Chris Minns says police not to blame for Aboriginal imprisonment as country mayors push for crime inquiry
The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has defended the way police interact with young Aboriginal people and said the force is not to blame for disproportionate Indigenous incarceration rates.
Speaking in Bourke, in far western NSW, Minns also said he was reluctant to meet the demands of the Country Mayors Association, police union and some Nationals MPs to hold an inquiry into regional crime.
The premier made the comments in an interview with Guardian Australia earlier this month during a tour of the Barwon electorate, where he met police, mayors and Aboriginal community leaders.
Data from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research shows children and teenagers aged between 10 and 17 in Barwon are more likely than the state’s average young person to come into contact with police. Aboriginal people made up 58.9% of NSW’s juvenile detention population at the end of June.
Minns’ outback trip came after a series of scathing reports from the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission about NSW police’s treatment of Aboriginal people and an ongoing investigation into the violent arrest of a disabled teenager in August.
Asked if he was concerned about over-policing of young Aboriginal people in Barwon and in regional NSW more broadly, Minns said he was “concerned about the level of Aboriginal incarceration across the board”.
“That’s a really complex problem that we have to try and solve,” he said.
“We can’t just put it all on the police’s shoulders or blame the police, because often a whole series of things have gone wrong before there’s an interaction between an Indigenous youth and a NSW police officer.”
Minns said people in Barwon had raised the issue of youth crime with him and it would be “wrong to dismiss” it but he was “reluctant” to hold a parliamentary inquiry into regional crime.
“The NSW police have got a really good idea about how to combat crime, build community safety and have more security in regional communities,” he said. “I’d rather just get on with it.”
The police minister, Yasmin Catley, said a parliamentary inquiry would only delay action and the government was committed to supporting young people.
The campaign for the inquiry is being led by the Gunnedah shire mayor, Jamie Chaffey, who chairs the Country Mayors Association, which has released a report showing there are higher crime rates and fewer police resources in regional NSW than Sydney.
Chaffey – who has close ties to the National party and unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in 2019 – insisted his push for the inquiry was not political.
“This is about the quality of life in rural NSW. When we know we have people scared to live in some communities … it’s our job to make sure that without fear or favour we call that out,” he said.
The MP for Barwon, Roy Butler, an independent whose massive rural electorate makes up nearly half the state, said he was concerned a regional crime inquiry would generate headlines while missing an opportunity to “insist on solutions”.
“I understand the request is really about youth crime and poor and at times very disturbing behaviour,” he said. “The solutions are complex but are actually already understood.”
A former police administrator, Butler called on the government to support police by addressing the lack of early intervention services for young people and “back good community leaders and programs”.
“I am aware of highly successful locally grown programs that struggle for funding and frankly well known services that are paid to deliver programs and don’t achieve the standards I expect,” he said.
Butler said the disparity between how much communities struggled with youth crime was “often driven by the history of each community in the styles, and at times, failures of leadership over time”.
The general manager of Brewarrina shire council, David Kirby, said crime, especially youth offending, in the town was so scarce it was “not even comparable” with neighbouring areas.
He attributed some of its success to hiring locals to build roads and other infrastructure and to the residents themselves.
Walgett, about 120km from Brewarrina, is trying to shake its reputation as a disadvantaged and troubled town.
Police arrested children as young as 13 in there after a spate of alleged breakins – but youths are always referred to diversionary programs where possible, according to the acting commander of NSW police’s western district, Gerard Lawson.
“Young kids don’t need to be in jail unless they’re really dangerous to the community,” he said.
The chief executive of the local Aboriginal medical service, Christine Corby, said Walgett was struggling with a lack of housing and a loss of services.
“While we’re talking about young people and crime, you need to look at the pointy end of what’s here in the community,” Corby said.