A police frisk left Mysa feeling dehumanised. New data reveals the extent of the practice in NSW | Australian Police and Police

Mysa Le felt “vulnerable and completely helpless” as police ordered her to undress in front of them so they could search her body for drugs.

Le was frisked at the Midnight Mafia music festival in Sydney in May 2018. She said two female police officers took her into a cubicle and told her to take off her clothes, without explaining what was happening.

“It just made me feel trapped,” she said. “It made me feel dehumanized.”

Le, who was 18 at the time, said the officers made a “suspicious” comment about her visible tampon string and had her lie naked and explain to them that she was on her period.

She said she found being strip-searched extra traumatic because she had been sexually assaulted by two people the year before.

Police confiscated her ticket and escorted her from the festival, “as if I was being arrested,” even though they found nothing, she said.

Her experiences are just one of thousands recorded in the most comprehensive set of internal New South Wales police records ever published.

For the first time, the public can see data obtained by the police under the state’s Access to Information Act. This data concerns searches, use of force and the issuance of instructions to proceed in the period 2017-2023.

The statistics were released on Wednesday by the Redfern Legal Centre (RLC) on its “police accountability dashboard”, which it said was the first of its kind in Australia.

According to Sam Lee, the RLC’s lead attorney, the project’s goal was to shed light on the many decisions she said police made “behind closed doors.”

“There is a problem with police accountability in NSW,” she said.

“It’s a government body. There’s a need for transparency and people need to know how the service is being used, and this is … a step towards more transparency.”

The dashboard found that Indigenous people were victims of 54.2% of all 15,668 use-of-force incidents recorded by police and 25.8% of 60,725 searches, despite representing just 3.4% of the New South Wales population.

Lee said the data told a “compelling story” about how police used their powers and she hoped it would hold them to account.

“I have no doubt, based on the work that I do and the statistics, that First Nations people are disproportionately over-policed ​​compared to other peoples,” she said.

The NSW Aboriginal Legal Service has said Aboriginal people, particularly teenagers and children, are “seriously over-represented as targets of police punitive measures”, such as searches and “excessive” use of force.

The RLC dashboard shows that Indigenous people in regional New South Wales were searched more often than non-Indigenous people, who were particularly searched in Sydney and other coastal areas.

Between 2017 and 2023, officers frisked four 11-year-old Indigenous children.

In 61.6% of all searches carried out by the police on site, including at festivals, they found nothing.

Le said police ignored her when she told them she was not carrying any illegal substances.

A police dog had “sniffed” her but did not sit down to indicate he had found drugs, she said.

Le’s experiences left her distrustful and fearful of the police, but they also inspired her to study social work.

She called on police to focus on harm minimisation and introduce mandatory training on how to deal with vulnerable and marginalised people rather than carrying out ‘unethical’ searches which she believed could further harm trauma survivors.

She said police should be responsible for publishing their own internal data to improve accountability.

Le filed a formal complaint with police in 2019. More than a year later, the police department’s internal investigation concluded that the chief officer involved had acted within the law.

A recent study by the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission found that only 30% of searches meet the threshold of ‘seriousness and urgency’ that officers must meet to legally justify a search.

Le is joining a class action lawsuit against the state government, led by RLC and law firm Slater & Gordon, seeking compensation for people who claim they were unlawfully frisked at music festivals.

NSW Police were approached for comment.