Indigenous Australian children are 18 times more likely to be placed on a secret police blacklist than non-Indigenous children, analysis of new data by the Greens has revealed.



Last year the Youth Justice Coalition – an alliance of peak legal and not-for-profit organisations that work towards youth justice – published a report that revealed the existence of the Suspect Target Management Program (STMP) in New South Wales.

According to the landmark report, the program stores data about young people and once they are placed on it they are far more likely to be in contact with law enforcement, which includes being stopped and searched, and visited at their homes, by police.

The program has been described by police as a "pro-active" policing approach, but legal groups have argued it is a prejudicial system that unfairly targets and profiles young people and Indigenous Australians by subjecting them to unnecessary contact with police.

The data relied on by the report authors was limited to a small number of police Local Area Commands (LACs), but NSW Greens MLC David Shoebridge has obtained further data from December 2015 to December 2017 under government information laws that shows how the scheme is used for more than 300 children across the state, broken down by race and postcode.

An analysis of the data by the Greens shows that almost half of all children placed on the blacklist are Indigenous, a vast over-representation when the small numbers of Indigenous children in the state are taken into account. The analysis shows that Indigenous children are 18 times more likely to be placed on the blacklist.