New South Wales Police Accused of Racial Profiling Students

Accusations of racial profiling are being levelled against New South Wales police officers who arrested two Western Sydney University students in their early twenties, who were involved in a protest at the institution’s Parramatta South campus on 9 October 2024, and footage of the incident does appear to portray law enforcement officers focusing in on a Black student and a Lebanese student to arrest.

A young unnamed Western Sydney University student explains, during footage posted to Instagram, that a peaceful protest was being staged by the Western Sydney University for Palestine Collective at the Parramatta campus, which had been hounded by police officers and security guards as soon as it started.

Fifty-odd demonstrators marched around the university campus at around 11 am on the Wednesday, and they eventually entered into a building. NSW police officers followed them in and subsequently violently removed two young men singled out for arrest, who were wrestled and dragged back outside and then taken to Gladesville Police Station to be charged with assault.

But students maintain that if any assaults occurred, it was the other way round. “Those boys didn’t do anything,” the unnamed student continued. “And the police officers they faked that they arrested them for an assault. They did not commit any assault. We were there the whole time. We were all witness to this.”

“Students are all shocked. We are all shocked. The university is funding a genocide. And they are not even allowing us freedom of speech,” she added.

And further footage shows plain clothes officers ensuring that students “stand back”, as about six police officers wrestled the one young Lebanese man, who was already clearly flat on the ground with multiple men on top of him. And as the Western Sydney University students called out in distress asking officers to “let him go”, the undercover cops simply ordered them to “calm down”.

Questionable assaults

In addressing the Free Palestine protest on Gadigal land in Sydney on Sunday, Western Sydney Professor Alana Lentin, who was part of the 9 October 2024 demonstration at the Parramatta campus, said, “riot police were called to the university and two students were violently arrested and charged with assaulting staff” but “you can clearly see from video footage that the opposite is the case”.

The Jewish academic further explained that a third student had been arrested on Friday morning at their home in relation to the protest, and she noted that the final arrestee was a Muslim student.

“As someone who teaches about racism and colonisation at the Western Sydney University and as a witness to these arrests, there is no doubt in my mind that this was a case of racial profiling,” said Lentin, a member of the Tzedek Collective, and she added that these students have been “watching people from their own communities being butchered and their own government standing by”.

University provost Kevin Dunne met with the students involved in the protest at around 2 pm that same afternoon, and he told them that they are “welcome to express their views”, however the university “has to draw the line at anything that’s violent, threatening or aggressive”.

Dunne couldn’t define what the actual assaults had been, as “he wasn’t a witness”, so Lentin cut in and said, “Well, I was there, Kevin. And when the students came in the building, the security of the university were pushing and shoving students left and right, and my wrist is in fact hurt, because I was slammed up against the wall over there.”

“So, if there is any question of assault, then I think we need to look at what the security was doing,” the academic added.

The whited sepulchre

On Sunday, Lentin decried the hypocrisy of Western Sydney University, as it “prides itself as an institution that is committed to social justice” and “to challenging racism”, yet when students “take these lessons and put them into action” by mobilising in a peaceful manner, law enforcement rushes in to drag them away and The Australian newspaper demonises them.

The Jewish academic was clear that the violence on campus is only compounding what some Western Sydney University students are currently going through, as some Palestinian and Lebanese students have family and relatives, who have been killed by the Israeli military over the course of its 12-month-long genocide in Gaza and the assaults of the last months on Lebanon.

“Now, as we know, western Sydney has always been a site of entrenched Islamophobia,” the university professor told the 53rd consecutive Free Palestine protest last Sunday.  It is “the domestic front of Australia’s participation in the war on terror”.

“I see last week’s actions against our students as a continuation of the war that the state wages on Arabs and Muslims, one that is paralleled only by that on Indigenous people, who are treated as threats on their own land and are hounded by the state,” she maintained.

Counselling? We want divestment

As Dunne continued to speak with the students, it became evident that his repeated assertions that the issue with the biased policing would be cleared up “if” it was found that the NSW police had acted in a prejudicial manner, which was understandable as the students that weren’t arrested had just witnessed those officers singling out certain students for prejudicial and aggressive attention.

The students that were rallying at the WSU Parramatta campus were chiefly concerned with their academic institution divesting from weapon manufactures involved in the Gaza genocide, which includes Thales, BAE and Raytheon, as these companies are partners in WSU’s International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems.

When asked what sort of assistance WSU was prepared to give to distressed students, Dunne suggested counselling. But one student countered, stating, “Counselling is not working. We are watching babies being pulled out from under the rubble that are related to us. Counselling does not fix that.”

“You divesting is the only thing that will heal us here on this campus,” the WSU student added.

In response, Dunne promptly said, “Thank you very much, guys,” and quickly scampered away.