Victorian police may be unequally targeting people perceived to be African with warrantless search powers, a Guardian analysis can reveal.
It also shows Victoria police are failing to collect data on ethnic appearance – to ensure racial profiling is not occurring – in about 20% of searches. This is despite a 2013 commitment to monitor whether discriminatory searches were being carried out.
Hit rates reveal disparities
Guardian Australia’s analysis examined warrantless pedestrian drug and weapons searches (in 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2023) by uniformed general duties police – where officers must form a reasonable suspicion that a person is carrying a prohibited item before searching.
It looked at the disparity in the “hit rate” for police searches of people of African appearance versus people of white appearance.
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Hit rate analysis is a standard way to identify racial profiling. The idea is that if police say they are stopping people based on reasonable suspicion, then we should see similar success rates across different racial groups.
For example, if police stop and search 100 African-appearing people and 100 white-appearing people, and both groups were truly selected based on a “reasonable suspicion”, then drugs should be found on about the same number of people – say, 10 in each group.
But if police consistently find drugs less often on African-appearing people than on white-appearing people, despite stopping them just as often, it suggests that police may be relying on flimsier reasons to stop African-appearing people or deem them suspicious, which could indicate racial profiling is occurring.
Victorian police do not publish detailed data on stop-and-search instances, so this analysis uses figures obtained by the Centre Against Racial Profiling under freedom-of-information laws. You can read more on the full methods below.
Across Melbourne, police were significantly less likely to find drugs when searching people of African appearance than those of white appearance.
The odds of a “hit” were about 27% lower for African-appearing people. This gap is a red flag suggesting that a lower threshold of suspicion is being applied to African Australians.
The pattern was strongest in Melbourne’s north-west corridor, where many of the city’s migrant and multicultural communities live. In Brimbank and Melton – areas that also rank among Melbourne’s most socioeconomically disadvantaged – searches of African-appearing people were about 86% less likely to uncover drugs than searches of white-appearing people.
The chair of Victoria’s South Sudanese Community Association, Andrew Ohide, said young South Sudanese Australians often told him they were frequently stopped by police without a reason.
“The racial issues are always happening between the young South Sudanese and the police. It’s occurring regularly,” he said.
“They keep stopping them. We don’t know whether that’s racial or not but they always stop them without any suspicion, without any warrant.”
Ohide said any police officer engaging in racial profiling should be held accountable.
Key data still missing
Victoria police officially prohibited racial profiling – making policing decisions based on stereotypical assumptions about race, colour and ethnicity – in 2015, becoming the first force in Australia to do so.
Experts Guardian Australia spoke to said that to track the occurrence (or lack) of racial profiling in police searches it is necessary to have reliable information on people searched.
In the Haile-Michael federal court case, 19 young people of African background alleged they were assaulted, stopped and searched by police around public housing towers between 2005 and 2009.
Known as the Haile-Michael case after one of the plaintiffs, it was settled in 2013 on the condition that police review training and “field contact” practices, which can involve stopping and searching people in public, and recording their personal information.
After the case, Victoria police in 2013 accepted recommendations made in an independent report it commissioned – including making reporting on perceived ethnic appearance mandatory – and undertook to revise its “field contact” policy in line with the proposed reform.
But the recommendation to make reporting of perceived ethnic appearance mandatory was never implemented and, as a result, Guardian Australia’s analysis shows racial appearance was not recorded in about 22% of pedestrian drug-search records and 20% of weapons searches. In a 2016 report, Victoria police said collecting data on ethnic appearance “presents complexities”. It said ethnic appearance is included in a field contact report “where possible by Victoria Police members when it is deemed to assist in identification”.
Another recommendation – to develop monitoring of disproportionate policing of different ethnic groups at statewide, regional, local and individual officer levels – was also never implemented. Victoria police cited privacy obligations and “the quality of current data collection of ethnic appearance” as barriers to internal monitoring. This is despite the fact that the same data underpinning Guardian Australia’s analysis was released by Victoria police under freedom-of-information laws, demonstrating that such monitoring was both technically feasible and possible within existing privacy frameworks.
