“Three shots were fired.”
The acting deputy police commissioner of the Northern Territory thrust three fingers into the air as he addressed the crowd of grieving and angry residents of Yuendumu two days after Kumanjayi Walker had been shot and killed by police.
The commissioner told the crowd he was very sad.
He assured them police had been wearing body cameras.
He promised an independent investigation.
The next day the chief minister, Michael Gunner, told a community meeting: “Saturday night was an awful night and we will be working together for a long time about how we deal with that together.” He promised “consequences will flow as a result”.
It is not our intention to doubt or disparage these expressions of compassion and care from the NT’s most powerful men. However, it is glaringly obvious that these leaders of government and police have direct oversight of a legal regime that has been systematically and adversely brought to bear on Aboriginal lives over the past two decades.
Walker’s death is not an aberrant event but a predictable outcome of an expanding law and order complex that has increasingly penetrated NT Aboriginal communities.
If more deaths are to be avoided, any interrogation into Walker’s death needs to examine the constellation of coercive measures affecting the everyday lives of Aboriginal people in the territory.
There are three necessary ingredients for an adequate investigation into Walker’s death.
First, that it is independent. The investigative mechanisms in the NT (and Australia-wide) preclude such an approach because investigative procedures are embedded in the policing apparatus.
Second, it is crucial that the family of the deceased is engaged at every stage.
Finally, it should consider broader systemic circumstances that govern police shootings, police powers, and training.
The rise of the police state in the NT has taken on a clearer guise since the late 1990s when the Howard government disbanded the bipartisan federal approach to Aboriginal self-determination. The Northern Territory government then governed through criminal justice policies, including by introducing a mandatory sentencing regime.
These new laws were instrumental in delivering Aboriginal youth and adults into detention for crimes committed against property.
A young person was required to serve a minimum of 28 days’ detention for their second offence. Virtually all young people detained under this law were Aboriginal.
These laws contributed to the death of 15-year-old Johnno Johnson Wurramarba who was detained in Don Dale for stealing stationery.
Although these property-related laws were repealed in 2001, mandatory sentencing continues for violent offences.
Since the 2007 Northern Territory intervention, Aboriginal Territorians have been subjected to an expanding system of policing and surveillance, instantiated most strikingly in the erection of spacious police stations and Centrelink offices in several Aboriginal towns including Yuendumu and a new supreme court in Alice Springs that towers high above all other buildings.
The intervention legislation dissolved distinctions between public and private space, allowing police to enter any Aboriginal home without a warrant.
Around the same time, the NT government dismantled primary structures of Aboriginal community authority – community government councils – in favour of shires that now govern and deliver services at a distance.
As power was systematically taken from them, further actions systematically criminalised Aboriginal youth and adults. Criminalisation was spearheaded by police who held racist attitudes, as recently identified by the Aboriginal justice unit of the NT government.
The intervention variously criminalised and precluded the deployment of customary law to resolve disputes, a set of practices that had been quietly tolerated for decades under previous governance regimes.
Unprecedented numbers of fines were issued to people not wearing seatbelts, for driving unroadworthy vehicles, for driving with suspended licences.
Through the same period the police force in central Australia has significantly expanded. Alice Springs, for example, already boasts three times the national average of police officers per head of population and aims to raise its force to 1,500 officers by mid-2020.
Additional “police auxiliary liquor inspectors” are stationed at the threshold of all stores selling alcohol, a program funded to the tune of $11m a year. These point-of-sale checks systematically target Aboriginal people and lead to fines and arrests.
One of the clearest cases of a dispersed policing regime rests with so-called paperless arrest laws, introduced in 2014. These arm police with broader powers to arrest and detain a person for four hours, or if intoxicated, “for as long as they are judged to no longer be intoxicated”.
In the first seven months after the paperless laws were passed NT police took 1,295 people into custody. Close to 80% were Aboriginal.
In May 2015 another Warlpiri man, Kumunjayi Langdon, closely related to Walker, was arrested under these laws while drinking quietly with kin in Darwin parkland.
While the maximum penalty for drinking alcohol in a designated area is a fine of $74, Mr Langdon was fined, handcuffed and removed to the Darwin police station in a police van.
Three hours later he was found dead in a holding cell.
This is the police state of the Northern Territory into which Kumanjayi Walker was born and grew up.
The time of his childhood and youth was defined by policies and public attitudes that pathologise Warlpiri ways of life and signal that there is no future in places governed by Aboriginal authority.
If there is just an inkling of a silver lining to these grim circumstances it is to be found in the galvanising effect ricocheting through the call for “justice for Walker”.
After many years of demoralised fragmentation, the days after the shooting have brought Warlpiri people and their supporters together in a stunning display of common purpose and dignity.
As Warlpiri call for justice for Walker, they make clear they want not only a fair trial, but also a more basic kind of justice: the recognition of the sanctity and sovereignty of their own law and a life of hope for their children.
Melinda Hinkson is an associate professor of anthropology at the Alfred Deakin institute, Deakin University, and director of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Thalia Anthony is an associate professor of law at the University of Technology Sydney.
