Half Aboriginal youths in custody bashed: committee told Source: AAP | Published: Friday April 9 1:45:05 PM Western Australia's Police Commissioner Bob Falconer today urged Aborigines to officially complain about police abuse, after allegations that more than half the Aboriginal youths in custody were beaten. Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS) chief executive Dennis Eggington, said the figures showed Aboriginal youths were in crisis. An ALS submission yesterday to a state parliamentary committee on crime said 52 per cent of Aboriginal youths in custody were beaten and only a third were informed of their rights. Eighty-five per cent of Aboriginal youths in custody were verbally abused and 65 per cent were pushed around, the submission said. Mr Falconer today said the ALS figures did not match up with official police complaints. "If these things are happening, make a complaint and let them be investigated and the investigation will be oversighted in every instance by the ombudsman, who is independent of the police," he told ABC radio. Mr Falconer said ethnicity did not show up in police complaints and that political correctness needed to be overcome to identify complaints from Aborigines. "In about half of all the complaints over the last three calendar years we do not know the ethnicity of the complainant," he said. "That's something we need to get over. We can't have it both ways if we need to identify, particularly, Aboriginal people." The ALS survey also showed Aboriginal youths made up only four per cent of the youth population, but accounted for 20 per cent of juvenile court appearances. The Deaths in Custody Watch Committee today backed the ALS claims, saying that they referred complaints to the ALS. "The Watch Committee frequently receives calls from distressed relatives who claim ill treatment of Aboriginal juveniles while in police custody," the committee's executive officer Kath Mallott said. ------------------------------------------------------- RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." RecOzNet2 is archived for members @ http://www.mail-archive.com/