Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
According to ABC reports, scanning Aboriginal people for illegal weapons is “concerning”. Should police target grandmothers in parks just to balance out the stats? Or focus on high-risk precincts? If you carry weapons, you might go to jail. Simple.
In Queensland, we have so-called Jack’s Law, named after a 17-year-old boy who was tragically killed on the Gold Coast in 2019 after being stabbed once in the chest. The law allows police to use handheld metal detectors to scan people at random for weapons in any public place without a warrant.
Naturally, the ABC managed to find the exact angle required to turn a life-saving safety initiative into an exercise in systemic racism: “One in 10 people searched for weapons in QLD identified as First Nations.”
The issue is that of the 160,997 people who were scanned over the last year, 11 percent identified as First Nations. According to the ABS and Census data, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people represent only 4.6% of the Queensland population.
So running the basic arithmetic reveals that First Nations people are roughly 2.4 times more likely to be scanned than their population proportion suggests. Which means, according to media logic, the Queensland Police must be racist, or perhaps the metal detectors themselves are? I’m not sure.
But let’s think about this rationally.
If you were a police officer in Queen Street Mall tasked with finding illegal weapons, and up ahead you saw a mother pushing a pram, and two Aboriginal teenagers—who are you going to scan? Legally, you could search the baby. But who is statistically more likely to be carrying a knife?
What about those two teenagers versus a shifty-looking lawyer with a briefcase on his lunch break? Well, obviously the lawyer—we can’t trust lawyers. What about a secondhand car salesman? Again, obviously the salesman. What if a federal politician walks past walking his dog? Scan the politician—who knows what kind of backroom corruption he’s concealing in those pockets.
Jokes aside, my point is simple: if an officer sees an elderly lady with a walking frame and two teenagers hanging around in a high-crime area, who is the more logical target for a knife scan? Obviously, the teenagers.
If activist journalists want to brand basic threat assessment and targeted risk profiling as “racism”, fine. But to anyone with a modicum of common sense, it’s just practical policing.
Obviously, another explanation is that wanding operations tend to be held in areas with higher youth crime rates.
I can’t imagine police setting up a mobile checkpoint in a leafy inner-west suburb just to target random pensioners gardening in their front yards. Not only would that be a complete waste of police resources, but it’s not what the community actually wants. It achieves absolutely nothing to search a grandfather playing with his grandchildren in the park for weapons.
Of course police are going to focus their efforts in high-risk precincts.
Unsurprisingly, the ABC wheeled out some experts to tell you how hard done by Aboriginal people are.
Greg Shadbolt, the principal legal officer at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service, commented on the high proportion of Aboriginal people being searched, stating: “Those percentage figures … about two and a half times what you’d expect, are certainly concerning. It really does come down to training and so on and addressing the potential for cultural stereotyping.”
He also said that searching Aboriginal people too much is “contrary to the Closing the Gap targets for trying to reduce the numbers of First Nation Australians in prisons.”
What’s he trying to say? That we shouldn’t search Aboriginal people for weapons because there’s a chance police might actually find something and increase their chances of ending up in jail?
I’ve got an idea… if you don’t want to go to jail, don’t carry around weapons.
That said, I’m pretty sure traditional weapons like boomerangs wouldn’t set off a metal detector, so perhaps embracing traditional Aboriginal culture is actually the ultimate loophole to pass a police wanding test.
Anyway, you get the idea. According to the experts, police are targeting Aboriginal people for weapons searches.
But what do you think? In order to avoid accusations of racism, should police target senior citizens and women with prams in equal numbers to young Indigenous men? Or should police ignore the ABC’s accusations of systemic racism and instead get on with their job of getting knife-wielding criminals off the streets?
MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn
According to ABC reports, scanning Aboriginal people for illegal weapons is “concerning”. Should police target grandmothers in parks just to balance out the stats? Or focus on high-risk precincts? If you carry weapons, you might go to jail. Simple.
In Queensland, we have so-called Jack’s Law, named after a 17-year-old boy who was tragically killed on the Gold Coast in 2019 after being stabbed once in the chest. The law allows police to use handheld metal detectors to scan people at random for weapons in any public place without a warrant.
Naturally, the ABC managed to find the exact angle required to turn a life-saving safety initiative into an exercise in systemic racism: “One in 10 people searched for weapons in QLD identified as First Nations.”
The issue is that of the 160,997 people who were scanned over the last year, 11 percent identified as First Nations. According to the ABS and Census data, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people represent only 4.6% of the Queensland population.
So running the basic arithmetic reveals that First Nations people are roughly 2.4 times more likely to be scanned than their population proportion suggests. Which means, according to media logic, the Queensland Police must be racist, or perhaps the metal detectors themselves are? I’m not sure.
But let’s think about this rationally.
If you were a police officer in Queen Street Mall tasked with finding illegal weapons, and up ahead you saw a mother pushing a pram, and two Aboriginal teenagers—who are you going to scan? Legally, you could search the baby. But who is statistically more likely to be carrying a knife?
What about those two teenagers versus a shifty-looking lawyer with a briefcase on his lunch break? Well, obviously the lawyer—we can’t trust lawyers. What about a secondhand car salesman? Again, obviously the salesman. What if a federal politician walks past walking his dog? Scan the politician—who knows what kind of backroom corruption he’s concealing in those pockets.
Jokes aside, my point is simple: if an officer sees an elderly lady with a walking frame and two teenagers hanging around in a high-crime area, who is the more logical target for a knife scan? Obviously, the teenagers.
If activist journalists want to brand basic threat assessment and targeted risk profiling as “racism”, fine. But to anyone with a modicum of common sense, it’s just practical policing.
Obviously, another explanation is that wanding operations tend to be held in areas with higher youth crime rates.
I can’t imagine police setting up a mobile checkpoint in a leafy inner-west suburb just to target random pensioners gardening in their front yards. Not only would that be a complete waste of police resources, but it’s not what the community actually wants. It achieves absolutely nothing to search a grandfather playing with his grandchildren in the park for weapons.
Of course police are going to focus their efforts in high-risk precincts.
Unsurprisingly, the ABC wheeled out some experts to tell you how hard done by Aboriginal people are.
Greg Shadbolt, the principal legal officer at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service, commented on the high proportion of Aboriginal people being searched, stating: “Those percentage figures … about two and a half times what you’d expect, are certainly concerning. It really does come down to training and so on and addressing the potential for cultural stereotyping.”
He also said that searching Aboriginal people too much is “contrary to the Closing the Gap targets for trying to reduce the numbers of First Nation Australians in prisons.”
What’s he trying to say? That we shouldn’t search Aboriginal people for weapons because there’s a chance police might actually find something and increase their chances of ending up in jail?
I’ve got an idea… if you don’t want to go to jail, don’t carry around weapons.
That said, I’m pretty sure traditional weapons like boomerangs wouldn’t set off a metal detector, so perhaps embracing traditional Aboriginal culture is actually the ultimate loophole to pass a police wanding test.
Anyway, you get the idea. According to the experts, police are targeting Aboriginal people for weapons searches.
But what do you think? In order to avoid accusations of racism, should police target senior citizens and women with prams in equal numbers to young Indigenous men? Or should police ignore the ABC’s accusations of systemic racism and instead get on with their job of getting knife-wielding criminals off the streets?
MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn
