Indigenous people in the Northern Territory are facing a “police state”, Mililma May, Danggalaba Kulumbiringin Tiwi writer and community organiser, told Solidarity’s Keep Left conference in April.
Darwin is heavily surveilled with security cameras, police and private security staff. May said that “Police Public Security Officers have just been created to carry out armed patrols of buses and shopping centres in Darwin. They are a new quasi-police body.
“When I did my research into how many police officers there are in the Northern Territory, and which state and jurisdiction has the most police officers, the Northern Territory ranks highest by far, with about 505 police officers per 100,000 people.”
This is more than double the figure in SA, the next highest with 235 per 100,000 people. The population of the NT is 30 per cent Indigenous.
May said, “This number of police doesn’t even include the private security, the PPSO officers and the TSD [public order unit, the Territory Safety Division].”
She also discovered that, “Darwin city council has 138 CCTV cameras that all have facial recognition technology”.
The Albanese government further granted the NT, at the request of the Chief Minister, exemption from civil aviation legislation to allow police drones to surveil Alice Springs 24/7.
Another example of the police state targeting Indigenous people has been the evacuation of residents from Nauiyu and Palumpa in response to flooding and Cyclone Narelle. This has resulted in about 400 people, almost all of them Indigenous, being “shipped into showgrounds and big compounds… that are all policed”, May said.
“Everyone wears wristbands and they’re not allowed to leave or enter the facility without signing in or out,” she said. Security guards routinely search people on entry and some visitors have been refused access. May said, “These are people escaping the climate crisis and [they] have been shipped into Darwin since January.”
Nationally, there have been more than 630 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the 1991 Royal Commission. This is increasing as the rate of imprisonment surges, jumping by 10 per cent in the year to June 2025. Since the NT Intervention began in 2007 levels of deprivation have massively increased.
Despite this brutal police occupation of the NT and the apartheid conditions forced upon Indigenous people, “in response to the deaths in custody there has been a movement building… and there’s deep solidarity happening between Blackfellas regardless of what happened in the referendum” on the Voice to Parliament, May said.
By Lorna Macritchie
