In December,the Queensland Law Society wrote to Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman urging action on the intoxication laws to lower the number of First Nations people being taken into custody,where almost one-quarter of deaths are among those suspected of committing public order offences.
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That letter detailed 2019-20 financial year statistics that showed police were over 11 times more likely to pursue such charges against First Nations people than the rest of the population.
Dominic Brunello,chair of the QLS’s criminal law committee,said there was a “need for reform” of public order offences in the state to ensure they reflect community standards.
He warned that any change to intoxication laws needed to also ensure public-nuisance offences – which fall under the public-order banner but carry higher penalties and include disorderly or offensive behaviour or language – were not used more by police instead.
“Such laws should only be initiated when it is in the public interest to do so,in a manner that does not disproportionately affect socially or economically disadvantaged groups,” Brunello told this masthead in a statement.
“Public-order offences give police wide discretionary powers in deciding who and when to prosecute,and this has the capacity to result in the selective enforcement of these laws. In our view,there remains a need for reform.”
University of Queensland law professor Tamara Walsh,who also leads the institution’s deaths in custody project,said you would be “hard-pressed” to find people beyond those groups being criminalised under the laws.
“You can’t make a law for the many when you’re actually only trying to control the behaviour of a few,because you just inevitably catch people in your net that you don’t want to,” Walsh said. “I hope there will be a review of the public nuisance[laws].”
A 2017 paper by Walsh in theGriffith Law Review,citing the most recently available public nuisance court data from 2014,noted that of a total of 35,000 charges or fines that year,9 per cent were due to offensive language against police.
“A significant proportion of these offences were committed by Indigenous people,” she wrote.
Speaking at the inquiry,Gollschewski said police used the public intoxication offence as a “low-impact way” of intervening to avoid an escalation in behaviour,or use of other offences.
Queensland’s Chief Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Officer,Haylene Grogan,told the inquiry the need for change was “clear and evidence-based”.
“We need to find solutions to public drunkenness outside the criminal justice system,” she said. “We need to tackle the underlying social and emotional wellbeing issues driving this vicious cycle.”
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