How proactive policing quotas sent NSW police searches soaring
The footage you're about to see reveals the key moments when a routine stop-and-search by NSW police officers crossed into the unlawful — ultimately costing the state $320,000.
This is the first time it's been made public outside a courtroom.
Ebonie Madden was jailed for six months in 2020 after police searched her and a companion Dylan on a street in the suburb of Penrith in Sydney's west.
This search was the basis for police charging Madden with resisting arrest, possessing a knife and theft.
But a judge later ruled that it was unlawful. Here's why.
The footage below comes from the body cameras attached to senior constable Michael Darnton and another officer who searched the pair.
It shows that Dylan, not Madden, is holding the black bag that the officers confiscate and search.
Loading...Now comes the moment when senior constable Darnton finds a knife and makes the arrest.
Listen closely and you'll hear Dylan say three critical words ("It's mine, chief") which the officers will later tell a court that they didn't hear.
The footage also captures comments from a third officer Danielle Munt ("That's what happens when you're mouthy. You get searched"). Munt will eventually agree in court that the comments were "unprofessional".
Loading...In December 2022, Madden won $320,000 after a judge found that Darnton did not have reasonable grounds to justify conducting a search, and the "clear inference is that Darnton's motivation was other than a legitimate exercise of police powers".
The judge also ruled Madden had been subject to malicious prosecution and false imprisonment. That ruling was upheld on appeal in February this year.
A spokesman for the NSW Police told the ABC: "The NSW Police Force will review the Court of Appeal judgement and consider ways to improve the way we handle such matters."
But the problem runs far deeper than this case, experts warn. And now, exclusive data that reveals Madden's search is just one among millions conducted by NSW Police as part of a statistics-driven strategy that has turbocharged police searches across the state.
Potentially millions of 'unlawful' searches
Only a tiny fraction of the 4.3 million person and vehicle searches conducted in NSW over the past two decades will ever be examined. But legal experts fear that in the lion's share, police may have abused their powers.
"My experience is unequivocally … that a very vast number of those searches will have been unlawful," says civil litigator and criminal lawyer Peter O'Brien.
"And what that actually means, in many instances, is that they are overstepping their mark."
It's a big call but UNSW Professor Vicki Sentas, an expert in policing practices, backs it.
"I do think that it's likely that the vast majority of searches in this state are conducted unlawfully," she told the ABC.
On an average day in NSW, police stop and search some 550 people and vehicles without a warrant.
Twenty years ago, that figure was 88.
Nearly 18 per cent of people searched are Indigenous, despite Indigenous people making up only 3.4 per cent of the population.
About 90 per cent of the time, the search finds nothing.
Since 2003-04, the number of searches has ballooned six-fold.
Over 20 years, that’s 4.38 million searches – and counting.
Stop-and-searches are part of a deliberate strategy of "proactive policing" used by NSW Police.
Not just conducting them. Counting them.
The idea is to reduce crime by increasing police interaction with the community.
But the ABC has unearthed a culture within the NSW Police of pressuring officers to boost search numbers, which legal groups say encourages the unlawful use of police powers.
Legal experts say this culture of proactive policing targets already-marginalised communities, and in particular, Indigenous Australians.
But while some former NSW Police officers have told the ABC that parts of the strategy have gone badly wrong, the NSW Police has defended the approach. A spokesman told the ABC that "proactive policing strategies have a direct correlation to crime reduction".
The ABC has gained exclusive access to data covering more than 4.3 million searches conducted by NSW Police during the past two decades.
Some has been obtained from NSW Police through freedom of information requests. Other figures are from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
The ABC has analysed the figures to reveal when and where you're most likely to be searched, who is most likely to be targeted and how proactive policing pushed search levels to unprecedented heights.
What we found is that search patterns vary significantly by location. Lower socioeconomic, migrant and Indigenous areas are often searched at higher rates, despite searches being no more likely to find anything.
This is The Hills, a well-off area in Sydney’s north west.
It’s among the police commands with the fewest searches in the state.
This shows the number of police searches across an average week in The Hills.
Here, you’re most likely to be searched if you’re out and about after between 8pm and midnight, especially on Fridays.
It’s a very different story in Liverpool, in Sydney’s south west – a more working class neighbourhood with more migrants.
It has the third-highest number of searches in the state.
Police conduct roughly five times as many searches per resident in Liverpool as in The Hills.
