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A civil trial expected to last eight weeks in the federal court in Melbourne was averted on February 18 by an agreement between the Victoria Police and six African-Australians suing them for racial discrimination and racial profiling.

The agreement mandates an enquiry, with submissions from the public, into allegations of police racism in the Flemington-North Melbourne area, which includes culturally diverse Housing Commission estates. The agreement also permits the six complainants to publicly tell their stories using police documents obtained through the court case.

“Court documents alleged a number of assaults by police, including one case in which a 13-year-old was stopped and searched without charge before a police officer allegedly bent his finger until the bone cracked, and then walked off,” the February 19 Age said.

In 2006, 17 young men, then teenagers, decided to take legal action over not only specific instances of racial abuse and violence by police but the systematic pattern of racial profiling.

Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre took on the case. In 2010, having failed to seek redress through the Australian Human Rights Commission, they initiated action in the Federal Court with law firm Arnold Bloch Liebler providing pro-bono representation.

By the time the case was settled, 11 of the original 17 complainants had withdrawn from the case, “frustrated and overwhelmed by the traumatic experience of seeking redress through the courts for what had occurred to them,” a February 18 statement by the lawyers said.

The six complainants allege that due to racial profiling, young African men in the area faced continual police harassment as they went about day-to-day activities.

Maki Issa told 91������̳ Weekly: “Between 2006 and 2009 it was pretty bad. You would be hard pressed to find an African male in the Flemington-North Melbourne area who hadn’t had a bad experience with the police. Because of people complaining and us taking the matter to court it’s kind of improved since then.”

He told SBS: “They see three or four African guys there and automatically assume that these are gangsters, or they’re in a gang.

“So what we’re trying to work on is for them to understand that these are a group of kids who live in the Commission flats who all share one little park. They’re obviously going to be in big groups all the time, understand that that’s their backyard.”

Issa’s complaints include being stopped outside his own home and being asked for a reason for being there.

Police documents obtained through the Federal Court case substantiate these claims. Police diaries refer to young African men as “criminals” despite those referred to not being accused of any crime.

African teenagers socialising or waiting for public transport are routinely referred to as “loitering”. Walking down the street in their own neighbourhood is noted as suspicious behaviour, as is wearing what is perceived as US hip-hop fashion. The word “gang” is used as if it were the standard collective term for a group of young Africans.

The said: “In August 2010 about 20 or 30 officers at Springvale police station were shown a presentation titled African/Sudanese Cross Cultural Advice. One slide on ‘Young (at risk) African Males’ said they were ‘typically inducted into a rebel army or warrior tribe as part of their teen years and consequently develop a strong warrior ethic’.”

Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre lawyer Tamar Hopkins told SBS on February 18: “One of the extraordinary things that’s come out of this settlement is the release of a whole lot of data that has been analysed by some experts about what’s actually happening in the Flemington and Kensington and North Melbourne areas.

“And contrary to what’s been released in the media to this point, that data has revealed that African people in the Flemington and Kensington area are about 2.5 times more likely to be stopped than … non-African people, and furthermore that Africans are in fact less likely to commit criminal offences than other populations.”

She told ABC radio: “This is the first time that a federal race discrimination case has come all the way to the Federal Court in Australia, never before have the police been put under this kind of spotlight, their practices, their procedures.

“It’s quite extraordinary, cases like this on the other hand are very common in other parts of the world but until now Australian police have escaped from the level of scrutiny that they’ve needed in this area.”

Issa told GLW that he was hopeful about the inquiry: “It will expose the weaknesses in policing in Victoria and then it should help us come up with submissions to fix this problem in the area … We’ve been fighting this battle since 2006, for seven years. It’s been a long while coming but we’re happy.”

Speaking to journalists outside court, another of the six, Daniel Haile-Michael, described the inquiry as a “monumental event”.

“I myself have been beaten up but … it is not a personal thing,” he said. “We understand it is a systemic issue and that is why we are trying to address it in a systemic way. It’s not about one police officer, it’s about changing a whole system.”