Text messages exchanged among police officers “reveal disturbing attitudes towards Aboriginal people” and should be able to be considered by the coroner, an inquest into the shooting death of a Warlpiri man, Kumanjayi Walker, has heard.
Walker, 19, was shot three times by constable Zachary Rolfe during an attempted arrest in the remote NT community of Yuendumu in November 2019. Rolfe was found not guilty of murder and two alternative charges after a six-week trial in the NT supreme court in Darwin.
A three-month inquest is examining the events surrounding the Warlpiri man’s death.
The text exchanges between Rolfe and other police officers also included some of his superior officers, who “were in a position where they should have demonstrated leadership, supervision and advice” according to counsel assisting the coroner, Dr Peggy Dwyer.
On Monday, the inquest was dedicated to legal argument relating to claims by Rolfe’s lawyers that issues which had been agreed on as central to proceedings should no longer be considered relevant, including whether “systemic racism” was a factor.
Dwyer argued that certain text messages obtained from Rolfe’s phone that were not legally admissible in his criminal trial are relevant to the inquest. Dwyer said the coroner’s statutory functions were “entirely different” to those a trial judge had to perform when determining the admissibility of evidence, and that a coroner is required to make recommendations.
“The evidence would not be called to demonise those officers,” Dwyer told the court. “It’s being called to get to a level of understanding, because if your honour does find that they are relevant, we need to understand why those attitudes develop and what the implications of them are, and how they can be addressed.”
Dwyer told the court five officers were involved in that exchange.
“I’d seek to submit … that they reveal disturbing attitudes towards Aboriginal people,” Dwyer said. “They reveal attitudes of contempt towards the Northern Territory, community police, or bush police, and they reveal a disregard for the way that community or bush police approach policing. They reveal attitudes of contempt towards senior police management.
“You will see in the submissions that have been handed up by parties including … NAAJA [the North Australian Aboriginal justice agency] and for families, that there is a contention that the messages reveal racist attitudes,” Dwyer told the court.
Dr Ian Freckleton KC, representing the NT Police Force, said while it was for the coroner to decide what material would assist in determining the circumstances of Walker’s death, the expression of a racist statement may not be evidence of systemic issues.
“Were you to find that there was a police officer, and she had obnoxious views that would affect all right-minded persons in this court and in the community, but she had no real connection with the death at all, except that she had been a member of the force, it would not be appropriate … for you to embark upon hearing evidence about it, or to critique her, or to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to ascertain whether her attitudes, unpleasant though they be, are replicated elsewhere,” Freckleton told the coroner, Elisabeth Armitage.
But Phillip Boulten, representing NAAJA, later argued that “decisions are not always made with conscious deliberate racist intention”.
“It’s not hard to think of how it might be relevant,” he said, going on to list questions that could be asked: “Did you talk like this to all of the people that you work with? Was this something that you discussed regularly?”
On Friday, lawyers for Rolfe argued the coroner, Elisabeth Armitage, may have to disqualify herself from the case, as she had been granted access to an unredacted version of a police report over which the NT police force had claimed legal professional privilege.
But on Monday NT police waived that privilege and agreed that the report could be entered into evidence unredacted. Counsel assisting Dwyer said it therefore was not necessary for the coroner to recuse herself and the issue could be “quickly resolved”.
