Crime and punishment in Darwin

When NT attorney-general John Elferink introduced paperless arrest laws into parliament last year he claimed not only would they give police 'control of the streets', they would also drive down serious crime.

'I will bet you London to a brick serious assaults later on in the evening will substantially drop,' he said at the time.

Chief minister Adam Giles has also repeated the claim. 'Paperless arrests are an important part of our successful DarwinSafe initiative that has already helped drive down assaults in Mitchell Street by 24 per cent,' he said.

It's been less than a year since the new laws gave police the power to arrest and detain people for minor offences such as drinking in public, swearing or making too much noise. In that time nearly 1,000 Indigenous people in the Darwin CBD have been arbitrarily detained under an infringement notice that no court would imprison for.

In May this year an Indigenous man died in the Darwin watch house after being arrested in a city park for being drunk and disorderly. At the resulting inquest, coroner Greg Cavanagh savaged the laws, calling them a 'retrograde step'.

They were irreconcilable, he said, with the recommendations of the royal commission into black deaths in custody, which urged police to use arrest and detention as a last resort, and to monitor the policing of public drinking offences to determine their impact on Aboriginal people. He called for the government to repeal the laws, warning there would be more deaths in custody.

Assaults in Darwin rose after CLP election

In the aftermath of the coroner's report, Giles defended his government's decision to refuse to repeal the laws.

'I well remember when Labor was saying that places like Mitchell Street were like a mini Beirut just 12 months ago,' he said.

'Now we're seeing situations where the streets are being cleaned up, so there is less violence, there is less alcohol-caused violence, and this is because of a range of the measures we are putting in place Labor would scrap.'

But according to NT police data obtained by Background Briefing, assaults in the notorious Mitchell Street entertainment precinct rose by 16 per cent in the 12 months after the election of the CLP government in July 2012.

While assault numbers have fallen marginally since the introduction of paperless arrest laws, they are still 8 per cent higher than when the CLP was elected.

The chief minister's office declined repeated requests for evidence to show assaults have substantially declined on Mitchell Street.

Crime data also shows that across Darwin, assaults have risen by more than 20 per cent since the CLP was elected, and the numbers of assaults involving alcohol have also risen.

In an interview with Background Briefing, Elferink repeats his claim that serious assaults had gone down despite there being no police data to support this.

'I am still waiting for the police to provide me with statistics in this space ... but certainly anecdotally the evidence is there,' he says.

Elferink says stories about serious assaults in the NT News 'have now almost disappeared' compared to 12 months ago, and this allowed him to 'make the assertion on the basis of that'.

Paperless arrests linked to high rate of Indigenous incarceration

In his 34-page coronial report, Cavanagh noted that 86 per cent of the Northern Territory's prison population was Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, while the NT had the highest imprisonment rate in Australia.

'There is a clear link between the introduction of that law and an increase in the incarceration of Aboriginal people,' he says.

'It is glaringly apparent that the paperless arrest scheme disproportionately impacts on Aboriginal Territorians who make up the vast majority of those detained under the laws, although they are only 29 per cent of the population.'

Elferink rejects Cavanagh's recommendations, describing them as an 'opinion' he disagrees with.

'Essentially what is woven into his decision is this notion that an Aboriginal person should in some way be exempt from the laws of the Northern Territory in a way that the non-Aboriginal person isn't,' Elferink says.

Background Briefing is investigative journalism at its finest, exploring the issues of the day and examining society in a lively on-the-road documentary style.