TRANSCRIPT
If you live in Victoria, you have may have heard of the term, designated area.
It's where police can search anyone without a warrant or reasonable suspicion, and it's often declared for police to manage mass protests.
Last November, Victoria Police declared Melbourne CBD and surrounds as a designated area for six months in response to weapon offences.
A legal challenge was then launched by activists, including organisers of an Invasion Day rally on Australia Day, as they argue it breached Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities.
Police later revoked the six-month long declaration, and the federal court will hand down findings of the legal challenge later in January.
A new study has shed light on a bigger issue of these warrantless searches.
Ilo Diaz is a researcher from Centre Against Racial Profiling in Melbourne.
His team has looked into data from 2019 to 2024 across the over 200 designated areas declared by Victoria Police.
“While designated areas are supposed to be a tool that Victoria Police use to supposedly keep everyone safe. What's happened is that it's racialising communities that are living in suspended rights areas, and they are the ones that are most impacted by these powers.”
Mr Diaz says areas like Dandenong and Brimbank, where residents are from multi-racial backgrounds, are often targeted for warrantless search when they are part of the designated areas.
“This means there's disproportionate impact, so for example, the 10 per cent most racialised communities, versus the 10 per cent least racialised - that's the whitest - they are impacted 3.5 times more than the low racialised communities.”
The Victorian government already banned racial profiling in 2015.
But more than a decade later, the state still needs to make more progress on this, according to Gemma Cafarella, a lawyer from Liberty Victoria.
“It's a very significant human rights issue. Liberty Victoria research shows that what happen when police use these powers is that 99 per cent of the time, they will be used against a person who has done absolutely nothing wrong, so there's a hit rate of just one per cent when these laws are used. The reason why that's such a significant problem is that it's a very significant impact on people's right to privacy, and their rights to just walk around the street without unwarranted intrusion into their lives.”
The Victorian Government issued a statement in response to the findings.
“Victorians deserve to be safe in public and there's no excuse for anyone to be carrying weapons around – that's why we've given police the powers to get weapons off our streets quickly and more often. Any allegations against members are taken seriously and investigated, and complaints about police conduct can be made to the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission.”
But Ms Cafarella says the Victorian Government needs to rethink using laws of designated areas for public safety.
“So what this study shows is that these powers are being used to entrench disadvantage to target racialised and low socioeconomic communities. We continue to say that the state government needs to rethink these laws, and go back to the drawing board and find solutions that actually address the drivers of crime, rather than to unfairly punish people of colour and people with socioeconomic disadvantage.”
