Redfern Riot Shouldn't Be Prosecuted

Editorial: Redfern riot shouldn’t be prosecuted

THE POLICE criticism toward residents of a small inner-city Sydney suburb of Waterloo must signal the end of society and media depictions that has created an inability to deem the residents’ constant claim of police harassment and violence. It is time we should accept the grim fact that many existing attitudes towards the most disadvantaged people, Indigenous Australians, are part of this mayhem-like problem.

The public intensely curved its attention toward what happened in NSW on February 15. A 17-year-old Indigenous boy, Thomas Hickey – the most common being “TJ” – died in hospital, a day after injuring himself whilst chased by the police. This was enough to trigger the community to regards the event as a “death in custody” case.

Pursued by cops as he was on his way from visiting his mother at Redfern block, TJ was terrified of the past police beat-up. Police impaled him on a metal fence and removed and searched him devoid-of stopping the blood loss, presumably a little girl called an ambulance. Before this traumatic death occurs, there has been constant police presence within Redfern block. Situated in Waterloo suburb, the block is the heritage place of Indigenous since granted in the early 1970s. Victoria Dunbar, a resident who has lived in the area for years, told Green Left Weekly of an everyday police hunt of black chaps in the area. Besides, police has restricts most youths, a 7:30pm curfew has abolish “football and basketball practice”. Moreover, residents claim police has shuts streets surrounding the residential block. These everyday situations didn’t only impinge on the Hickeys but the entire young man in the community.

It is absolutely doubtless that, this...

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...an. That hatred and misconception between the two made media representation and politician glib rhetoric against them became larger. This is definitely how it starts.

Indubitably, media has been insistent on the recurring violent in this community. Print media such as Murdoch and Fairfax have focussed on the pessimistic. The words constantly used to describe Aboriginal community are “alcohol, drugs, poverty and violence”. This portrayal – if not putted to an end – will not change our society way of depicting on Indigenous.

That is why an essential, most imperative summit missed by NSW and the federal government in the past years was to bulldoze media exploitation of Indigenous. In future, this burning flame must be extinguished in order to re-establish Aboriginal aspects of this country and to reunite them with migrants. Or else, if not, will keep burning.