A white police officer who fatally shot an Aboriginal teenager during an arrest attempt in 2019 held racist views that were “normalized” in his department, a public inquiry found Monday in a long-awaited report that cast a harsh light on policing culture in Central Australia.
A coroner read out the findings of the two-year-long inquest into the killing of 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker in his outback community of Yuendumu, where he was shot three times by Constable Zachary Rolfe of the Northern Territory Police Department.
The public inquiry found that before the shooting, the police force had ignored repeated complaints about Mr. Rolfe’s violent treatment of Aboriginal people and that he had previously shared videos of forceful arrests with his family and friends, apparently for entertainment.
Mr. Rolfe, 33, was charged with murder, a rare instance for a police officer in the line of duty. He has maintained that he shot Mr. Walker in self-defense, and was acquitted after a jury trial in 2022. The case touched off protests and became a rallying cry over police mistreatment of Indigenous Australians, a minority that is arrested and incarcerated at much higher rates than the rest of the population.
The public uproar over and interest in the case had centered around what, if any, role racism had played in the fateful encounter between the two men. Mr. Rolfe fired the shots after he was stabbed by Mr. Walker in the shoulder with a pair of scissors during a scuffle. The teenager was dragged, bleeding, into a police vehicle as relatives watched.
In her findings on Monday, Elisabeth Armitage, the coroner for the Northern Territory, said: “I am satisfied that Mr. Rolfe was racist and that he worked in and was the beneficiary of an organization with hallmarks of institutional racism.” She traveled to the community — a three-hour drive from the nearest airport — to deliver her findings before residents in a dusty courtyard lined with gum trees, just a few streets away from the red-walled house belonging to Mr. Walker’s grandmother, where he was killed.
Ms. Armitage said she could not exclude the possibility that “Mr. Rolfe’s racist attitudes were operative in his decisions” that led to Mr. Walker’s death.
The Northern Territory Police Force, which has apologized for missteps in the case but has argued the problem was limited to the individual officer, said in a statement Monday that it acknowledged the coroner’s findings and would “ensure that what has been learned is not lost.”
Mr. Rolfe, who has been dismissed from the force for “serious breaches of discipline,” did not immediately respond to a request for comment through his attorney.
The anger that continues to linger years after the shooting was apparent in the wake of the makeshift court proceeding under a cloudless sky.
After the coroner finished reading her findings, an older man from the community grabbed the microphone to say: “They’re going to keep on doing this, and they’re going to get away with it.” A woman, sitting with a group of community members, exclaimed: “Six years, to say nothing.”
A “coronial inquest” in Australia is a public investigation into the causes of deaths that occur under suspicious or unexplained circumstances, aimed at preventing similar episodes in the future.
Under the broader scope of the inquest, Ms. Armitage was able to consider evidence that was excluded from Mr. Rolfe’s criminal trial, including private text messages between Mr. Rolfe and other members of the police force, in which they used explicit racist slurs to refer to Indigenous Australians. The messages and officers’ testimony made it clear the racist views weren’t confined to Mr. Rolfe, she said.
“This was not the case of one bad apple,” she said.
She pointed to internal awards given out within one unit of the department that included racist depictions and slurs, calling them “grotesque examples of racism.” The fact that there had not been any complaints about the awards, or consequences for those involved, was “clear evidence of entrenched, systemic and structured racism in the Northern Territory Police,” she said.
She also said the department had failed to act on multiple previous complaints against Mr. Rolfe about his excessive use of force against Aboriginal people, including some that resulted in head injuries. The tacit approval gave him a sense of impunity and emboldened him in his mistreatment of members of the Indigenous community, she said.
Mr. Rolfe shared videos of himself using force against at least five Aboriginal arrestees with family and friends, and appeared to find them funny, Ms. Armitage said. That was an indication that he “dehumanized” Indigenous Australians, she said.
While she read her findings, members of the community sat in plastic chairs arranged in a semicircle around the table from which the coroner read her extensive findings over about an hour, as the sun beat down and crows cawed.
In the tight-knit community of about 800, many had tried to care for Mr. Walker, who was orphaned at 12. On the night of the shooting, they were left waiting outside the police station for hours without information about his fate.
Mr. Walker, had a long record of run-ins with the police. There was a warrant out for his arrest, after he cut off an electronic monitoring bracelet from an earlier case.
Waiting for the proceedings to begin on Monday morning, Leanne Oldfield, who had cared for Mr. Walker as a child as an adoptive mother, said she hadn’t slept well the previous night. She said she felt drained after the yearslong inquiry process.
“My heart is still broke,” she said.
Victoria Kim is the Australia correspondent for The New York Times, based in Sydney, covering Australia, New Zealand and the broader Pacific region.
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