“It’s a pain you can’t describe,” Raylene Nixon says quietly.
“It’s something that you feel deeper than a broken heart – it’s pain in your soul.”
In 2021, she sat in a sterile room and watched Australian police footage of her son’s death in real time, as he gasped for air and pleaded for help.
“Choke him out,” one officer can be heard yelling in the body camera video, before another places Steven Nixon-McKellar in a chokehold.
Moments later, the 27-year-old Aboriginal man lost consciousness. Paramedics failed to resuscitate him, as his throat was obstructed by vomit.
Mr Nixon-McKellar is one of 562 Indigenous Australians to die in police custody since 1991 – the year a landmark inquiry, intended to turn the tide on the issue, released hundreds of recommendations.
But few of those proposals have been implemented, studies suggest, and Indigenous people continue to die at alarming rates in prison cells, police vans, or during arrest.
Last year was the most lethal on record, according to government data.
Police advocates insist officers are using necessary force when confronted with life-threatening situations, and that each death is thoroughly examined.
But critics say there is a “culture of impunity” in which “police are investigating police” in cases alleging excessive force.
They point out there has never been a conviction of a police or corrections officer over an Indigenous death in their care.
‘They only knew the colour of his skin’
Mr Nixon-McKellar died during his attempted arrest following an anonymous call to Queensland police suggesting he had been driving a stolen vehicle.
The officers involved have defended their use of the neck hold – which is now banned – on the basis that he was “fighting” them at the scene, making it difficult to deploy a taser or pepper spray.
BBC
