BlackLivesMatter and Black Deaths in Custody Special

Just before 9 o'clock last night, the jury returned guilty verdicts against all three defendants. It was absolute shambles to say the truth. It was absolutely ridiculous. The mud on his clothing, the day after the alleged attack. On a shallow mud bank and the Fitzroy River. Basically, I think most of the people used to me were good people. I think a really important question we need to ask is how many indigenous prisoners in Australia are innocent? This is Curtain, a podcast where we pull back the blinds to shine a light on the darkest parts of our justice system and ask who are the victims. I'm Amy McWire. And I'm Martin Hodgson, Senior Advocate for the Farm Prisoner Support Service. And a warning, this series contains the names of deceased people and has distressing content that might upset some listeners. Welcome to Curtain the podcast. As everyone will be aware, America has been a blaze with rage at the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of four police officers. Those officers have now been charged. And we've seen protests right around America and around the world. The central theme is that Black Lives Matter. And that this continuing murder of Black people around the world by police must stop. What we've also seen is quite a bit of reaction in Australia. But as always, that tends to be driven because this has happened in America. And most of the coverage remains about the issues in America and facing the African American community. This week, my co-host Amy McWire has written numerous articles about this particular issue. And has focused very heavily on why Black deaths in Australia and Black deaths in custody never seem to get any attention. Amy, you wrote a piece on your own blog the other day that's been shared right across the internet and around the world talking about this very issue. Why do you think Australians always seem to have to wait for something to happen in America before they even look to what's happening in Australia? It's very interesting to me that Australians can't learn the lessons of white supremacy and racist violence ingrained in the systems in Australia. And obviously we see the result of that is the continual death of Aboriginal people at the hands of the state. And since 991, we've had 432 Aboriginal deaths in custody. These deaths are seen as invisible to Australia. They do not recognize them and we see that in the protests that are unintended and we see that in the footage that fails to spark a national outcry in the same way that the footage that shows the devastating death and homicide of George Floyd sparked an outcry. And I think one of the reasons for that is that Australians are complicit in the violence perpetrated against Aboriginal people. And that is a key part of incarceration. It's about keeping Aboriginal people out of sight containing them. And the violence perpetrated against them, particularly state sanctioned violence, is seen as legitimate violence. And we're blamed for our own deaths because it's seen as legitimate violence. We're blamed for being incarcerated at rates that beg a belief, even though particularly when you look at Aboriginal women, the majority, I would say all Aboriginal women should not be in jail. So I think there's so many reasons and one of that is the complicity that Australians have and the continual oppression of Aboriginal people. Because this violence is not just divorced from history, it has a purpose. We know what that purpose is. The purpose is the erasure of Aboriginal people from this land because this land is stolen land and Australia has profited from this land. So it's connected to so many other things. Australians are comfortable with the distance. They can look at the dehumanization of black lives in America and say this is wrong. They can't do the same here because they're benefiting from it. Yeah, I think that's very true when something I've said heard this week is that, well, we see from America the video footage, but we've also seen horrific deaths of the people like Mr. Briscoe in our springs. Why do you, you've explained sort of why that doesn't trigger Australians, but what about the Australian media? Because they're often the ones too that are profiting this idea that it's because it's captured on film in America and we get to see it. Why do you think the Australian media won't report on what's happening in Australia? I think one part of it is laziness, but I also think it's the fact that majority of Australian journalists are in positions that the majority of Australian journalists are white, upper middle class, non-indigenous definitely. And so when they're reporting on these deaths, they are siding for the majority of the police versions of events. So I've seen in the past when Aboriginal death and custodys occur, the police statements come out and they automatically set up the police as being innocent. So there are ways that the language is framed. And I see a lot of media just covering that uncritically. And you see that in the questions that are posed and the questions that Australian journalists fail to recognize that are incredibly important. So I think it is not only a general apathy shown towards black lives by the Australian media, but it speaks to a much deeper cultural problem about the fact that the majority of Australian journalists are non-indigenous and do not have any understanding of the lived reality of Aboriginal people. And that affects what stories they dim as important and what lives they see as valuable. And as you said, we've had footage showing just horrendous violence, perpetrated against Aboriginal people. For example, Mr. Briscoe, I remember a few years ago now, there was a 12-year-old boy in Kempsey who was tased and was screaming for his mother as he was tased. And that footage was probably, you know, shocked Australia, not even Australia, but shocked people for a week. And then they move on. They've got the memory of goldfish in relation