Dr Berhan Ahmed, the chief executive at youth and community services organisation Africause, said analysis’ findings that police may be unequally targeting people perceived to be African were “serious”.
He said he was concerned Victoria police have not implemented mandatory reporting of ethnic appearance.
“This system needs to look at this as a justice issue,” he said.
Rebecca Wickes, the director of the Griffith Criminology Institute, said that while there may be racial profiling occurring, it was not possible to be definitive as there were significant issues with the underlying data recorded by police.
“The literature provides a great deal of support for unconscious or conscious bias towards different racial groups,” she said.
“But we must be very careful of the data that we use to be able to definitively say that bias is systematically occurring in stop and search situations.”
Wickes said that the lack of detailed location information and high rate of missing appearance data meant that more rigorous statistical analyses were not possible, and so advised caution in interpreting the results.
Police response
Victoria police did not respond to Guardian Australia asking why the force has not implemented mandatory ethnic mandatory reporting despite previously recognising the importance of this and agreeing to revise the field contact practices after the Haile-Michael case.
Providing a general statement, a Victoria police spokesperson said searches could only be conducted when police have lawful grounds to do so.
“Police are trained to respond to a person’s behaviour, not their background or ethnic appearance,” the spokesperson said.
Officers are required to make a field contact report when they have obtained details from someone they suspect has committed or is about to commit an offence or may be able to assist with the investigation of an indictable offence, the spokesperson said.
Police are trained to respond to a person’s behaviour, not their background or ethnic appearanceVictoria police
“Where possible to assist with identification, police make a field contact report record a description of the person’s physical appearance and their perception of the person’s ethnic appearance, the spokesperson said.
“Victoria police is committed to ensuring every member of the community who comes in contact with police is treated with dignity, respect, fairness and that their human rights are protected.
“All police members undertake mandatory human rights training. We have strong policy and guidelines for police to ensure everyone is treated with dignity and respect in line with human rights”
Chris Cuneen, a professor of criminology at the University of Technology Sydney, said the analysis was important and that it “broadly conforms with what we know” about racialisation and policing.
“Some of the other work that’s been done on stop and searches in Australia, which has been in relation to First Nations young people and the use of knife searches in New South Wales, showed a high proportion of searches of Aboriginal young people and a low success rate or hit rate,” he said.
Cuneen said that searches were not necessarily bad if done in a fair and equitable way but that if they particularly targeted people based on their race or ethnicity then it could have “compounding negative effects” on police relations with that group.
Wickes also highlighted the issues with warrantless searches generally.
“I definitely think there needs to be more work as it relates to the systematic and accurate collection of data, as it relates to stop and searches, because these are violations of people’s privacy and their right to move about freely in the community,” she said.
“So I think that at the very least the stop and search data should be as accurate and reliable as it could possibly be, and it is the responsibility of the police to ensure this occurs.”
Quick GuideHow we analysed police dataShow
The data analysis for this story was performed by Monika Sarder, and used a cleaned version of Victoria Police stop-and-search data (50,000+ warrantless searches from 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023), processed in R to improve quality, standardise formats, and add geographic fields.
The analysis looked at drug searches on foot by uniform police, comparing outcomes for white- and African-appearing people using hit-rate methods.
Rates by area were also examined.
There are a number of limitations to the analysis, including:
Racial appearance is recorded based on the officer’s perception at the time of the search, using a fixed set of predefined categories. These do not reflect the individual’s self-identified race or ethnicity.
Although racial appearance has been a required field since 2019, 42% of all search records (22,117 entries) are missing this information. In some cases, officers selected “Other” when uncertain.
Since 2020, Victoria Police have combined “Mediterranean” and “Middle Eastern” categories into “Mediterranean/Middle Eastern”, meaning outcomes for people perceived to be of Middle Eastern or ‘Arab’ appearance are not visible in the data.
You can read about the methods in more detail here.
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