By Debra Wirth
The long-awaited final report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody will be available in two weeks. The question waiting to be answered is: are the recommendations of the report on the fatal police shooting of David Gundy an indication of what is to come, or will the final report again whitewash Australia's appalling human rights record in relation to Aboriginal people?
The commission's report of the inquiry into the shooting death of David Gundy during a raid on his home in 1989 recommends that criminal or internal police charges should be considered against the Special Weapons Operations Section officers who led the raid. It also recommends that Gundy's widow and other family members be compensated for his loss and the trauma suffered.
The report, by Commissioner J.H. Wooten, says that "to this day police have refused to recognise the shortcomings in the training and methods of SWOS, the unlawfulness of their raid, or the patent untruth on which it is based. Instead they have sought to denigrate and blame David Gundy for what happened, although he was in truth a law-abiding, hard-working family man. The killing of this man was followed by an assassination of his character."
These are the strongest statements to have come out of the royal commission since it began. The case was certainly very clear cut: an innocent man shot in his bedroom during an illegal police raid.
Yet in other cases of Aboriginal deaths in police custody, the commission appears to have preferred to accept the evidence of police — even when this was contradicted by other witnesses, and other circumstances cast suspicion on the circumstances of the deaths.
The cases of John Pat, who died in the Roebourne lock-up in northern Western Australia in 1983, and Eddie Murray, who died in the Wee Waa police station in north-eastern New South Wales in 1981, are among the most well-known cases in which many people believed that the police were directly responsible for their deaths. No police officers were charged in relation to Murray's death. Five cops indicted for the manslaughter of Pat were acquitted in May 1984.
Aborigines are 15 times more likely to be imprisoned than the rest of the population, according to "Aborigines in Prisons and Non-Custodial Corrections", a report by the royal commission released last year. The highest level of over-representation was in WA, where the figure was 26.3 times more likely.
Between 1982 and 1989, the number of Aboriginal prisoners nationally jumped by 31.9%, from 9826 to 12,964. Non-payment of fines accounted for 39.5% of Aboriginal prison admissions.
A recent press release by the Committee to Defend Black Rights puts the situation of detention and deaths of Aboriginal people in police custody like this: "As a minority group in Australia, we find ourselves an involuntary majority in prisons and police cells . Our people have been victims of the Australian colonial legal system that has claimed tens of thousands of our people's lives, bludgeoned to death, shot, hanged, beheaded, raped, robbed by cops, colonists and executioners. Still today, the thud of the boot against dark flesh resounds in police stations across the country ..."
Several of the reports prepared by the commission lead one to the conclusion that racism dominates not only in the jails, prisons and police force. It is inherent in the whole system. Grinding poverty, appalling housing and living standards, unemployment, continual police and state harassment — this is the everyday reality which results in so many Aborigines being jailed.
This reality is the upshot of years of government policy which has systematically denied Aboriginal people the right to run their own lives. From the official policy of genocide to assimilation, the last 203 years have brought cultural devastation for Aboriginal people. One of the most brutal aspects of the assimilationist years was the policy of taking Aboriginal babies and young children from their parents.
Glenn Allan Clark was born in 1962 at Queenstown, Tasmania. When he was four years old, his mother, Dawn, left Glenn's father, who was violent towards her, and with his five sisters and brothers went to live with Dawn's parents on Bruny Island.
The Child Welfare authorities had apparently been concerned about the welfare of the children from the time that Glenn was one year old, but had offered no assistance. Yet within a month of her leaving the man who had been treating them badly, the authorities took Dawn's children away from her, saying they were neglected. The department offered her no contact with her children and treated her as if she had nothing to offer them.
The behaviour of four-year-old Glenn, as a result of being torn from his mother, became so destructive that the staff at a "receiving home" threatened to resign if he was not removed. Glenn was then put into a Salvation Army home, where he was semi-adopted by the superintendent and his wife. When the superintendent retired, however, Glenn again became distressed.
The response was to dose him heavily with tranquillisers and anti-depressants. The superintendent believed the treatment was an experiment by the Mental Health Commission on children with "behavioural problems". Each further deterioration of behaviour was met by increased dosages over the next two-and-a-half years. Glenn's behaviour improved markedly only when the treatment was finally stopped.
When Glenn was 16, he was turned out of the Salvation Army home. Frequent brushes with the police followed, and he spent three of the next eight years behind bars. On March 27, 1986, at the Royal Hospital in Hobart, Glenn Allan Clark was pronounced dead. According to police, he was found earlier hanging in a cell in Glenorchy Police Station by means of a jumper tied to the cell bars.
The commission's report of the inquiry into the death of Glenn Allan Clark, while critical of the police involved, concluded that he "took his own life and no other party was involved". From the time Glenn ustody until his death, he was seen by no-one other than police officers. All the evidence in the report about how he was treated and how he reacted is that of police.
Glenn was arrested for being drunk and disorderly and was detained on that charge and on an outstanding money warrant. He had not been in custody long when he was apparently discovered by two of the police on duty tearing the pillow case in his cell to shreds and tying the strips to the cell bars. The two police decided that Glenn might be suicidal, so they removed all the bedding from the cell, believing that they were removing the danger of suicide.
