The New South Wales police force has been ordered to pay $1.85 million to almost 200 young people for wrongful imprisonment. The total number entitled to compensation is likely to increase before 9 October, the cut-off date to join a class action law suit.

Musa Konneh, the lead applicant in the class action, was 17 years old in 2010 when police turned up at his house and wrongfully arrested him for breaching bail conditions. Four days earlier, the charges brought against him – travelling on public transport without a ticket and possessing someone else’s identity card – had been dropped.

Police ignored Musa’s protests that he was not on bail. They handcuffed him, threw him in a police wagon and took him to Penrith police cells where he was strip searched and detained overnight. In an interview with ABC News Radio in 2011, Musa described the humiliation and sense of violation he experienced during the arrest and detention as an “abomination”:

“I was expecting that the law should be always right. The coppers they shouldn’t get you for something you didn’t do; they should get you for something if you in trouble. I wasn’t in trouble and they get me, so that just mean that it’s not safe. I would be frightened to call them.”

The police, far from showing remorse, have blamed the problem on a computer glitch in their “COPS” database that failed to update bail conditions when they were dropped or varied.

But the “error” does not explain the racial profiling and thuggery of police; their targeting of Aboriginal people, Muslims, Arabs and other minority groups. It doesn’t explain why they never seem to harass rich people – bankers and other corporate thieves – hanging around Vaucluse and Point Piper.

It doesn’t explain how Melissa Dunn, a 16-year-old Aboriginal person, who was hanging out with her friends at McDonalds on a summer’s night in January 2012, was picked up in Sydney’s CBD, dragged to the ground in a head-lock and brutalised by a police officer because she was swearing.

In the court case that followed, the magistrate not only found Melissa not guilty of resisting arrest and hindering police, but remarked that police “used an inordinate amount of force” saying, “frankly it beggars belief”.

Melissa Dunn, known by her friends as a happy and friendly young woman, committed suicide three days after the court case ended, and was found dead in a park in Maroubra.