Unmasking police accountability: responses to Australian First Nations peoples’ deaths in police custody

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ABSTRACT The view that there is something inherently wrong with the ways in which police are held accountable when a person dies in their custody has been expressed across several national contexts, most often with a focus on Indigenous people and people of colour. This is so even when processes typically seen as accountability mechanisms are engaged. With a view to garnering some understanding of this dissatisfaction, this paper focuses on the question, How is police accountability understood by those discussing deaths of Indigenous people in police custody in an Australian context? A narrative review method identified key themes from textual sources that discussed police accountability in the specific context of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person dying in police custody. The findings indicated three key elements of how police accountability is understood, namely: independent investigation of police actions, criminal prosecution, and public giving of honest evidence, with these themes emerging against a background of claims that police accountability does not exist when Indigenous people die in police custody. Of particular interest are findings as to what the narrative review did not show about police accountability and what that might mean for developing police accountability processes that better meet the needs and expectations of Australia’s First Nations people and the broader community. It is proposed that, in contrast to police being ‘held accountable’, the complementary position of police ‘being accountable’ may yield better accountability-related outcomes in policing contexts, both systemically and individually.