A White policeman, an Aboriginal teen and the murder trial gripping Australia
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SYDNEY — The police officers approached the house at dusk, just as the sun was setting on the remote Outback town of Yuendumu. They had been sent to arrest an Aboriginal teenager who had broken his bail conditions and escaped authorities a few days earlier. But as Constable Zachary Rolfe tried to place handcuffs on Kumanjayi Walker, the 19-year-old again resisted.
“Just put your hands behind your back,” Rolfe said, according to a set of assumed facts in the case. Instead, Walker pulled a pair of scissors from his pocket and stabbed the officer in the shoulder. As the two struggled, the White officer fired three bullets from close range, mortally wounding the teen.
Between the first and second gunshots was a gap of 2.6 seconds — a pause that will be at the center of court arguments starting on Monday in Darwin to determine whether Rolfe will spend his life in prison. The police officer is pleading self-defense. Prosecutors argue that the second and third shots, one of which was fatal, were unnecessary and amount to murder.
But between the two young men yawned another gap, a divide of race, power, privilege and history that has transformed the case into what one newspaper here has called “the most significant murder trial this century.”
Rolfe, a decorated officer and army veteran, comes from a well-known family in Australia’s wealthy capital. Walker was an orphan from one of the nation’s poorest communities whose life had been marred by misfortune and misconduct.
Their deadly encounter in Australia’s Northern Territory in November 2019 came two months after police had shot another Aboriginal person to death in a neighboring state. The back-to-back shootings became rallying cries for the Black Lives Matter movement in a country where past police killings of Indigenous people have gone unpunished.
“This case is a bit of a litmus test,” said Thalia Anthony, a law professor at the University of Technology Sydney. “People critical of deaths in custody will be watching this to see if there is a shift, whether to have some hope for how we move forward, whether we will stop this continual killing of Aboriginal people by authorities with impunity.”
Still, support for the police in Australia remains high. And the recent acquittal of the officer charged in the other killing around the same time shows the head winds against officer prosecutions, Anthony said.
The Walker case has proved deeply divisive. Thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest his killing. Thousands more have taken to social media in support of Rolfe. Police officers have been disciplined or fired for distributing T-shirts defending their comrade. Journalists have been barred from reporting some aspects of the case, and prosecutors have threatened to charge two reporters with contempt for allegedly bending the rules. The Northern Territory’s top official has had to deny accusations he interfered in the murder case.
Adding to the drama is the Rolfe family’s recent decision to break its silence. The father has said his son is not a racist but a hero.
“It’s an idiotic suggestion that anyone could form murderous intent in 2.6 seconds,” Richard Rolfe told the television program “Spotlight.” “He did everything he could to protect his partner’s life and then did everything he could to save the offender’s life.”
Yuendumu sits on the edge of the Tanami Desert, almost 200 miles from the nearest city. More than 85 percent of its roughly 700 residents are Indigenous. Some are acclaimed artists. Yet half of Yuendumu is unemployed and incomes are only a third of the territory’s average.
“It’s an incredibly poor place,” said Warren Snowdon, who represents an expanse of the Northern Territory twice the size of Texas, including Yuendumu, in Australia’s Parliament.
Like much of the country, the town has a history inextricably tied to colonial violence.
In 1928, Australia’s last known massacre of Indigenous people occurred not far from Yuendumu when a police officer led the slaughter of dozens of Aboriginal men, women and children near the Coniston cattle station in retaliation for the killing of a White dingo trapper.
Yuendumu was founded two decades later as a depot for the Australian government to deliver food and services to Aboriginal people, who were “forcibly relocated” from the surrounding countryside to Yuendumu, Snowdon said.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Australian states and territories passed “protection acts” that gave them tremendous control over the lives of Indigenous people, culminating in the removal of thousands of children, known as the Stolen Generations.
“The people who had to enforce that was the police,” said Warren Mundine, an Aboriginal politician who recalled being racially profiled as boy under the protection acts. “You have a long history of hostility and mistrust between the police and Aboriginal communities, and it still lingers very much today.”
The laws were eventually repealed, but in the Northern Territory, the federal government again tightened controls on Indigenous communities in 2007. Some of those measures — such as severe criminal penalties for alcohol possession and cuts to welfare for school truancy — remain in place.
“That enables the police to have a very controlling role in Aboriginal lives, not too different from the protection acts,” Anthony said. “So they live under different laws.”
Those laws shaped the short life of Kumanjayi Walker.
