Life-saving custody notification facing closure

One of the few implemented recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody is about to be demolished.

The Custody Notification Service (CNS) in NSW and the ACT will cease to exist at the end of June. The CNS requires that police notify the NSW Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS), within one hour, if an Indigenous person is taken into custody. The ALS offers advice to the detained person and checks on their welfare. It operates 24 hours a day and has contact with around 15,000 Aboriginal people taken into custody each year.

Since the CNS was introduced in 2000, no Indigenous person has died in a police cell in NSW. Activists and lawyers have consistently called for the expansion of the life-saving service to all other states.

Instead, the NSW CNS, which operates with an annual budget of $526,000, is threatened by federal and state funding cuts.

“The CNS is more than just a phone line, it’s a lifeline”, said ALS CEO Kane Ellis. “We regularly assist Aboriginal people to access essential medication or medical attention they were otherwise not receiving.”

Of the service’s meagre budget, Ellis said: “The cost to run the CNS is nearly the same as holding two juveniles in detention for one year”.

In the Northern Territory, which has no custody notification service, two Aboriginal men have died in the last month, each within hours of being detained.

If the CNS is cut, Black deaths in custody will rise. The blood will be on the hands of governments and the police.