The criticism of the police revolves around whether they did all they could to prevent Glenn from suiciding, if in fact that is what happened. From their evidence in the report, it becomes clear that they did not. The policemen who said they saw Glenn shredding the pillow case failed to adequately raise the alarm with the senior officer as to the danger of suicide. Neither did they maintain a continuous watch over Glenn. At the time Glenn supposedly hung himself, the police station, according to those on duty, was completely unattended.
The report implies that the police involved, and those carrying out the initial internal examination, were responsible for only mild negligence. Commissioner Wooten says in the report that three attitudes can be seen to be running through the thinking of senior officers in this case. These were: 1. that if a death is deemed a suicide, there are no suspicious circumstances and no investigation is required; 2. an inability to conceive that police might be at fault; and 3. an extraordinary "club" atmosphere among cops.
These are among the strongest criticisms of the police contained in the report of the inquiry into the death. It does not recommend that any charges be considered. Presuming that the account given by the police at Glenorchy Station is correct, Glenn's death might have been averted if greater precaution had been taken.
Like this one, most of the commission's reports, are prefaced with accounts and descriptions of the lives of those who died in custody. This is particularly relevant to the deaths which were deemed suicides.
But while the histories certainly give the victims more of an identity than if only the circumstances of their deaths were dealt with, the impression is also gained that in some cases the description of the people's lives and personalities is used to reinforce the verdicts of suicide. The inquiries seem to set out to discover why the people were suicidal, rather than treating their deaths as a possibly suspicious event.
The observation that death might have been avoided had police or other authorities been more diligent is a recurring theme in the reports. One extreme example is the report on Fay Lena Yarrie, who died as a result of injuries sustained while in police custody on December 15, 1988.
Fay Yarrie was apprehended by police for drunkenness after being detained by an off-duty police officer outside a hotel in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley. She was placed in a cell with two other women, one n observed behaving aggressively toward other inmates. The cell was the furthest from the charge counter at the Brisbane City Watch-house.
They were left unattended and unobserved for at least 40 minutes. When the cell was inspected, Fay Yarrie was discovered lying on the floor unconscious, her face covered in blood. No police attended despite evidence from witnesses that Fay Yarrie and another of the women in the cell were calling out for help. Fay Yarrie died that evening in hospital. Noreen Jumbo, the other of the women in the cell that day, pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter in the Supreme Court in Brisbane on November 10, 1989.
As with the Glenn Allan Clark case, the police interviewed for this inquiry completely removed themselves from the incident. The impression received is that they thought it unnecessary to carry out any medical inquiry since the cause of death had been established. However, other evidence to the commission contradicted the police and could be grounds for believing the police were more involved in the death than was found.
Two Aboriginal girls, who witnessed the off-duty policeman apprehending Fay Yarrie outside the hotel, said they saw him violently assaulting her. One of them said she saw the policeman hold Fay Yarrie by the hair, instead of the wrist as he claimed. The witness said the policeman pulled Fay Yarrie down to the footpath with the result that her head hit the concrete three or four times. The other girl said she saw the policeman twist Fay Yarrie 's arm and kick her in the stomach and the back.
The evidence of these two witnesses is completely disregarded by the report. It states that the girls were probably too much under the influence of alcohol and other drugs, which they admitted taking, to remember what happened.
There were other witnesses at the hotel and later in the watch-house who gave evidence which contradicted that of the police. The report either discredits this evidence or does not treat it as important to the case. As in the Glenn Allan Clark case, the only evidence which is taken seriously is that of the police.
Often the only evidence available concerning the death of an Aboriginal person comes from the police. This was the case in the death of Monty Charles Salt, who died in police custody even though he had not been arrested and was not facing any charges.
Monty Salt was taken into custody at Laura in far north Queensland on June 27, 1987, because he was ill. Until a post-mortem was conducted, it was assumed that he was suffering delirium tremens as a result of a recent bout of heavy drinking. Having concluded that Monty Salt was suffering from the DTs and in urgent need of medical attention, a police officer took him into custody under the provisions of Sections 26 and 27 of the Mental Health Services Act 1974-1984.
As a result of medical advice obtained from the Royal Flying Doctor Service and other sources, the officer oversaw the administration of Valium, put Monty Salt on a mattress in the back of a police vehicle and proceeded to drive over a rough and dusty road towards Cooktown. The officer had arranged to meet Cooktown police halfway, and they to the Cooktown Hospital. However, he died in transit. It was later discovered that the amount of Valium given to him was far in excess of that prescribed.
Although medical opinion and the results of the post-mortem did not find that the Valium had contributed to Monty Salt's death, and in fact he had died of pneumonia, the case certainly brings into question the qualification of police to take into custody seriously ill people. In this case, there were also questions as to whether Monty Salt should have been transported in the manner he was. One can't help but suspect he would have been treated differently if he hadn't been an Aboriginal stockman perceived to have been suffering from drinking too heavily.
There is no doubt that racism is the underlying theme in relations between Aboriginal people and the police. Although the stated objective of the royal commission was to get closer to the truth of Aboriginal deaths in custody, it had clear limitations.
While the commission was often critical of individual police and prison officers and the system in which they worked, the commission is part of that same system. Many people lost faith in the commission when it published its interim findings in December 1988, believing that that report cleared the names of people who should have been charged with murder.
Unless the final report hands down strong recommendations that are fully implemented by federal and state governments, Aboriginal people will still be waiting, as they have for two centuries, for justice.