news| media clipping

please report any broken links or other errors to › want to come back later?  click here to add this page to your bookmarks / favourites

Child caged for 500km drive to jail

By Tony Koch

4 May 2004 - An 11-year old Aboriginal boy was arrested, held in custody and transported 500km in a police utility cage.

The boy with his parents

His crime?

The boy and several of his friends had constantly clashed with police in Normanton for petrol sniffing and stealing. They also broke into a house and stole CDs and money.

After the graffiti crime, a Justice of the Peace ordered the boy be taken into custody before being taken to Mount Isa where he was again imprisoned overnight.

Aboriginal leaders and legal representatives are outraged at his treatment and allege police ignored all recommendations of the Black Deaths in Custody Royal Commission.

Police Minister Judy Spence said her inquiries had revealed that police had “followed all protocols”.

“I think it is unfortunate that this young offender was detained in this fashion but it was necessary for him to appear in court in Mount Isa,” Ms Spence said.

“I understand a court was specially convened to hear his case as soon as possible. The police followed the proper procedures.”

Ms Spence said the Families Department, responsible for the welfare of children, had approved of the boy’s transport details.

Ms Spence said the child was represented in Normanton Court by Aboriginal Legal Aid which could have applied for bail. But a Mount Isa Legal Aid lawyer disputed that and said the only person in attendance at Normanton was an Aboriginal field officer whose job was to collect people needed in court.

“The first we heard of this case was on the Saturday morning, March 27, when we were notified that a child was in Mount Isa jail and needed representation in court,” the lawyer said.

“We got him bail immediately and he was taken to the Aboriginal hostel where he was allowed to ring his parents in Normanton.

“On the previous day the only person there (in Normanton Court) was Mr Lance Owens, an indigenous field officer who has no legal qualification, no legal training, and no legal standing. It is ridiculous to suggest that a field officer could argue for bail.

“A Families Department officer should have been contacted. There was no Families Department representation at court in Mount Isa the next morning either.

Officer in charge of Mount Isa police, Assistant Supt Mick Huddlestone, said the charge against the boy related to property damage.

“It is common for young people from up here - Doomadgee, Mornington and Normanton - to be held in the watchhouse awaiting court, but usually they are flown straight to Townsville,” Supt Huddlestone said.

The boy’s case was finalised in Mount Isa Children’s Court. He pleaded guilty and was put on 12 months probation to be served in the custody of his uncle in Brisbane.

Indigenous academic, parole board member and head of the women’s task force into violence on communities, Boni Robertson, met the child and his family yesterday.

She said it was appalling a young boy would be treated this way.

“Every protocol regarding the handling by police of a juvenile has been broken, and it is ridiculous to suggest otherwise,” Ms Robertson said.

“What danger does an 11-year-old pose so serious that he has to be remanded in custody, and his parents not even notified?

“And where was the Department of Families in all of this?”

Local Aboriginal leader Murrandoo Yanner said: “It is no wonder our kids grow up frightened of police and holding them in contempt when they see what happens to young children who need guidance, not imprisonment.

“Murderers and rapists get bail in Queensland, but not black children.”

Source: Courier Mail

Mother told son’s 500km ride in cage ‘comfortable’

4 May 2004 - A Normanton detective told the upset mother of the 11-year-old boy jailed for graffiti that her child would be comfortable travelling 500km in the cage in the back of the four-wheel-drive vehicle.

The woman had asked why her son could not sit in one of the three vacant rear seats in the Toyota Landcruiser wagon so he could wear a seatbelt for the trip from the Gulf of Carpentaria town to Mt Isa.

But the police told her the boy would be comfortable lying on the floor of the “dog box”.

“I was crying because I did not know what was going on,” the woman said yesterday.

“They had taken my boy from his grandmother’s place early that morning and put him in the Normanton watchhouse for a couple of hours and then took him to court. My husband and I did not know anything until he was loaded into the paddywagon to go to Mt Isa.

“He only had a plastic bottle of water.”

The boy said the police drove him for more than three hours to a spot about 5 km north of Quamby, near Cloncurry, where he was transferred to the cage in the back of the Mt Isa police Toyota Hilux.

“I was not given anything to eat on the trip and we arrived at Mount Isa about 9.30 at night where they offered me a meal in the jail cell, but I couldn’t eat it,” he said. “I was in a cell on my own, but there were other men in the other cells.”