In Liverpool, searches peak throughout the week, as well as multiple times within a day.
People here are most likely to be searched on Tuesdays and Wednesdays between 10am and 11am.
Like elsewhere in NSW, Indigenous people in Liverpool are far more likely than non-indigenous people to be searched.
In Liverpool, 7.5 per cent of people searched in 2022-23 were indigenous.
Indigenous people make up just 1.6 per cent of the population here.
But the percentage in Liverpool looks low compared to Orana Mid-Western, a regional police division in the state’s west which has a much bigger Indigenous population.
In Orana Mid-Western, Indigenous people made up 77 per cent of searches in 2022-23.
Look closely and you'll see that the percentage of Indigenous searches in Orana Mid-Western has climbed almost every year for the past seven years.
This is despite the overall number of police searches in Orana Mid-Western falling — a trend mirrored state-wide.
NSW Police quietly abandoned search quotas in 2021-22, amid falling searches in almost every command … with a handful of exceptions.
Searches are still soaring in three police commands, all in Sydney's north west.
In Mt Druitt, Blacktown and Parramatta, police searches climbed by 59 per cent, 72 per cent, and 78 per cent in the five years to 2023.
But skyrocketing searches in these areas have done little to increase the chances of police finding something.
In all three jurisdictions – as well as across the state – “find rates" have remained stubbornly low.
Across the two decades, roughly nine in 10 searches found nothing.
Rising search rates in Mt Druitt, Blacktown and Parramatta show how proactive policing discriminates according to class and race, says O'Brien.
"There's definitely a class element to it. Over-policing and use of police powers is certainly connected with lower socioeconomic communities … [as well as] ethnic and indigenous communities," he says.
He adds that, in his experience, those police commands have a particularly strong focus on proactive policing and "are not sufficiently encouraging adherence to police responsibilities."
A spokesman for the NSW Police said that officers undergo "a significant amount of training to allow them to conduct their duties."
'Turning them over': inside a proactive crime team
One type of team is responsible for more than one in five searches across the state, according to ABC analysis of police data obtained under freedom of information laws.
The state's specialist Proactive Crime Teams are part of the broader push towards proactive policing.
They conduct more than half of searches in some police commands, including Liverpool (59 per cent), the Inner West (54 per cent) and Campbelltown (53 per cent).
These teams are all about the numbers, according to former proactive crime team officer Liam McKibbin.
"Statistics were absolutely one of the drivers, if not the main one," he says.
The former senior constable served NSW Police for 13 years and worked in the Kings Cross command's Proactive Crime Team from 2009 to 2014.
"There was an expectation of having a certain amount of stats per month – person searches, drug detections, move-ons, arrests. There wasn't a quota but certainly your numbers were looked at," he says.
Testimony from two of the officers involved in Ebonie Madden's arrest revealed a similar focus on numbers in the Nepean Proactive Crime Team.
Senior constable Darnton told the court that his team's productivity was "to an extent measured by the number of searches", while another officer confirmed that performance within the team was linked to "the number of searches performed by an individual officer."
The idea behind these teams was to get ahead of crime, McKibbin explains. Done well, he says, the approach had benefits but the focus on numbers worried him.
He recalls teams of eight-10 officers searching roughly 10 people a day — each — when he was on the job.
"I had real doubts about the efficacy of what we were doing …turning people over every day as part of our ordinary duties," he says.
The phrase "turning people over" is police slang for searching people.
McKibbin, now a defence lawyer, has a different view of proactive policing these days.
"It's quite a thing to stop someone and deprive them of their liberty, ask them to turn their pockets and pat them down," he says.
"For those individuals that you were searching and stopping and detaining, even if it was an entirely benign and polite reaction, I guarantee they'll be thinking about that interaction for some time."
Proactive policing or racial profiling?
Walking home from his mum's house. Catching the train. Delivering a fridge with his cousin. Looking for his 10-year-old son to call him inside for dinner.
These are a handful of the things Raymond Munro was doing when police stopped and searched him.
Sometimes he is stripsearched. Other times, it's just a pat down. Often, he says, it's the same officers coming back again. And again.
The 44-year-old Wiradjuri man says it was worse when he was younger. "I used to get searched sometimes four or five times a day," he says.
