NSW Cops Evicted People Who Didn’t Have Drugs From ‘Above & Beyond’

Several alleged drug users were denied entry or removed from Sydney’s Above & Beyond festival over the weekend, even when they weren’t carrying drugs. Many of those people were then banned from returning to Olympic Park for a total of six months.

The whole fiasco began last week when NSW Police announced they would evict any festivalgoer given a positive identification by a sniffer dog, regardless of whether or not they had drugs.

NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge, who runs a Facebook-based effort to disrupt sniffer dog operations—Sniff Off—described the operation as “a gross abuse of police powers and a vicious attack on civil liberties.”

On Friday, Shoebridge spearheaded an attempt to get the operation canceled via court intervention. But the case was thrown out by Justice Pembroke who claimed that trying to pass an injunction on something that hadn’t yet occurred rendered it “hypothetical.”

As he explained: “If I may say so, the prospect your client will be evicted from the concert is hardly justification for bringing this claim in advance…. We don’t waste our time with hypothetical issues like that.”

And so the police operation was allowed to go ahead, barring several from the show when a sniffer dog sat beside them, prompting searches. Festivalgoers were then made to forgo their $128 tickets and removed from the venue, regardless of whether the dog’s indication was right or wrong.

And according to Shoebridge, the dogs were often wrong.

“We have known for over a decade, that these dogs get it wrong up to 75 per cent of the time. But, up until now, people haven’t been punished for them getting it wrong,” he told news.com.au.

“We’ve now seen two appalling attacks on civil liberties in the one night,” he said. “People have been refused entry to a cultural event due to the judgement of a dog and then the police have doubled down on that by banning them for the entire Olympic Precinct for six months… It is a new, noxious development.”

His office is now seeking legal council on how to best challenge the move.