How proactive policing quotas sent police searches soaring by ABC

At a time when New South Wales Police were already under immense public scrutiny, this story used the police force’s own statistics to question the efficacy and legality of its “proactive policing” strategy.

Over many months, the ABC obtained vast amounts of data through freedom of information requests to understand when, where, why, and how people across the state were being stopped and searched without a warrant. The data contained an unprecedented level of detail, such as the date, times of day, and police team.

Next, we cross-matched these records with customised datasets from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and added geographic boundaries and population figures from Australian Bureau of Statistics datasets. We then analysed this expanded dataset for demographic, geographic and per capita trends, in consultation with independent experts, including statisticians and former police.

Our final analysis spanned 20 years and 4.3 million police searches. It showed that despite the vast majority of searches finding nothing, searches had ballooned six-fold over this period. We also found that lower socioeconomic, migrant and Indigenous areas were searched at higher rates, despite these searches being no more likely to find anything.

The challenge we faced was showing why these numbers should matter to a broad audience, most of whom have never been subjected to a police search.

One of the ways we achieved this was by opening the story with a single data point of a routine stop-and-search gone wrong. Using footage never previously shown outside court, we broke down step-by-step how quickly and easily searches could go wrong, and why this matters. We then “zoomed out” to reveal the scale of the problem and how this case is just one among potentially millions of unlawful searches.

We sought to humanise the data by using data-driven illustrations to convey the enormous scale and frequency of searches. These illustrations also incorporated testimony (in first-person quotes) from accounts of actual NSW Police searches in the dataset. We compiled these from enforcement commission reports, academic research, court cases, and other legal documents.

To underscore the unequal application of police powers, we included a second series of charts that compared and contrasted the pattern of police searches in different parts of the state, e.g. wealthy, disadvantaged, urban, regional, indigenous, etc.

To highlight how much searches varied by location, we created an interactive tool that allowed users to find their own police command or neighbourhood within a series of small multiple line charts. These charts showcased a huge amount of data, much of which this story made publicly available for the first time.

Lastly, our reporters went the extra mile to include testimony from Indigenous man Raymond Munro, who had previously filed a civil claim against police alleging unlawful searches. It took weeks to find an indigenous person willing to speak on record for this story, as many are understandably fearful that media attention would make them a further target for police.