The boy was kept in a Mount Isa hostel for the three weeks along with three other Aboriginal boys.

He spent his days and night at the premises and no effort was made to send him to school or provide any other form of education.

He did not understand why he had been taken to Mount Isa or why he had to be away from his parents.

“The police treated me all right except when I was taken from the Normanton car to the Mount Isa one and the bullyman (policeman) squeezed my hand real tight so I wouldn’t run away in the bush or something, and I had to ask him to stop hurting me,” the boy said.

“When I finished in the court the bullyman in Mount Isa said to me that if I did anything wrong I would be put back in the watchhouse.”

Police Minister Judy Spence said she had been briefed by police who said the child had been fed before he left Normanton and had been offered another meal when the swap-over took place at Gregory.

Source: Courier Mail

Cage incident shames Australia

by Tony Koch

8 May 2004 - If today, in post-apartheid South Africa, police had charged an 11-year-old boy with property offences, put him in the lock-up, then transported him more than 500km in a cage in the back of a police vehicle to be locked up over night, it would be big news.

The most revered figure in world politics, Nelson Mandela, would denounce the inhumane treatment.

But when this occurs in Queensland Police Minister, Judy Spence parrots the response she refined in her previous Families portfolio – "I am assured correct protocols have been followed".

Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson said that although the circumstances surrounding the Aboriginal boy's detention were "sad and regrettable", he was satisfied the officers "made reasonable and necessary decisions in the remote location and circumstances".

The statements made on radio by Atkinson and, yesterday, by Premier Peter Beattie about the transport of the boy were not just spin. They were wrong.

They both denied that there had been anything untoward with the transportation of the child more than 500km from Normanton to Mount Isa where he arrived at 9.30pm on March 26.

Both said the boy was transported in an airconditioned four-wheel-drive. The truth, confirmed by police and by the child involved, was that he was taken halfway in a Toyota Land Cruiser wagon.

Despite tearful protests from his mother, he was not allowed to sit in any of the vacant three passenger seats but placed in the weldmesh prisoner's cage in the back.

North of Quamby he was transferred to the back of a full-blown paddywagon, a Toyota Hilux with a cage in the utility back for the trip to Mount Isa.

He was charged with graffiti: writing his name in spray paint on a road in Normanton. He had been arrested, put in the watchhouse and brought before the Clerk of the Court, with the arresting officer saying the child had refused to be interviewed. In the company of which adult or legal representative had this police officer attempted to interview the boy? He was not legally represented in the court. His parents were not present. Nobody was in court to ask for bail.

What was the hurry to get him out of town? He was on bail awaiting sentencing on five break-and-enter and stealing charges, and unlawfully using a motor vehicle, for which he was subsequently sentenced to 12 months' probation. He wasn't going anywhere.

He was living at either his grandmother's house or with his parents.

Atkinson had this to say: "Two of the officers stationed in Normanton transported him in the rear area of an airconditioned Toyota Land Cruiser and they were met en route by police from Mount Isa where he was transferred to a prisoner transport vehicle."

What Atkinson glossed over was that the boy was transported in a cage in the back of the Land Cruiser when he could have been placed in a seat, and then in the caged area in the back of the "prisoner transport vehicle" – a Hilux utility.

Atkinson's release continued: "In making decisions relating to transport of persons in custody, police have to consider a range of matters including the safety of the person being transported, the potential for escape and the potential for self harm."

This child weighs about 30kg. His treatment by police, court officials and the Department of Communities was disgraceful. The truth is embarrassing and is being skewed.

Tony Koch is an assistant editor of The Courier-Mail. kocht@qnp.newsltd.com.au

Source: Courier Mail

Further information:

• Articles and documents : Law, deaths in custody, sentencing and violence
• Death by Neglect
  11 November 2002 - A decade after a royal commission to stop Aboriginal deaths in custody, Edward Russell's story is proof not enough has changed. Edward Russell lies in a grave without a headstone. A rough wooden cross and framed photograph suggest an unremarkable life and death.
• Finding the future: three approaches to the problems in Aboriginal communities
  15 May, 2002 - By Hal Wootten, former Royal Commissioner into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. It is not for us or our governments to pre-empt the myriad choices that open to Aboriginals as they seek their futures, whether as individuals or as members of communities. There are enough constraints imposed by the real world, where choices are always limited by scarce resources, by the rights and interests of others, by law, by the needs of one’s family, by the trade-offs in every decision that is made.

|| click to go to the top of this page