How the Yuendumu police shooting death of Kumanjayi Walker changed the NT

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17 hours ago

The sun is beginning to sink into the desert horizon when a team of pseudo-tactical cops — police dog in tow — roll in to Yuendumu, a tiny Aboriginal community three hours from Alice Springs.
It's quiet in town on this Saturday night, November 9, 2019. There's a funeral happening at the cemetery.
But it hasn't been this calm for a while — a string of violent break-ins targeting the community's health staff has scared the nurses into Alice Springs for the weekend, seeking respite.
And as then-constable Zachary Rolfe and his Immediate Response Team (IRT) colleagues arrive at the police station, with their long-arm rifles and bean-bag shotguns; it's about to get a whole lot more chaotic.
WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the name and image of an Indigenous person who has died, used with the permission of their family.
This story also contains racist and offensive language and images.
The local sergeant, Julie Frost, is burnt out and overworked.
She's called for back-up so her team can rest, and then tomorrow, at 5am, the out-of-town officers will join one of her officers, to arrest Kumanjayi Walker.
It's a plan she's already discussed with his family, to allow him to take part in the funeral.
Legally, the 19-year-old Warlpiri-Luritja man shouldn't be in the community this weekend, it's a breach of a court order.
Culturally, he's required to return to bury his grandfather.
Police tried to arrest him a few days ago, but he threatened them with an axe.
Footage of that incident has already done the rounds at the Alice Springs Police Station, where officers can't believe the bush cops didn't shoot Mr Walker.
Enter Mr Rolfe: a constable keen on "high adrenaline" jobs, with three years of policing under his belt and — a coroner has now found — a "tendency to rush in", with a "reluctance to follow rules".
Confident in her plan for a safe 5am arrest, Sergeant Frost leaves the station in the hands of the IRT for the night, telling the visitors on her way out that if they do happen to come across Mr Walker that night, then "by all means, arrest him".
Less than two hours later, Mr Walker takes his final breaths on the floor of a police cell, three gunshot wounds to his torso.
The reaction was immediate.
And divisive.
The brand new NT police commissioner — sworn in two days after the shooting — travelled to Yuendumu with the chief minister to reassure the community the officer involved had been stood down, pending investigations into how a quiet night in community ended with a 19-year-old being shot by a police officer, inside his grandmother's home.
Then-chief minister Michael Gunner, in a poorly phrased promise which haunted the rest of his political career, tried to explain there would be independent oversight of police, a coronial investigation, and that "consequences will flow" as a result.
Four days later, Mr Rolfe was charged with murder after an investigation which many claimed didn't pass the pub test.
An ICAC investigation later found no evidence of political interference in the investigation.
For years, Warlpiri people grieved quietly, in their tiny town on the edge of the Tanami desert.
Suppression orders protecting then-constable Rolfe's right to a fair trial prevented previous allegations of excessive use of force, perjury and his text messages from being published.
Prosecutors tried to argue some of that evidence was proof of the officer's tendency to be violent towards Aboriginal men, fighting to tell the jury that a local court judge had found, months before the shooting, Mr Rolfe likely "deliberately" banged a man's head into the ground, then lied about it under oath.
But Mr Rolfe's lawyers won that melee — one of many trial arguments which landed in their favour.
Supreme Court Justice John Burns ruled the evidence was irrelevant to Mr Rolfe's decision to fire his Glock three times, in response to being stabbed in the shoulder by Mr Walker that night.
Journalists were barred from writing about Mr Rolfe's history until after the jury had returned its not guilty verdict.
Meanwhile, the details of Mr Walker's criminal history, his unsettled upbringing and health issues were splashed across the pages of national newspapers.
"The way that he was portrayed was this really violent young man [who] was the reason for his own death, and we felt like we had no control over his story," his cousin, Samara Fernandez-Brown, said.
Duelling social media campaigns kept a divided audience up to date with a long and complicated court process over several years.
"Justice For Walker" became a carefully curated platform for advocacy for the Yuendumu community, treading a fine line between calling for Mr Rolfe to be jailed, and not prejudicing a jury they had put their hopes in.
"I Back Zach" produced stubby coolers, and later, a police officer was sacked over a "Blue Lives Matter" singlet referencing the shooting.
A now-deleted, anonymously-run, Facebook page called "I Support Constable Zachary Rolfe" posted daily updates from inside the criminal trial.
In March of 2022, more than two years after Mr Walker died, his family held their breath for almost six weeks as they gathered each day in Darwin's Supreme Court — more than a 1,000 kilometres from home — and stood in the same room as the man who took their loved one's life.
Mr Rolfe sat in the public gallery while he was on trial for murder, as COVID-19 restrictions at the time forced half of the jury into the dock.
Eventually, the Warlpiri mob watched the cop accused of murdering their loved one walk free from the Supreme Court — acquitted of all charges.
A win for many in the police force, and the unions which backed him, which vehemently believed he should never have been charged in the first place.
