Racial profiling occurs when a person, in a position of authority, responds to another, consciously or otherwise with unjustified suspicion or distrust and one of the factors behind that response is the other’s perceived race, religion, indigeneity, nationality, or ancestry. At a population level, racial profiling is a subset of systemic racism that can be evidenced through data identifying that unjustified policing practices, operations or strategies are disproportionately targeted at racialised groups thus subjecting them to increased investigative interest, suspicion, fear of dangerousness, disbelief or dehumanisation.

Systemic racism occurs where the practices of institutions (including the police and the criminal legal system as a whole) systematically disadvantage one racial group over another. The targeting of particular groups for disproportionate numbers of searches is a form of systemic racism with profound implications for the well-being of those groups. Both systemic racism and racial profiling are forms of racial discrimination and are unlawful under international law and through Australia’s Race Discrimination Act 1975.

Data is one mechanism through which to observe systemic racism. It can also indicate whether the police are likely to be engaged in racial profiling.

This ongoing project obtains and analyses data from police obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (‘FOI’). The FOI data we currently have access to includes police search without warrant data from 2018, 2019, 2022-2024 and use of force data from 2023, 2024. We do not currently have access to 2020 and 2021 search data. As Victoria was under extensive lockdowns during this period these two years are unlikely to be representative of other years. Thanks to Inner Melbourne Community Legal, we do however have access to Victoria Police 2020 Covid fine data. The FOI data we have obtained is limited in all sorts of ways, due mainly to inadequacies in Victoria Police data collection and inconsistencies in reporting practices. For example, despite Victoria Police making ethnic appearance data fields mandatory in field contact reports in 2019, many police continue to fail to record this information.

At this point we do not have access to police data about racialised differences in family violence policing, stop and question, vehicle stops or vehicle only searches, decisions to arrest, decisions to charge, deaths in custody, decisions to oppose bail or in complaints and in the use of risk databases. Much of this critical data is simply not collected by police. It is also expensive and difficult to obtain through FOI.

Data on some of these practices is available from surveys and research on public experiences with the police and from qualitative sources such as newspaper reports, inquest and court findings and personal accounts.

We also acknowledge the limitations in using quantitative data to evidence complex and intersectional social dynamics including enduring systemic racism and racial profiling. Data released by the police is subject to inaccuracies and potential manipulation. Observations that can be made from it must not be read in isolation, but require a nuanced understanding of the experience of being policed by the communities themselves. Lived experience, such as the data generated through an inquest, a royal commission, personal account, or qualitative research strategy can provide a more complete method of generating knowledge than simple data points.

This project refers to people has having a 'race' that is perceived by the police. Having a perceived race is different to having a racial identity. Racialisation is social phenomena. In White dominated societies, such as Australia with its history of invasion, colonisation, and the White Australia Policy, Indigenous and other non-White people are frequently 'racialised' while White people have the privilege of being treated as 'unraced'.

In this 'unraced' mind-state some White people fail to notice the way Australian society is structured to normalise Whiteness and treat Indigenous and other non-White people as 'other'.

Within this website we use the term White people and Caucasians interchangeably to refer to people who are racialised as 'White'. Drawing on the conception of Whiteness used in the 1901 White Australia Policy, we classify the highly diverse set of peoples who speak European languages as ‘White’. Because, as a consequence of the White Australia Policy, White people are the dominant racial group in Australia, and Whiteness is normalised, we use the treatment of White people as the benchmark against which to assess the treatment of other groups. This does not mean that the policing of White people is always lawful or acceptable. Indeed the low hit rate findings of this Project indicate that Victoria Police frequently searches all racial groups including White people without reasonable grounds.

The data we use has been released to us by Victoria Police under the FOI Act. Documents. Data released under the FOI Act can be treated as a public document. Victoria Police will refuse to release information that discloses a person's identity, address or location (s33 of the FOI Act). The data we release will enable researchers and individuals to explore the effects of gender, age, race, time, date and police operation on police decisions to search. These are important questions that could assist researchers and individuals in exploring systemic bias. This data transparency project seeks to counter the long standing secrecy around police data and the lack of access to it by researchers, lawyers and individuals impacted by policing.

We recognise the data we provide may enable individuals to identify themselves. However, rather than being problematic, we believe this experimental intervention will benefit those individuals and their lawyers in making racial profiling/over-policing complaints and otherwise having better access to police records about themselves.

We are aware that records containing far more information are publicly released in other jurisdictions. For example in New York, stop data includes whether force was used and location of the incident.

The data we release focuses on police practices, not crime rates. We are interested in whether the police are engaging in systemic racism and other forms of bias. For a further discussion on the ethical issues of monitoring racial profiling see Monitoring Racial Profiling - (FKCLC) Stop Data Working Group.