to Aboriginal affairs. So the media is complicit, they're lazy. They're unwilling to actually look deeper and understand what's truly happening in this country. And, you know, I think one of the important parts of the media is that we bear witness and that we try and hold those responsible for these acts of violence accountable. The Australian media has shown itself time and time again that it's unwilling to do this. And so we've seen that, you know, a lot of Australian media, I saw Channel 10 sharing messages of solidarity. And we know that Channel 10 has broadcast, you know, racist rhetoric from people like Carri and Kennelly and Joe Hildebrand. So it's amazing that they feel they can offer solidarity, protestors overseas without, well, at the same time, demonizing Aboriginal people over here. Yeah, there seems to be a real lack of critical thinking. And one thing that's definitely disturbed me, and I know a lot of others, is to watch programs like the project, dedicate an entire hour to the issue of Black Lives Matter. But never having done that when there's been a murder of an Aboriginal person at the hands of police, never when damning findings have been handed down by a coroner after an inquest. And it's almost like the issue of Black deaths in custody is tacked on at the end. How do you think we get the Australian media to finally center this issue? And I guess the other thing too is I, you notice that Scott Morrison has been asked about this issue, almost every press conference he's given this week. And he's given a non-answer every time and he's not challenged. So I know you've explained what about the media it is, but what's the next step? How do we get the media to change in that sense? I, I don't have a lot of hope in the media. I'm very cynical about it, because as you said about the project, imagine if they had done an hour long special during the inquest or a straight after the inquest of any tenure day, which only happened a couple of months ago. Imagine if they had done that and applied public pressure at the time. Maybe we would see, you know, greater calls for action than we currently are. And the thing I've seen also in relation to Aboriginal deaths in custody is that the onus is always on Aboriginal families to campaign to try and force the media to listen and to take up these issues in ways that other families and victims of crime have never had to do. And so from my perspective, I'm very cynical about the media and it changing in relation to that. And particularly we've seen after the current crisis around coronavirus, you know, the severe cuts, particularly to regional media, but also new upcoming media like Buzzfeed and 10 daily and vice that were actually in a media landscape that's very small and concentrated. And so, you know, I really worry for the state of journalism and the ability for journalists to actually, you know, invest to get these stories properly. So from my point of view, I think it's about not only trying to find a way to. to cover these issues independently, but also trying to build up some sort of workforce to be able to do that, and to be able to actually bear witness that every inquest and every trial, you know, and actually try and do that because I don't think we can actually depend on mainstream media. I just think they've shown time and time again that they're unwilling to do that. And we're seeing in this current environment that they may not even be equipped to do that for very long. Yeah, I think it's definitely a lesson we've learned and probably why we ended up making Kurt and the podcast in the first place, which was that we didn't feel comfortable trusting the life and story of Kevin Henry and Linda to the mainstream media. And I think that's a huge indictment on the media who have all the resources they could possibly need. And yet they don't cover these issues anywhere near appropriately. Another issue I think I really have to raise is that there's been 432 deaths in custody just since 1991. People seem to forget the thousands and thousands of deaths that happened prior to 1991. But what happens with all of these deaths is that every single one goes to a coroner. And so we have people working for families, lawyers, social workers and advocates throughout this process. And clearly, not every inquest of those more than 400 has separate experts every time. Often it's the same people. And yet we do not see these experts in the media. So I really would urge the media to speak to the people who know, to speak to the people who do the work on the ground and not just grab the opinion of the nearest person to them, the most available, because it's not acceptable when we're talking about coronavirus. It's not acceptable when we talk about any other issue. And so it shouldn't be acceptable for the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I guess just before we finish on the media issue, Amy, why do you think on this particular issue that experts aren't spoken to by the media? I think because the Australian media haven't fully followed these issues through. They don't have the contact book to be able to ring up. And as I said before, they're fundamentally lazy. But I think we also have a situation where people put their hands up to comment on things that they have no expertise in. And really we should be stepping aside and letting people not only with lived experience, but lived experience of police brutality and families of the victims speak, but also people who have researched this issue extensively because the problem is, is that when you have people who are uninformed out in the media making motherhood statements about very complicated issues, you severely narrow the terms of reference in relation to the debate. And I think we saw that in several death and custody cases, including the case of Miss Mar, who we've talked about a lot of times on this podcast, who died in Cessnaq in the Maitland police station. And the fact that there wasn't that expertise around her case has