It was the end of one courtroom ordeal, but marked the beginning of the next three years for a community and a police force which hadn't even begun to heal their shattered relationship.
Six months later, Mr Walker's family were back in another courtroom.
Still hundreds of kilometres from home, and still calling for "Justice for Walker".
Justice to them, however, could no longer look like Mr Rolfe going to jail.
The coroner's court opened with an Acknowledgement of Country and an invitation for Mr Walker's loved ones to be heard.
With the evidence live-streamed, translated into multiple Aboriginal languages and the coroner travelling to Yuendumu herself, the coronial inquest could not have been more different than the criminal trial.
"It was identified very early in the inquest, I think, by the coroner herself, that a key factor here is this wasn't just two young men meeting in a house one night," Gerard Mullins KC, representing some of Mr Walker's family, said.
"It was a history of both the Warlpiri people, and what they had been through historically, and also the Northern Territory police and their attitudes to Indigenous people."
As she opened what was supposed to be a three-month investigation into the shooting, Judge Elisabeth Armitage asked herself one question: "Do I know the story of Kumanjayi Walker and Constable Zachary Rolfe?
"Do you?"
With a comforting smile from her bench overlooking courtroom one in the Alice Springs Local Court, Judge Armitage invited the 16 interested parties to "look a little deeper and listen a little longer".
Almost three years later, the judge once again travelled down the Tanami Road into Yuendumu, with a 683-page report tucked under her arm.
She addressed the community for almost an hour, in remarks which were also broadcast live on national television.
Somehow, she managed to keep her voice from wavering, as she summarised the findings which will likely define her career.
"Kumanjayi's death in Yuendumu on 9 November, 2019 was avoidable," she found.
"Mr Rolfe was racist.
"He worked in, and was the beneficiary of, an organisation with hallmarks of institutional racism."
If a reckoning in the ranks of the Northern Territory Police Force wasn't required before, there was no escaping it now.
"The fact that [racism] did exist and the fact that it was permitted and fostered is just not acceptable," Acting Commissioner Martin Dole said.
"There's probably some feelings of hurt amongst the police force, there's probably some feelings of denial.
After examining an 8,000-page download of Mr Rolfe's phone, the coroner found racial slurs were "normalised" between officers on the Alice Springs beat, with no disciplinary consequence.
"I find that these and similar messages reveal the extent to which Mr Rolfe had dehumanised the largely Aboriginal population he was policing, his disinterest in the risk of injury associated with his hands on policing style, and the sense of impunity with which he approached the use of force," Judge Armitage wrote.
While she said she could not find with "certainty" that Mr Rolfe's racist attitudes contributed to Mr Walker's death, she also could not rule it out.
"That I cannot exclude that possibility is a tragedy for Kumanjayi's family and community who will always believe that racism played an integral part in Kumanjayi's death; and it is a taint that may stain the NT police," Jude Armitage wrote.
But the coroner, as she had flagged from the very beginning, was looking deeper than Zachary Rolfe and Kumanjayi Walker.
She found Mr Walker's problems began before he was even born, exposed to alcohol in utero and violence, trauma and neglect in his formative years.
Despite being deeply loved — and now sorely missed — by his family, Mr Walker struggled at every turn.
Mr Rolfe, the coroner found, was not just a "bad apple", but a product of an environment which fostered problematic attitudes and behaviour.
"Grotesque" examples of racism within the force's most elite unit were ignored by the then-commissioner of NT police, Michael Murphy, and five senior officers insisted a so-called "C**n of the Year" award had no racist connotations.
"That no police member who knew of these awards reported them, is, in my view, clear evidence of entrenched, systemic and structural racism within the NT Police," Judge Armitage found.
"Yapa [Warlpiri people] have known that, we have felt that," Ms Fernandez-Brown said.
Mr Rolfe rejected many of the coroner's remarks, particularly those which suggested he ignored his training and lied, when he claimed Mr Walker had reached for his gun during the fatal scuffle, and suggested he is considering seeking a judicial review in the Supreme Court.
"Insofar as some may hold a view to the contrary, this was never about race," he said in a statement.
The coroner's long-awaited findings were due to be handed down in June, but days before her scheduled trip to Yuendumu, the community was plunged into sorry business again.
Another young Warlpiri man, Kumanjayi White, died in police custody on the floor of an Alice Springs supermarket.
The delay meant the report was, somewhat ironically, delivered at the start of NAIDOC week, when the 2025 theme was "The Next Generation: Strength, Vision & Legacy".
As Warlpiri kids on school holidays played ball games in the centre of the community, largely oblivious to the tragedy around them, the idea of what "Justice for Walker" looked like, was changing shape.
"'Justice looks like putting trust back in us and not undermining the authority, wisdom, knowledge, power and most importantly the love that exists here," Ms Fernandez-Brown said.
"Justice looks like people coming to that table and ensuring that they have a genuine intention to make sure this doesn't happen again."