Walker’s family declined to speak to The Washington Post ahead of the trial. But relatives previously told media that the teenager was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, which can be associated with lifelong neurological impairments including impulsiveness, hyperactivity and poor judgment. His parents died when he was young, his father while in prison, “Spotlight” reported.
Walker had encounters with police as a juvenile, according to a spokesman for the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, who said he could not by law provide additional details.
In June 2019, Walker was convicted of unlawful entry of a building, damage to property and stealing, according to the spokesman. A judge sentenced him to 16 months in prison with half the time suspended, and Walker was released to a halfway house in Alice Springs in October 2019, not long after his 19th birthday.
About a week later, Walker removed the electronic monitoring device on his ankle and left the halfway house in the middle of the night. When police in Yuendumu tried to detain him again, Walker threatened them with an ax and fled, according to the list of assumed facts in the case.
Three days later, Rolfe and three other officers were sent from Alice Springs to Yuendumu as part of an Immediate Response Team — tasked with handling high-risk incidents — to arrest the teenager.
Rolfe grew up in leafy Canberra, more than 1,500 miles from dusty Yuendumu. His father, Richard, is a well-known Audi dealer who is a Member of the Order of Australia — the country’s top honor. He and his wife, Deb, a prominent attorney, own a notable collection of Indigenous art. A profile dubbed them “one of the [Australian Capital] territory’s most high-profile and charitable couples.” They sent their son to an elite private school before he enlisted in the Australian army and served a tour in Afghanistan.
Rolfe and his family declined to comment for this article. But in his TV interview, Richard Rolfe described his son as driven to help people.
“If there is a need to put himself out there, to try and save somebody, that’s what he does,” he said.
Rolfe joined the Northern Territory Police Force, finishing top of his cadet class. In his first week on the job in late 2016, Rolfe stripped to his underwear and swam into a flood-swollen river to save a man. Then Rolfe swam and walked several miles downstream in search of the man’s girlfriend, who he found lying injured on the riverbank.
“I didn’t think there were crocodiles in the water but I wasn’t sure because I’m not from the Northern Territory,” Rolfe told a newspaper.
The rescue earned Rolfe medals for bravery. But the next time he made headlines, it was because he had been charged with murder.
If Rolfe is found guilty of murdering an Indigenous person, he would be the first Australian police officer convicted of the charge, according to Sophie Trevitt, executive officer of the Aboriginal legal advocacy group Change the Record.
“For too long the police force has operated with a policy of mates-protecting-mates, and it has got to end,” she said.
Fatal shootings by police are relatively uncommon in Australia. In the nation of 25 million, six people were fatally shot by police in the fiscal year that ended in June. In the United States, the per-capita rate of such shootings is more than 12 times as high.
Far fewer people own firearms in Australia, which means officers are far less likely to face a threat requiring deadly force, experts say. But Australia’s eight large police forces also allow for better, more uniform training than the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. A study by the Australian Institute of Criminology found that 37 out of 39 fatal shootings by police over the course of a decade were justified.
The statistics are little comfort to Indigenous Australians, who have watched a string of such killings go unpunished. In October, an officer in Western Australia was acquitted after fatally shooting a mentally ill Aboriginal woman who was walking down a street with a knife in September 2019.
“The Aboriginal outcome was absolute dismay, sadness and anger,” said Hannah McGlade, a human rights expert and associate professor at Curtin University who is Aboriginal. Not a single member of the jury was Indigenous, an issue she and other experts say Australia has failed to address.
Rolfe’s trial was moved almost a thousand miles from Alice Springs to Darwin because of concerns that public meetings and rallies had polluted the jury pool. Roughly 9 percent of Darwin’s population is Indigenous, half the rate in Alice Springs.
The trial will be broadcast in an Alice Springs courtroom for members of Walker’s community who are unable to travel to Darwin, but a covid outbreak in Yuendumu left the community in lockdown until recently and some families are still isolating.
The prosecution was handed a boost in November when Australia’s top court limited Rolfe’s ability to argue he was acting in “good faith” during the ill-fated arrest. That means the trial will probably hinge on the 2.6 seconds between the first and second shots, and what the jurors make of body-camera footage of the incident. If convicted of murder, Rolfe faces a minimum of 20 years in prison, though the jury can convict him on one of two lesser charges instead.
Mundine, who has watched the footage, said he believes the shooting was justified. But decades of injustices and stalled reforms have left many Indigenous Australians anxious for signs of change.
“You’ve got the history of Australia, the invasion, people driven off the country and put in reserves, protection acts,” he said. “That builds up a lot of resentment.”
Washington News
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