Vol. 76/No. 7      February 20, 2012

Terrance Briscoe, a 28-year-old Aboriginal man, was arrested in Alice Springs, central Australia, by the Northern Territory Police for public drunkenness at 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 4. Five hours later he was found dead in his cell.

Ray Jackson from the Indigenous Social Justice Association told the rally that, as always, there is the “so-called official version” and the “family version” of what happened.

According to the association, since 1980 more than 400 Blacks have died in police custody.

Police reportedly told the family that Briscoe hurt his head when he fell over before being locked away. But two men who were arrested with him said he was beaten by up to five officers, one of them a woman.

His aunt, Patricia Morton-Thomas, told the Northern Territory News that the conflicting stories made the family suspicious. Her nephew, she pointed out, received no medical care for the injury.

In a media statement, Jackson said that for an Aborigine or Torres Strait Islander “arrest becomes a death sentence followed by the obligatory whitewash and cover-up.”

Paddy Gibson from Stop The Intervention Collective Sydney told the protest that they would be “pushing hard for justice and for the police to be prosecuted.” He said that even if Briscoe was not assaulted, the negligence of the police puts “this death at their feet.” STICS was formed to campaign against the 2007 federal takeover of Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Briscoe’s uncle Daniel Taylor, a representative of Amnesty International, and Robert Dow, who resigned from the Northern Territory Police over such instances of cop brutality, also spoke at the protest.

Today, about one in four prisoners are indigenous, even though Aboriginal Australians make up just 2.5 percent of the total population. Thirty-two percent of people living in the Northern Territory are indigenous. There, the imprisonment rate for Aboriginal people has risen 46 percent in the last decade from 523 prisoners per 100,000 adults in 2001 to 762 prisoners per 100,000 in 2011.
 
 
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