really I think limited the ability in which to talk about it and to push for justice. So, you know, taking out space in the media actually has real material consequences for the victims of, and the families of victims of violence by the Australian state. And I think people really have to realise that, you know, you might think that you're advocating and you might think you're doing the right thing, but actually you are taking up a lot of space that actually has negative consequences for our ability to actually raise awareness of these issues. Because I think you mentioned 432 cases. We always hear about the numbers. We hear about the numbers. They shouldn't be shocking because we've been talking about this for a very long time. And yet, could they tell us the reasons why many of these people behind these numbers are dying in custody? Because all of them, a lot of them are different. We have to look at the actual the reasons behind it. We have to illuminate and understand those forms of violence in order to be able to stamp it out. And if we're not talking about it, if we're not furthering the conversation, then how will we ever do that? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And the little coverage that there has been of Ms. Mars death in custody has almost been completely inaccurate and could have been far improved. Had journalists taken the time or bothered to read the Inquest findings. So I think maybe we'll look at that a little bit now, which is that one problem with the Inquest findings and Amy spoke about before this burden on the families. And one thing you can certainly commend about the African-American community in the States is that every time an issue like this happens, we see people rally around the family. We see lawyers and other experts volunteer their services. And we've seen George Floyd's family really protected by that process, by not having to do endless interviews of their own. But that's also been assisted by the fact they were able to hire private, highly regarded forensic pathologists to get to the bottom of why George Floyd actually died. And if you look at the Inquest into the death of Ms. Mars, most reporting tends to label a death of natural causes. And we see in a lot of the reporting, a lot of the statistics that really lacks any humanity, that these cases listed as dying of natural causes when that is just not the facts. So I think we need to explore a case like Ms. Mars and her life more vigorously. And Amy, as we've spoken about on the podcast before, can you just quickly brief the listeners on why Ms. Mars was with the police in the first place? Yeah. So Ms. Mars was a 36-year-old aboriginal mother of four. She was living in, she was walking along the street in Cessnauk in the Nisa Falls Hunter Valley at midnight when she was pulled up by police who suspected her of breaching bail. She actually hadn't breached bail. But while she was walking along the streets, they detained her anyway and they detained her under a piece of legislation in Nisa Falls that allows police to detain people for intoxication, but it has to be as a last resort. So they have to actually find a responsible person to care for that person rather than then place them in detention. So Ms. Mars was taking into custody. When she was taken into custody in mainland police station, so the police believe that she had HIV. And this actually affected the ways that they actually took care of her. So the coroner found that they did not take her welfare seriously. So that was not just in relation to not actually finding a suitable person to place her in their care. And the coroner actually mentioned that her mother was available that night and that the police should have found it quite easy to contact the mother, but they just couldn't be bothered. And those, they just didn't care about her welfare at all. They mocked her. One of the police officers actually walked and mocked her way of walking as if she was like a chimpanzee, which is a highly racialized imagery based on the fact Ms. Mars was an aboriginal woman. They did not provide adequate checks on her. And so she actually had a pill bottle and her cause of death ended up being mixed drug toxicity. So there were all these different forms of violence perpetrated against Ms. Mars largely because of the callous disregard they showed to her life. And the fact that they did not care for her welfare at any point in that included that included not just their failure to place her in the care of her mother or in hospital, but also the fact that they failed to conduct regular welfare checks on her. And yet when the details of Ms. Mars deaths were coming out, the focus was on the custody notification service, which is the 24/7 hotline, which police are required to call when they take an aboriginal person into custody when charged with an offense. Now the police were not even legally required to call that hotline. And when the inquest came out, the coverage was largely based around New South Wales government actually extending the CNS. So police are now required to call it when they place an aboriginal person in custody for intoxication. So we see that there was no focus on the fact that New South Wales is still locking up people for basically the crime of being drunk in public, which we know is not a crime and shouldn't be a crime. And we know that since the days of the Royal Commission, and yet the focus has not been on that, the focus has not been on Ms. Mars and her personhood at all. In fact, she's been largely ignored in these entire proceedings as her family and her family, particularly her mother at the very beginning two months after her death. We're asking these questions. Why was my daughter in custody in the first place? Why was she allowed to die in a police cell? And yet those questions, those crucial questions posed by her family were once never posed by the media at all. Yeah, I think is might a bunch of good points that go to what we were speaking about earlier. We've