An audio recording of a conversation between a police officer and an Indigenous woman has sparked outrage after the woman who recorded the conversation was filmed calling out racial abuse.
Key points:The video, posted on social media, was captured by a man who was on duty at the timeThe officer spoke to the woman for a number of minutes and she was recorded calling out racismThe video has been viewed more than 4 million timesThe video of the incident, which has since been shared thousands of times, shows the woman calling out racist comments and the officer responding in kind.
The footage, posted to YouTube by a member of the community group Beyond the Black Line, shows an officer speaking to a woman named Alyssa who is on duty with the Brisbane Police Service.
The woman was speaking with a friend about what is happening in the community and the interaction turned violent when the officer accused her of having a right of privacy.
“The lady asked him to call the police, he said that they can’t talk to you, that you have a right not to be recorded and she said, well, yeah, I’m just speaking my mind,” the officer said in the video.
“He asked her to come back inside and then said, ‘you can’t go into my room,'” the woman told ABC Radio Brisbane.
“And she’s like, well I’ll call the cops and I’m going to leave the house,” she said.
“We’re both out of here and he starts yelling at her and she goes, ‘No, I don’t want to hear that.'”
After the woman leaves the room, the officer continues to call her out.
“I’m going downstairs, call the [law enforcement] squad, she says, ‘I don’t need to be told, I want to talk to my lawyer,'” the officer tells the woman.
“So he said to her, ‘You need to call my lawyer, call him, call your lawyer,'” she said in a separate video.
The video was then shared on social networks, garnering more than 400,000 views.
“In the middle of this conversation, he’s shouting racist comments at her, calling her a liar, a whore, a f—ing whore,” the woman said in another video.
“He said, you know what I’m saying, you can’t call me a liar.
You can’t say what you want, you’re a liar.”
Ms Black said the officer, who is in his mid-30s, had also been verbally abusive.
“You can’t just say racist things like that, they’re not good enough,” she told ABC Brisbane.’
We’re not going to sit here and say, ‘Well we’ll sit here until he apologises and then we’ll talk about it’, she said.
“She said she and other people who were part of the Beyond the BLACK Line community were not surprised by the officer’s behaviour.”
When we were doing the filming, I was saying, ‘We’re here, we’re not talking about this anymore’, but I was being rude,” Ms Black said.”[But] he just kept saying racist things, like, ‘This is not acceptable, it’s not fair.
You don’t deserve this, this is not the way you behave’.”‘
I don’t feel comfortable with a white officer’Ms Black, who said she was born in Australia but lived in the Northern Territory for several years, said she had been subjected to racism by police.”
If he’s just doing his job, it doesn’t make him a racist, but if he’s a white person, then he’s going to be doing his racist job,” she explained.”
They’ve just taken our rights away from us, so I don’ really know what to do with it.
“Topics:law-crime-and-justice,community-and/or-society,police,britains-university-football-league,australiaFirst posted March 23, 2020 14:54:20Contact Jacqui FentonMore stories from Queensland