On one occasion, the former youth worker was searched by police just one block from his house. After finding nothing, they gave him a move-on direction and told him he would be charged if he was seen in the area again -- despite knowing he lived 100 metres away, he says.
Another time, police searched Munro in the inner west suburb of Erskineville. After they found nothing, Munro asked if he could leave. One of the two officers shoved him in the chest with both hands, then kneed him, Munro says. After that, they let him go.
Munro is no angel. His criminal record includes a 2005 conviction for an assault that left a man with serious disabilities. He was found guilty of affray in 2016.
The police record isn't spotless either. In 2018, Munro made a civil claim against NSW Police, alleging a series of unlawful searches. It was settled out of court.
Munro told the ABC he's been subject to so many police searches "it's not worth counting".
O'Brien says police "very commonly" believe that a person looks suspicious because of what they're wearing or their general appearance.
"And that can be as simple as the colour of their skin," he says.
Having made a 25-year career out of representing people mistreated by police, he says one kind of case hints at just how deep the problem runs.
"I've represented many off-duty police officers of colour, who, on their night out in capital cities around the country, have been stopped by police and arbitrarily searched," he says.
"I think it's true that there's a racial profiling that goes on in police officers' minds."
The NSW Police's own search data may well support this claim.
Statewide, in 2022-23, First Nations people made up just under 18 per cent of all person searches, according to figures from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
Among proactive crime times, that figure surges to 40 per cent, according to an ABC analysis of NSW Police data.
Only 3.5 per cent of the state's population is indigenous.
Among proactive crime teams, the share of searches of Indigenous people leaps to more than 80 per cent in some regional areas, including the police divisions of Central North (94 per cent), Oxley (85 per cent), Orana Mid-Western (86 per cent) and New England (83 per cent), all in the state's west.
Within Greater Sydney, Indigenous people made up more than half of proactive crime team searches in the police commands of Mt Druitt (61 per cent), Nepean (53 per cent) and Campbelltown (51 per cent).
Meanwhile, across all police searches, First Nations people made up more than 90 per cent in the local government area of Bourke, and roughly 75 per cent of searches in Dubbo and Moree Plains, an ABC analysis of BOCSAR figures shows.
"Our people have been disproportionately searched, questioned, charged, and refused bail by police for generations. Now we know that so-called proactive crime teams are driving this disparity even higher," says Aboriginal Legal Service CEO Karly Warner.
Raymond Munro says he was 10 the first time he was stopped and searched by police. After asking him to turn out his pockets, they took him to the station and questioned him. He says it was an hour before a lawyer found him and asked the officers why they thought they could interview a minor without a legal guardian present.
"They accused me of snatching a purse or something. They took me to the station and … a woman came up there and said, yeah, that I was the person who snatched her purse," he says.
Munro remembers he was scared but, also, unsurprised. "I was prepared for it. I just felt like this was normally how a lot of people were treated in that area, particularly Aboriginal people," he says.
Yet the data is clear: police are no more likely to find something when searching an indigenous person. And with strip searches, they are slightly less likely to find something, according to BOCSAR figures.
Warner says the figures point to a "systemic issue with policing".
"We've had police tell our teenage clients they can stop and search them whenever they want. Officers have stopped and searched our young clients in takeaway shops, on the street and at the shopping centre. They've repeatedly pulled them over in cars. They've patted them down in public and ordered them to sit down when being spoken to.
"This treatment is intentionally humiliating and degrading."
Where proactive policing went wrong
Police have the right to stop and search anyone in NSW if they "suspect on reasonable grounds" they have a prohibited weapon or drug on them.
They've had these powers in one form or another for more than 40 years. But it wasn't until the mid-2010s — a decade after proactive policing came to NSW — that search volumes reached unprecedented levels.
The idea was simple, according to former detective superintendent Mick Plotecki, who was key to introducing his own version of this system to NSW: the more police interfere with criminals, the more you reduce crime.
"What we found was when we increased the amount of times that police got out and actually talked to the community … the criminal activity flattened out and in fact dropped," he said.
Plotecki's proactive crime strategy was rolled out across parts of the NSW Police from 2002. It had a clear impact on reducing crime, according to police accounts set out in a lengthy industrial dispute that outlines the history of proactive policing in the state.
But the method of proactive policing ultimately adopted by the NSW Police shifted from Plotecki's early vision.