been critical of the media and some would say, well, we need to explain how they can do better. And I think Amy's just outlined how they need to do better. Go to the very first issue of the police taking Miss Marin to custody for being drunk in public. Well, go anywhere in Sydney, any town, large or small, there are drunk people coming out of pubs and clubs, their own home, people are actively encouraged to take a designated driver, to use a taxi, to take an Uber, to walk. Miss Mar had not been drinking. So any decent journalist should be asking the police that question. Let's go to the second issue, allegedly the failure to report for bail. She had reported, now if a white person or any non-indigenous person had died in custody, having reported for bail and the police claim that they hadn't, I think there would be questions asked. It's again unacceptable. Let's go to another issue, the assumption by police that a mother of four had HIV when she did not. This was supposed to be an issue we left with the prejudice of the 90s, to speak despicable wicked prejudice that killed many members of the LGBTQI community for absolutely no reason who, or the brunt of vicious police violence through that period. So we have this cattlewag of mistakes before Miss Mar even makes it to the police station. And based on every single one of them, there are solid questions that the media could be asking. There are solid questions that politicians could be asking. And these are all mistakes that the police were never held to account for. And I think Mar and Yevra is an important point about accountability and I think that's part of very witness. If we're going to bear witness to all of these deaths, we have to hold people accountable and we have to be accountable as well. We can't just sit by and let them the tally of aboriginal deaths just pass us by, you know, things have to change now and they can change by demanding accountability. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that call you make to hold ourselves accountable is really important. And you raised the issue of the CNS, the custody notification service. Well, another error by the police was to misidentify Miss Mar as not being aboriginal, meaning that even if they had placed her under a rest for some sort of serious charge of any kind, no call would have been made because they decided again on guests, guesses and stupidity of their own that she wasn't aboriginal. Now we know that she was and obviously that was clarified later on very quickly. But again, this is another issue that wasn't picked up and it's another reason why the CNS as it's being advocated for doesn't work. And the other issue I would add to that is that if the police had picked up the phone, having never should have arrested Miss Mar in the first place, she wasn't drunk in public. And even if she was, she shouldn't be touched or go and arrest every drunk person in the state of New South Wales, having misidentified her, having mislabeled her as carrying HIV, having claimed she hadn't reported for bail, but she had. She was placed in a cell and she was dying. A call to a solicitor hours away as we sadly found in the inquest into the death of, into the death of Arnie Tanya Day will not save the life of an aboriginal woman who should never have been in the cell at all. So I would like to call for that accountability and for that change of focus from calling for these little measures band-aids over wounds instead of saying to the police, keep your hands off aboriginal people and to the politicians that where there are these stupid holes in the law that enable the police to carry out these actions to change the law. Now it's not okay to stand in front of a press conference and pretend they care when they can walk into Parliament and make very real change tomorrow. And I know some of the pushback that will come that this was an issue where there were pharmaceutical drugs involved, people will say maybe it was natural causes, maybe it wasn't. Trust me, you're wrong to question that because I know most people have never read the inquest in the first place. But if we look at another case, you can remove all of the guesswork from it. In Western Australia, Joyce Clark was shot dead by police. That's all you need to know and yet where were the project special hour episode for that? Where were the rallies and the protests for her? I mean, I wonder if you can give your insight into how it's possible for an aboriginal woman to be shot in public dead by the police and for there to be no outrage? Well, I know the reason why there's no outrage and it's the reason that there is never any outrage that greets the death of aboriginal women particularly at the hands of any form of violence. And it's because of the continual dehumanisation of aboriginal women that we've seen from the very first time that the invaders set foot on their shores. The dehumanisation of our women has been key to the continuing colonial project. And we've seen that lack of care in the facts that aboriginal women have been the highest and fastest growing carceral population in this country. And when you lock up aboriginal women, the majority of them are mothers, majority of them are victims of violence themselves. You are ripping apart aboriginal communities. It's a very strategic thing to do, to not care about the lives of aboriginal women and to continue to dehumanise us and to believe that our, and to mark our deaths as ungrievable and as unworthy of mourning. And so, it's been a very long history in this country of aboriginal women's lives being undervalued and deaths being seen as uninevitable. And we saw that in the 1991 Royal Commission in which 11 aboriginal women died and yet gender was not seen as an issue. And we, you know, the names of those women were never, ever, the names on the front pages of newspapers. And when you look at a lot of the details of those cases, they're merit cases like this too. They're merit cases like Miss Mar. These are things that