An off-duty police constable has been filmed head-butting a 14-year-old Indigenous teenager in the face in a late-night altercation outside a McDonald’s in regional Queensland.
The state’s police commissioner, Katarina Carroll, said an Ethical Standards Command investigation has been launched, describing the officer’s actions as “inappropriate”.
The officer was filmed approaching a group of youths in the streets of Dalby, after one reportedly yelled words to the effect of “you’re nothing without the badge”.
“What badge have I got right now ****,” the officer says in the video obtained by 7news, which was broadcast with the expletives bleeped out.
“Which one of you ****s said that?”
The officer strides across the street and approaches the group aggressively as he is filmed and goaded.
“Punch me, punch me,” says one. “You’re a pig.”
“You’ve got three seconds to walk away or I head-butt you,” the officer responds, appearing intoxicated.
After one of the teens continues to goad him, the officer pushes his chest into the Indigenous teen’s chest before striking a sickening blow with his forehead.
“I was in shock, I thought he had like knocked my teeth back,” the teenager told 7news.
The off-duty officer and the youths then wrestle and yell before on-duty police arrive and break up the altercation, physically restraining their colleague.
Queensland police confirmed the officer had been stood down pending investigation and provided basic details but no further comment.
Asked if she condemned his action, Carroll said she had “not seen what happened prior” to the video.
“But, on what I have seen, those actions are completely inappropriate,” the police commissioner said.
The Indigenous teen who was struck said he did provoke the altercation “a bit”, but added that a police officer was “supposed to be able to be the bigger person”.
“I feel as though he has targeted me because of … the colour of my skin,” the youth told 7news.
The Youth Affairs Network of Queensland’s director, Siyavash Doostkhah, said this was not the first incidence of police violence against young people.
“It’s just this has been caught on camera,” Doostkhah said.
“But over the years, we’ve heard from young people that this happens a lot of the time … and it seems to happen to people of colour, particularly Aboriginal kids, more.”
The youth advocate said that a state government crackdown on youth crime, egged on by the opposition and amplified by the media, had only created tension and pitted “the community and young people” at odds “as if they were enemies”.
“We’ve dehumanised young people so much that people do perceive them as a … criminal first,” he said.
Social worker Simi Kaur, who works from the Dalby high school, said the footage was “really confronting”.
“I don’t know what actually happened,” she said. “But whatever happened, the way it was dealt with … was not good.”
Kaur said she was concerned by a rise in suicide attempts by young people in Dalby, a lack of mental health support and activities to provide an alternative to antisocial behaviour.
