Mysa Le felt “vulnerable and completely helpless” when she was ordered by police to undress in front of them so they could search her body for drugs.
Le was strip-searched at Sydney’s Midnight Mafia music festival in May 2018, where she said two female police officers took her into a booth and told her to take off her clothes without explaining what was happening.
“It just made me feel trapped,” she said. “It made me feel dehumanised.”
Le, who was 18 at the time, said the officers made a “suspicious” comment about her visible tampon string and she was forced to explain while naked in front of them that she had her period.
She said she found being strip-searched especially traumatic as she had been sexually assaulted by two people the previous year.
Police confiscated her ticket and escorted her out of the festival “as if I was being arrested” even though they didn’t find anything, she said.
Her experience is just one of thousands captured by the most comprehensive set of internal New South Wales police data ever published.
For the first time, the public will be able to view data obtained from the police under the state’s information access laws detailing strip-searches, the use of force, and the issuing of move on directions from 2017 to 2023.
The statistics were released on Wednesday by the Redfern Legal Centre (RLC) on its “police accountability dashboard”, which it said was the first of its kind in Australia.
The RLC’s supervising solicitor, Sam Lee, said the project aimed to shine a light on the many police decisions she said were “made behind closed doors”.
“There is a problem with police accountability in NSW,” she said.
“It’s a government body. There is a need for transparency and people to know how the service is being used, and this is … one step towards making it more transparent.”
The dashboard shows that Indigenous people were subjected to 45.9% of all 51,668 “use of force” events recorded by police and 25.8% of 60,725 strip-searches despite only representing 3.4% of the NSW population.
Lee said the data told a “compelling story” about the way police used their powers that she hoped would hold them to account.
“There’s no doubt in my mind, through the work I do and through the statistics, that First Nations people are disproportionately over-policed compared to non-First Nations people,” she said.
The NSW Aboriginal Legal Service has said Aboriginal people, especially teenagers and children, are “grossly overrepresented as targets of punitive police powers” such as strip-searches and “excessive” use of force.
Indigenous people were strip-searched more widely across regional NSW than non-Indigenous people, who were mainly searched in Sydney and other coastal areas, the RLC dashboard shows.
Officers strip-searched four 11-year-old Indigenous children between 2017 and 2023.
Police found nothing in 61.6% of all strip-searches they carried out in the field, including at festivals.
Le said she was ignored by police when she told them she didn’t have any illicit substances on her.
A police dog had been “sniffing around” her but hadn’t sat down to indicate it had detected drugs, she said.
Le’s experience left her mistrustful and scared of police, but it also inspired her to study social work.
She called for police to focus on harm minimisation and implement mandatory training on dealing with vulnerable and marginalised people rather than carrying out “unethical” strip-searches that she believed could further harm trauma survivors.
She said police should be responsible for publishing their own internal data to improve accountability.
Le made a formal complaint to police in 2019. More than a year later, the force’s internal investigation found the senior constable involved had acted lawfully.
In a recent audit, the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission found only 30% of strip-search records documented the “seriousness and urgency” threshold that officers must meet in order to justify a strip-search under the law.
Le is taking part in a class action against the state government, run by RLC and law firm Slater & Gordon, to pursue compensation for people who allege they were illegally strip-searched at music festivals.
NSW police were contacted for comment.
• Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
• This article was amended on 26 September 2024. An earlier version said that Indigenous people were subjected to 54.2% of all 15,668 “use of force” events when it should have said 45.9% of all 51,668 events.