have just not changed. And so when I look at Joyce Clark and I look at the apathy that greeted her death, I just see that continuing devaluation of the lives of aboriginal women. And it has to change. I mean, this is a case that is just so blatant that I think it's now up to us to make sure that it does not pass by without coverage, without outrage. I think it's up to us to assert the right of Joyce Clark to have lived a life-free of violence, to have lived a life on which her dignity was maintained and her life was valued. And so I think that's the challenge now. And media should not just talk about these issues for this week. They need to continue talking about this. Yeah, I think that's something I won't say I agree because it's not really my place to say I agree. My role is to say as a man to listen to what Amy's just said, it's not for us as men, particularly. And for all non-indigenous people to decide whether you agree or not. And it's not my place either. It's to listen to these truths that Amy just spoke and to absorb it and to listen to it over and over again until it hits home. It's the fact and you just have to accept it. And one thing before we move off the media is we often hear these idiots like Kerry Anne, Kennelly and Joe Hildebrand. And we've heard it from others who should know better too about Aboriginal people not sending their children to school. Well, we've just spoken about three Aboriginal mothers who were murdered by the police. How can they send their kids to school if they're dead? So when is a person in the media going to make that connection in their own head? And then start asking the questions of not only the police and politicians, but some of the people who work in child protection who remove children in these instances from the families who are doing their very best. Never mentioning the fact that the reason these children don't have a mother is because their mother was brutally and violently taken away by the same state that demonises and seeks to destroy another generation. So I think the excuses for everyone, quite frankly, have run out. And I would echo Amy's call that we have an opportunity here as the man alleged to have murdered Joyce Clark, the police officer goes on trial in Western Australia. That the media organisations need to put their very best out on this. And I would suggest that they use their large budgets to employ Aboriginal journalists and Aboriginal experts to cover this case, because if we want to understand why this happens and if we want to make sure there's justice, then this case needs constant attention. You can't turn away now and then when the man walks free say I don't know how it happened, it'll happen if you don't keep your eyes fixed on what's going on. Amy as an Aboriginal woman yourself as a mother as a journalist and someone who cares deeply about these issues not only at a professional level but obviously at a personal level because it is your everyday life and existence. How important is it to you to be able to follow the trial that will take place in Western Australia and be given an opportunity to write and speak about this issue? Well I think the thing is and even I fall into this trap is that we focus so much on wider Australian responses but not on black responses and I think I was talking to this with your mum actually Martin. Actually I feel like although Aboriginal people all around the country were already mobilizing to support cases like Joyce Clark and continue to bear witness to the deaths of Aboriginal people in custody I feel like there has been an added almost like a fire has been reignited or stoked and I feel personally very motivated even more motivated than before to ensure that the death of Joyce Clark does not just pass by and I think a lot of other Aboriginal people feel this so I feel like we shouldn't just focus on white responses but also on the black responses and I feel like there has been a significant not that it's changed but it has added fuel to our fire and I think that's a common feeling across the breadth of Aboriginal Australia. So you've heard that call which to me is to centre black voices if you're not Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander whether whatever position you hold in society whether you're a person listening to this podcast whether you're someone who reads about these issues on the internet you're in the media you're a politician you're a business person whoever you are it doesn't matter there are black voices and there are black women's voices like Amy's that you need to be listening to because these are the people best placed to centre the real victim in all of this who we should never forget is Joyce Clark and you cannot look away it can't end so that next week we're talking about something else clearly as you've heard and Amy has been committed to curtain as a project for the last four years committed to the cause of valuable and invaluable journalism her entire life and there are hundreds of other Aboriginal women across the broad range of the professional world and in their own communities who were doing this work so I think it's time for everyone else myself included to step back and to push those voices forward to hear them and to listen and so to end curtain the podcast today I would encourage you all to buy a copy of the Saturday paper this weekend where Amy will have a cover story on these very issues and read it listen to what's being said and then make sure everyone you know does the same thing and then once you put it down and you start to invest your time into the work of Aboriginal women that is readily available if you only look then I hope that will be enough as you understand and begin to understand that the humanity that's been stripped from Joyce Clark that we won't have to ask for you to stand behind Aboriginal women again and support and fund and give your platform to them that you'll just do that naturally otherwise I've failed you've failed and as a country why even be here