Joining millions of activists around the globe, tens of thousands of Australians have taken to the streets over the past two weeks to stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. However, for many of these protesters, the demonstrations are about more than standing in solidarity with their American counterparts — Australian activists have used the movement to place an international spotlight on Indigenous Australian deaths in police custody.
According to The Guardian’s database on Indigenous Australians’ deaths in custody from 2008 until today, 164 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had died while in police custody. As of June 2018, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made up 28% of Australia’s prison population, despite making up 2.8% of the country’s total population as of the 2016 census.
This widespread issue draws parallels to police brutality against African Americans in the United States. While no official data has been released on deaths in police custody in the U.S. despite the passage of the 2013 Death in Custody Reporting Act, African Americans in 2019 were 2.5 times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police officers. Broken down, 24% of all police killings in the U.S. in 2019 were of African Americans, despite only 13% of the nation’s population identifying as black.
Many Australian activists were further galvanized to take to the streets after a video surfaced of a Sydney police officer slamming an Indigenous boy to the ground on June 1. This video is similar to the countless ones in the United States which have documented instances of police brutality.
These activists have expressed how the issues in the United States and in Australia are one and the same. “It’s the same story on different soil,” 17-year-old activist Ky-ya Nicholson Ward said during a June 6 rally in Melbourne.
Justin Grant, an activist who attended the Melbourne rally, spoke on the historical relationship between the police and Indigenous Australians in an interview with Al-Jazeera. “[The police] are breaking our trust and scaring our people ... they [don't] respect our culture, our laws or our practices."
These parallels have been emphasized during the protests, with chants such as “I can’t breathe” taking on new meanings outside of their American context. Several protesters’ signs have echoed this sentiment, with phrases such as “Same Story, Different Soil” popping up on protest materials throughout the country.
However, others have diminished the similarities between the motivations behind the Black Lives Matter movement and Indigenous Australian deaths in police custody. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said during an interview with local Sydney radio station 2GB that: “There’s no need to import things happening in other countries here to Australia … Australia is not the United States.”
Black Lives Matter protests both within Australia and around the world are expected to continue throughout the coming weeks. As of this article’s publication, there have been no major responses to the protests within the Australian Parliament House to address Indigenous deaths in police custody.
Jacob Sutherland
Jacob is a recent graduate from the University of California San Diego where he majored in Political Science and minored in Spanish Language Studies. He previously served as the News Editor for The UCSD Guardian, and hopes to shed light on social justice issues in his work.