In 2006, the NSW government imposed crime reduction targets on the NSW Police for the first time. The NSW Police then introduced its own quotas for a whole range of offences, but also for "proactive" measures like person searches.
The change was profound. But for Plotecki, a move in the wrong direction.
"It was misinterpreted by a lot of people – and deliberately so, in some cases … A lot of people just failed to actually understand the importance of allowing the officer to use their professional judgement," Plotecki says.
With searches, that professional judgement involves weighing up, in the specific circumstances, whether the police have "reasonable suspicion". In short, a legal basis to conduct the search.
"You can't really put a quota on that," Plotecki says.
And worse are the dangers of pressuring police to chase the numbers. "There's a risk that you'll get an element that will do things that are outside the rules," he admits.
UNSW criminal law academic Vicki Sentas says the consequences of slapping quotas on commands have been far-reaching.
"Targets have absolutely driven the number of person searches," she says.
"And what they tell us, if you scrape behind the KPIs, is that police are misunderstanding the legal basis for their searches."
She points to the fact that the state's "find rate" — the percentage of searches that find an item or object – barely inched above 10 per cent across the two decades, even in the most "successful" jurisdictions.
"When we have really low find rates, it does raise alarm bells around search powers being used unlawfully," she says.
NSW Police declined to tell the ABC why it abandoned quotas for police searches in 2021-22. But Dr Sentas says the shift came amid sustained public critique of police practices – especially the police interpretation of "reasonable suspicion".
"Reasonable suspicion is not someone looking dodgy," she says.
"Reasonable suspicion is not someone wearing a hoodie. Reasonable suspicion is not someone averting their gaze from the police or not wanting to talk to the police or even running away from the police."
A spokesman for the NSW Police said: "There are multiple ways to measure performance by officers but no single definitive measure."
"We are committed to transparency and accountability, and we regularly review our practices to identify opportunities for improvement."
As for Raymond Munro, he says a lifetime of "harassment" by police has taken a toll. Every time he rounds a corner and sees a police officer or car, he braces himself, he says.
"It feels like living in bondage," he says.
"My mental health has been really affected … I don't eat much and I don't go anywhere. I just stay in bed most days."
Stop and Search is an exclusive miniseries from Background Briefing. Follow the podcast on the ABC listen app to hear how proactive policing ended in the shooting of a 20 year-old Sydney man.
Credits
Reporting: Paul Farrell and Inga Ting
Data: Inga Ting
Design and illustration: Alex Lim
Development: Thomas Brettell and Katia Shatoba
Photography: Jack Fisher and Sissy Reyes
Digital production: Inga Ting and Mark Doman
Fact checking: Benjamin Sveen
Notes about this story
- Circumstances of NSW Police searches described in the opening illustration are citations from court documents, the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission's 2023 Operation Tepito Final Report, and UNSW's 2019 report Rethinking Strip Searches by NSW Police.
- Search locations refer to where a person is searched, not where they live. This may affect comparisons of search numbers and/or rates in areas with high numbers of visitors, for example, central Sydney.
- Boundaries for some local government areas have changed over the period covered by the data. Search rates for these areas should be treated with caution.
- Search rates per 100 residents were calculated for local government areas using Australian Bureau of Statistics Estimated Resident Population figures for calendar years matched to financial years, e.g. 2022 → 2022-23
- Search rates per 100 Indigenous residents were calculated for the period 2010-11 to 2022-23 using ABS Estimated Resident Population figures for 2011, 2016 and 2021 matched to financial years, e.g. 2022 → 2022-23. Financial years between these release dates use the latest available year, except for 2010-11, which uses the ERP for 2011.
- Indigenous over-representation rates for local government areas are calculated by dividing the indigenous search rate by the non-indigenous search rate
- Data from the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) and NSW Police both use the current Police Area Command/Division structure. Records for Local Area Commands (from pre-2018) have been assigned to the equivalent command or division in the current structure. For example, a search in Ashfield local area command in 2017 would be assigned to Burwood police area command.
- The Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research suppresses numbers between 1 and 4 for confidentiality reasons
- BOCSAR figures for Total Aboriginality include a small number of Unknown Aboriginality
- For incidents with multiple people searched, BOCSAR selects the Aboriginal identifier ahead of Non-Aboriginal or Unknown.
- Analysis in the story excludes areas with an average of fewer than 20 searches a year
- Search outcomes percentages exclude a small number of people that refused to be searched