A FREMANTLE author has called for a reckoning of WA’s “racist” knife laws after being randomly stopped for a search at the Freo Railway Station last week. 

On Friday, May 30, Khin Myint was detained by police officers at Fremantle Train Station and was subject to a wand search to determine whether he was holding a knife. 

“They wanted to wand me to see what was in my pockets, and then they demanded that I empty my pockets because I had things made of metal like my phone,” Mr Myint said. 

The WA government introduced legislation in December last year which provides police officers with the power to conduct “random, non-invasive scans” for edged weapons “anywhere, anytime within specified Knife Wanding Areas” with the use of hand-held metal detectors. 

People found in possession of knives without a lawful excuse are faced with a maximum three years in prison and a $36,000 fine. 

• Author Khin Myint says WA’s new knife laws probably won’t reduce crime rates – but will disproportionally impact marginalised people. Photo by Katherine
Kraayvanger

“Any person who refuses to undergo an edged weapon scan, or refuses to produce an identified object when requested, commits an offence and faces the same penalties,” a WA Police media release read. 

According to police, the legislation was “inspired” by Queensland’s ‘Jack’s Law’ legislation and was brought in following the Bondi knife attacks in April last year. 

However, random searches have been known to have “unintended racist outcomes”, according to Mr Myint, and is the sort of law which was deemed “unconstitutional” overseas, specifically in New York in 2013. 

“It really stunned me that something could have arrived in WA that sparked a global conversation about race, that was eventually found by [US] courts to be unconstitutional, specifically because it was racially discriminatory,” Mr Myint said. 

“The mayor [of New York] ran it as a policy to try and win over the public for 10 years, and it failed, because it hadn’t decreased weapon crime, but what it did show over that decade was that it was disproportionately black, Hispanic, and brown people who got targeted.

“I lived around the world in the years after New York, and I saw race conversations happening in every Western country I stayed in [like England and France]; they all know what the Stop and Frisk thing was in the States, because that was the global reference point… the world has resoundingly noted that these laws have unintended racist outcomes that damage particularly lower class brown people, children, and people with mental health issues.” 

According to WA Health, the number of patients admitted to public hospitals for injuries caused by knife assaults has dropped in the last 12 years. 

Ambulance callouts to stabbings have increased, although this also includes knife accidents and incidences of self-harm. 

WA Police, who highlighted they’d conducted 50,000 edged weapons searches since December, were contacted to determine the actual number of weapons seized but were unable to respond in time for publication.

Mr Myint says he’s “frustrated” there wasn’t more debate about the legislation before it was brought in, both from politicians and community, especially given the potential racial discrimination known to be associated with ‘random’ searches. 

“There were protests in the States, it was on the front page of the New York Times for weeks on end, but in Perth we’re just so complacent and it makes me feel like my city is backward and parochial which I think it is… here it’s just fucking crickets,” Mr Myint said.

“Fremantle is progressive, and people like to think they care about race, but racial literacy is so low here, people don’t even notice when a law like this comes in that it’s a race issue. 

“I get really frustrated with [WA] sometimes and its version of progressivism, because I don’t know that people really care that much about race issues, they care about them abstractly.” 

Mr Myint says the random searches could disproportionately affect WA’s most vulnerable, including Indigenous people, and people with mental health issues, and could put pressure on WA’s already precarious prison system.

“I think people focus on the liberty side of it, without remembering that the main complaint people had was that it meant a lot of brown people ended up in jail because of small drugs crimes [once they were searched],” Mr Myint said. 

Drugs

“[The New York politicians] might have had good intentions here, but what police officers were actually doing was finding drugs on people and thinking, if the person didn’t look so good, that they could use it as an excuse to stick that person in jail.

“A massive number of people ended up in jail or with legal trouble because of it.” 

Mr Myint would also like to see more dialogue, from the Fremantle community and politicians alike around how the legislation could affect its at-risk citizens especially given it was rushed through government. 

“I’m fairly sold on the idea that it’s racist, because what they discovered in New York was that it didn’t actually solve the problem… if it did, there’d be a stronger argument for it,” Mr Myint said. 

“Mike Bloomberg, who was the New York mayor at the time, publicly apologised in quite a long speech where [he admitted] it fractured the community, it broke down relations, it was racist, and it didn’t do any good… he’s a somewhat conservative politician admitting he fucked up.”

by KATHERINE KRAAYVANGER