I can’t comprehend how things like this are still happening.
(That last link is a link round-up – another is here.)
The story I’m talking about is this (and apologies for taking a week or so to blog about it): Mr Ward (his family have asked that his first name not be used), an indigenous man, was arrested after being charged with drink-driving.
He was locked into a metal, un-air-conditioned lock-up van (operated by a private contractor, GSL) on a hot summer’s day for a journey of several hundred kilometres.
He died. With third degree burns from the metal of the lock-up.
I cannot imagine this happening to a white person. Unfortunately, my reaction when I first read this story (hat tip: Christina at Saying Nothing Charmingly and Trin at Salt in the Air) was that it was all too imaginable in a still-racist Australia.
Literally adding insult to injury: apparently, on facebook, people are saying things like this:
Marty Rodgers wrote
at 15:59 on 18 December 2008
Maybe if they don’t get arrested, there will be less deaths in custody. Stop blaming the police. Look closer to home….
Marty, sweetheart. Where to start? How about this: how many of your white buddies have been arrested and taken to prison for drink-driving?
The fact that it is incredibly unlikely that a white person charged with drink-driving would then have been arrested and transported several hundred kilometres is only the first part of the racism illustrated by this horrendous incident. And if it did happen, which it wouldn’t, it sure as hell wouldn’t happen in an un-air-conditioned metal lock-up van like this. And if that happened, which it wouldn’t, there would have been comfort stops.
And even with all that, which wouldn’t happen, if the hypothetical white person had died, there would be such an enormous national outcry it wouldn’t be funny. There would be cries for the immediate closure of GSL. There would be fund-raising. There would be celebrities.
None of that is happening, at least, not on the scale it would be if a white person had died.
And that’s only one thing that’s wrong with Marty’s statement.
Many of the links display the level of racism shown by the people driving the van. I’m going to leave you with a couple quotes from this one (by no means the whole thing, or the worst of it, just quotes I want to use to illustrate something).
So, compare:
Ms Stokoe said she assumed the air-conditioning was working in the rear because there was no problem with the air-conditioning in the front cab and Ward, whose family does not want his last name published for cultural reasons, would have banged on the side of the van if there was a problem.
with:
Ms Stokoe and Mr Powell made no stops on the 3 1/2-hour journey until they heard a thud in the back of the van when they were just outside Kalgoorlie.
When they pulled over to check on Ward, Ms Stokoe said, they did not open the van’s back doors completely because it was not procedure and Ward might have been trying to escape.
“If he was mucking around and it was an escape attempt, we would look like idiots,” she said.
(emphasis added in both sets of quotes)
In other words: “he would have banged on the side of the van if there was a problem [implying this is how they usually do things], but if he had banged on the side of the van, we would have thought he was trying to escape.”
Logic FAIL.
That is only one of the many, many, many things wrong with this entire mess.
Australia is still a racist country.
The idea that he would have banged on the side of the truck astounds me, even without the logic fail. Someone in physical distress is required to have the energy and the ability to make a noise over the sound of the road and the engine in order to get attention?
And yes, the racism in this is unbelievable, both in the incident itself, and the reactions to it.
So much LOGIC FAIL – not just with the transport guards, but also with the commenters you highlight. “Appalling” doesn’t begin to do it justice.
Yeah. I keep wanting to say it’s beyond belief, but part of the problem is that it’s really not.
And Deborah, yes, noise. That slipped my mind as I was writing, drowned out (as it were) by the “maybe he was trying to escape!” ridiculousness.
Full-body-hitting-the-floor thuds are quite a lot louder than fists-on-hot-metal thumps.
So how do they know he wasn’t thumping the side of the van before that?
Thanks for linking to me.
I have links to many news reports of Mr Ward’s inquest in various News Updates.
I have now brought them together on the one page which I will be updating as new reports are published in the media.
Link to Mr Ward’s inquest news reports
Robbo
[...] Not good enough: indigenous man dies in custody [...]
Thanks Robbo. It’s great to have them all in one place, and I should have made your link round-ups more clear, anyway.
Your blog seems like a great resource generally, by the way.
Deeply disturbing case indicating so, so many things wrong with the correctional system, and what a dreadful way for that poor man to die.
He was an Indigenous man, raised in Australia, being treated unfairly by authorities. Why on earth would he think they’d CARE if he banged on the side of the van to indicate discomfort?
[...] Not good enough: indigenous man dies in custody « Wallaby The story I’m talking about is this (and apologies for taking a week or so to blog about it): Mr Ward (his family have asked that his first name not be used), an indigenous man, was arrested after being charged with drink-driving. [...]
[...] undoubtedly reduced my overall libertarian score. When a black man in the US, an Aboriginal man in Australia, a Maori boy in New Zealand can be killed and the killers not prosecuted, or let off, or convicted [...]