The NSW Greens have renewed calls for pill testing and an end to drug dogs and strip searches at music festivals following a damning report exposing the police canines’ low success rate.
NSW Police search figures show the dogs scored an average drug detection success rate of just 25 per cent during the last decade while a Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) review revealed officers routinely failed to follow proper strip-search procedures.
Of the more than 94,000 general and strip searches undertaken from 2013 to June 30 this year after a drug dog detection, nearly 71,000 yielded no illicit drugs, according to figures released to Greens MP Cate Faehrmann.
Ms Faehrmann has called on NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley to explain why the commission’s recommendations from an initial review in 2020 – which also found similar failings – had not been adopted.
“It’s outrageous that less than one in three police officers is following the rules for protecting privacy and dignity in strip searches,” she said.
In NSW, officers can undertake either general or strip searches if they have a reasonable suspicion of illicit drug possession.
Formal questioning procedure
However, drug dog detection does not entitle police to routinely conduct a search, and officers are required to ask follow-up questions, such as whether a person is in possession of banned drugs.
Ms Faehrmann, who is the Greens’ drug law reform and harm minimisation spokeswoman, said the use of sniffer dogs is leading to people being needlessly searched, and called for the canines to be banned from music festivals.
“Unequivocally drug dogs don’t stop people taking drugs, they just lead to riskier behaviour and sometimes that riskier behaviour can have fatal outcomes,” she told reporters outside the Listen Out music festival in Sydney on Saturday.
NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley said she has asked NSW Police for a briefing on the LECC report in relation to drug-detection dogs and is awaiting a response.
“No drug is safe, even if it is tested,” she told reporters in Sydney on Saturday.
‘How can we trust the government?’
But Ms Faehrmann said the minister’s comment “doesn’t match with anybody’s reality”.
“Young people will hear that and just go, ‘how can we trust the government?’ Millions of people actually do take illegal drugs every year safely.”
She pointed towards recommendations made by deputy state coroner Harriet Grahame in 2019, following an inquest into six MDMA-related deaths at NSW music festivals between December 2017 and January 2019.
Ms Grahame called for pill testing and said the heavy police and drug-detection dog presence encouraged risky, and sometimes fatal, behaviour like panic ingestion to avoid detection.
But the government had not changed its approach, Ms Faehrmann said.
“It’s a very dangerous approach. People are still going to take drugs. This is the reality.”
-AAP
