More than half of the Indigenous people who died in custody since 2008 had not been convicted of a crime.
A Guardian Australia investigation has found that while 44% of deaths in custody were of sentenced prisoners, 56% were people held after being charged with a crime, people who died in a police pursuit or during arrest, or people who died in protective custody.
In contrast, the majority of non-Indigenous people who died in custody (51%) were serving a prison sentence.
Most of the Indigenous people who had not yet been charged were suspected of non-indictable offences, ranging from public intoxication to evading police. Those crimes typically carry sentences of less than five years.
Five people, including the Wiradjuri woman Rebecca Maher, had been remanded in custody for their own protection because police believed them to be intoxicated.
Maher died in the Cessnock watch house in 2016. She is the only Indigenous person to have died in New South Wales police custody since the introduction of the mandatory custody notification service in 2000. Police failed to notify the service.
Her family said an autopsy report showed there were no drugs or alcohol in her system. An inquest is scheduled for March.
In February 31-year-old Patrick Fisher died after falling from a 13th-floor balcony in a Sydney housing block while trying to avoid police attempting to arrest him for outstanding warrants. His family said he would have been concerned about being “bashed” by the officers.
Guardian Australia examined the circumstances of every Indigenous death in custody over the past 10 years, and compared Indigenous and non-Indigenous deaths over a five-year period. The analysis also revealed a split along gender lines.
Far fewer women die in custody compared with men. But women who died in custody were more likely to experience a lapse in procedure or to not receive all the medical care required.
In 2017 a NSW coroner found that a 21-year-old woman, who died in Emu Plains minimum security prison in 2012, may not have died if prison staff had correctly completed a perimeter check. The woman, referred to by Guardian Australia as “PB”, died of a drug overdose after receiving heroin smuggled into the prison.
Had prison guards conducted a perimeter check as required, the coroner said, they may have noticed an open window in PB’s accommodation unit which would have prompted them to check on the inmates in that unit, and discover PB in need of medical attention.
“The tragedy of this matter is that, apart from the failings by Corrective Services staff on the night of her death, had any of the other inmates in House 3 chosen to ‘buzz up’ there seems little doubt PB could have been saved,” the coroner said.
