A groundbreaking coronial inquiry has revealed that an Australian police officer shot an Indigenous teenager dead because they were drawn to “high adrenaline policing.”
The 682-page findings were made at a ceremony in the remote outback town , of Yuendumu in central Australia on Monday. Racist behavior was also “normalized” in Zachary Rolfe’s Alice Springs police station.
Five years after Kumanjayi Walker was shot, which caused protests all over the country. However, Rolfe was found not guilty of murder in a 2022 trial in Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory.
One of 598 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have died in custody since 1991 when detailed records began, Walker was shot three times during the attempted arrest in Yuendumu.
After conducting a nearly three-year investigation, Northern Territory coroner Elisabeth Armitage said, “I found that Mr. Rolfe was racist.”
Elisabeth Armitage, the coroner for the Northern Territory, has published her findings into Kumanjayi Walker’s death. twitter.com/hNb6UPnDUT
Rolfe worked for an organization with the hallmarks of “institutional racism,” she claimed, after being fired from the police force in 2023 for reasons unrelated to the shooting.
Rolfe’s racism and other attitudes “in a way that increased the likelihood of a fatal outcome” were a “significant risk,” she claimed.
According to the coroner, Walker’s family and community will always accept that racism played an “integral part” in his death. The taint could stain the [Northern Territory] police, the police said.
The coroner cited offensive language and described the territory’s tactical police as “grotesque examples of racism” during a so-called awards ceremony.
No complaints about the awards have ever been made over the course of ten years,” she said.
The policeman’s text messages also revealed his interest in “high adrenaline policing” and “contempt” for some more senior officers as well as “remote policing.” According to her, these behaviors “had the potential to lead to a fatal encounter with Kumanjayi.”
Walker’s family claimed that the inquest had exposed “deep systemic racism within the NT police” in a statement shared before the coroner’s release of her findings.
In a statement posted on social media, the family stated that “the hearing testimony confirmed our family’s belief that Rolfe is not a “bad egg” in the NT Police force but a symptom of a system that disregards and brutalizes our people.
The inquest concluded that there is evidence supporting a return to full community control, citing Yapa culture, stronger people, better outcomes, and self-governance, as stated in the statement, which mentions the Warlpiri people, also known as Yapa.
Kumanjayi White, 24, a Yuendumu native and a member of the Warlpiri community, passed away in a supermarket in Alice Springs last month, forcing Armitage to postpone their presentation.
Source: Aljazeera
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