Joe, one things we should agree on is since the coppers in places like WA, Queensland, NT and elsewhere have mostly dropped their program of 'Aboriginal Assisted Suicide in Custody' you know, found hanging in the cell in the morning, numbers have evened out somewhat, CCTV will do it all the time. The fact is if you are an Aboriginal person, you are about 30 times more likely to die in police custody than a non-aboriginal person. Simply because as an Aboriginal person you are 30 times more likely to be in custody in the first place.

Simply because as an Aboriginal person you are 30 times more likely to be in custody in the first place.
Paul1405,
How is that ?

Paup,

Your last two sentences have a certain logical connection to them: thirty times as many people in custody or incarcerated - thirty times as many deaths in custody. I'd quibble with those ratios, but they don't actually suggest anything out of the ordinary.

The question surely is: why the hell are indigenous people - on your figures - committing thirty times as as many offences as non-Indigenous people, assuming that nobody is being fitted up ?

I had a good mate up on one community who turned out to have done two years for manslaughter. I asked him, carefully, about it and he just grinned. Young fellas there used to come down to the city, pinch a flash car and drive it back up before dumping it into the Murray. Great joke. And all of the wineries in the district had at some time been broken into by blokes from the community; one explained to me how and where they broke in; occasionally the blokes would be found by police under a tree half a mile away, passed out.

One lawyer acquaintance was grumbling to me about having to always get Aboriginal kids off any charges, including one fourteen-year-old who had twenty eight offences on his sheet. And i remember a young bloke in Yatala prison who wanted to be a lawyer when he got out; he was in for causing the death of an innocent motorist who he had run into on the wrong side of the road in a stolen car, fleeing a petrol station without paying. He's probably an elder by now, around fifty years old, perhaps on a legal rights committee. Maybe head of it.

Joe

A new development,

The Howard appointed, and mate of Abbott's, a flunky of the LNP, Dyson Heydon has been shown to be a serial sex abuser of women at the High Court of Australia. Heydon was honoured with an Companion of the Order of Australia, should someone shown to have engaged in grubby sexual behaviour be holding such an honour? In my view, certainly not!

Joe,

Yes, it is difficult for us white people to understand
the high rates of alcoholism, family violence and all
the problems associated with high rates of crime
amongst our Indigenous population.

Domestic violence, alcohol, drug abuse, - where does all
that come from?

Could it be - intergenerational family disfunction in
many Indigenous communities, lack of job skills and
employment opportunities impacting on them. Mental
health issues, that result in domestic violence,
alcohol, and drug abuse? Poor health doesn't help.

Additionally perhaps there could be factors like the
loss of cultural knowledge in many Indigenous communities
which may have disrupted traditional values and norms of
appropriate social behaviour being transferred from one
generation to the next.

I'm sure that as a researcher you could easily find answers
to your own questions. That after all is your area of
expertise.

All the rest of us can do is guess and of course put our own
spin onto things.

Joe,

My husband remembers arriving by bus in the evening
as a young lad and getting off at his bus stop
opposite a typical pub at pub closing time. In those
days pubs closed early. The foot path around the pub
being full of drunks looking for a fight or lying
on the pavement passed out.

This was a daily occurrence at all pubs in suburbia.
It was hard to avoid at closing time. It was interesting
to see lined up on window-sills a multitude of glasses
full of beer.

This was a typical scene of many Aussie neighbourhoods.

Our Indigenous people are not the only ones capable of
passing out after drinking. It seems to be a shared
Aussie tradition.