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In 2018, at the Splendour in the Grass music festival in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia, Raya Meredith was strip-searched. Not that it matters, but nothing illegal was found. In 2022, then-27-year-old Raya Meredith filed a class action suit against the police of New South Wales, arguing that the strip-searches conducted at music festivals from 2016 to 2022 were unlawful and constituted assault, battery, and false imprisonment. Her landmark suit<\/a> now represents 3,000 people who were strip-searched. That case is currently being heard in court. Today, Raya Meredith\u2019s attorneys explained that the New South Wales police admitted the strip-search was unlawful but \u201cobjectively reasonably necessary.\u201d What?<\/p>\n Kylie Nomchong, Raya Meredith\u2019s attorney, responded to that claim<\/a>, \u201c\u201cWe get to the quite outrageous submissions \u2026 where the defendant is asking your honour to infer that it was objectively necessary to search the plaintiff\u2019s breasts and genital area,\u201d Nomchong told the court. It is unbelievably offensive to assert, without any evidence whatsoever, that there was some objectively reasonable basis on the part of the searching officer to inspect the plaintiff\u2019s vagina, to ask her to pull out her tampon, to ask her to bare her buttocks and anal area and to bend over and drop her breasts. It\u2019s just offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n Justice Dina Yehia, the presiding judge in the case, agreed with Nomcholeng<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019m not quite sure I understand those submissions, given the way this matter has proceeded.\u201d<\/p>\n What else is there to say? For the police, the violation of a woman\u2019s body and person was, and continues to be, \u201cobjectively reasonably necessary.\u201d The objective and reasonable necessity of the strip-searches is so self-evident that just days before the hearing began, the police withdrew 22 witnesses, mostly police<\/a> \u2026 because it was objectively reasonably necessary for them not to speak under oath.<\/p>\n Raya Meredith\u2019s attorneys note that strip-searches seldom \u201cwork\u201d, as in produce any evidence of illegal activity. But police engage in them anyway. So, what\u2019s the point and purpose of strip-search? A study published in 2021, the year before Raya Meredith\u2019s encounter with the police, considered the scale and scope of strip-searches conducted by New South Wales police from 2014 to 2018, As Raya Meredith\u2019s attorneys suggest, most of those searches produced nothing, other than trauma and pain. Nevertheless, the use of strip-searches \u201cat music festivals, at train stations, in police vehicles and at other locations<\/a>\u201d increased. What did the few strip searches that did produce any evidence of illegal activity show? 96% involved drugs, either possession or distribution: \u201cIt can be inferred from these data that the strip search regime is primarily being used for the enforcement of the summary offence of drug possession, rather than the serious indictable offences for which the power to strip search was envisaged<\/a>.\u201d A War on Drugs was declared, and strip-searches were normalized, naturalized, deemed \u201cobjectively reasonably necessary\u201d.<\/p>\n When the State declares War on its population, as in a War on Drugs or a War on Crime, it declares a state of exception<\/a>. That is, it declares a crisis so grave, so threatening to the State that the elimination, ostensibly temporary, of constitutional rights and protections is reasonably objectively necessary. The police in New South Wales were just following orders.<\/p>\n (By Dan Moshenberg)<\/p>\n