someone with their fine only partly cut-out.
That proposal is one of the changes currently before the attorney-general.
Bell said the discretion to release someone partway through their warrant “if health issues arise.” Under the present system, a detainee with health issues is either admitted to hospital and kept under police guard in the ward, or released as fit to be in police custody, a status Bell said didn’t mean the person was healthy, it only meant they didn’t require immediate hospitalisation.
“Commissioner, you would agree they are at opposite ends of the spectrum, you are either hospitalised or you are fit for custody,” Fogliani said. “There’s a huge area in the middle.”
A number of police officers who had custody of Dhu in the hours before her death gave evidence that they equated the fitness to hold form to mean she was “fit and healthy.”
The inquest continues.
