Dr Vicki Sentas appeared on Mornings with Wendy Harmer (17 November 2017) to discuss her recent report into the STMP (Suspect Target Management Plan).

Dr Sentas was asked what brought STMP to her attention, responding, "Community legal centres like Redfern Legal Centre, who I work with, I run a ‘Police Powers Clinic’ where members of the community who have complaints around the police, can go to Redfern Legal Centre and get some advice."

"It was only in 2013, that I started to even hear what the STMP was, and that was from young people who were coming to see the centre saying, ‘Police are coming to my house several times a week – I haven’t done anything,’ or ‘I was on bail, and I had a previous offence for shoplifting and that’s been finalised but the police still keep coming around.’ They mentioned this thing called a ‘STMP’ and the lawyers said, ‘we’ve never heard of this, what is this?’"

Dr Sentas went on to say, "We started to dig into the STMP, because there is nothing really on the public record about it. So the STMP more broadly, perhaps two years ago, it was rolled out to include domestic violence perpetrators. So predominately adults, so we didn’t look at how it’s been used around domestic violence, we are predominately concerned about how it’s being used around young people, but it certainly applies to both adults and young people".

She said, "The commissioner recently revealed last week in parliament, young people as young as nine, and our research certainly showed from limited statistics we were able to get from NSW Police, people as young as ten and certainly we’ve had clients who are 11, 12, 13". 

Listen to the full interview here (from approximately 42:00).