Just a warning. Today's episode discusses traumatic events and refers to deceased Aboriginal people and contains offensive language. It's also the second episode in a three part series. If you haven't yet, go listen to episode one, Children of the Intervention. You see a lot of cops here in pursuit vehicles, driving the caged divisional van to get in this part of the world, or checking the IDs as people line up outside the bottle shop in the town's main shopping center.
It feels like they're everywhere, and the numbers back up what the eyes can see. For every one hundred thousand people in the Northern Territory, there are seven hundred and thirty cops, almost triple the national average. We spoke to Uncle Brian in the last episode, along with Damien and his eighteen year old son Bison. They represent three generations of Arunda men, all of whom have had their own
experiences with the territory and police. It doesn't make you feel like when you're walking down the street and you see a police fan head towards you, it's.
Like sad sort of thing, you know, because you know they're looking at you, they're targeting you. Who's actually one black color. They're watching you.
They're getting a little bit overboard.
To be honest, everywhere I go in l Springs, locals tell me about interactions they've had with the cops. Not everyone wants to say it into a microphone, but the stories are similar, stories about violent cops and about not feeling safe in their own town.
Yeah, that you talk about murder, They've killed a lot of people.
They killed a lot of people, especially our people, black people. Nothing in the orditary nobody was found guilty.
Uncle Brian's talking about the fact that since the point of first contact between black and white people on this continent, thousands of Aboriginal people have died in custody and not a single law enforcement official has ever been convicted.
You know, they walk around saying about gangs in the town and all this, and that, who's the gangs? We're not the gang. Who's the ones we're in a badge linked up to another association, not another badge. They're the ones with their game because they're the ones where their uniform.
The broken relationship between the police and locals isn't just conjecture on the streets of Alice Springs. It's acknowledged by the INNT Police Commissioner who earlier this year apologized to Aboriginal Territorians for the harm caused by his organization.
So today, as the police commissioner on the Northern Territory, I unagreeably say sorry Orratorians in the past Hans and the injustices caused, or members of the Northern Territory Police.
I want to understand how things got to this point, whether it's possible to mend all the broken pieces splintering the community here. To begin to find meaning, I'd need to speak to the police themselves and the arrunder woman tasked with changing the culture within the force and trying to rebuild the relationship between her organization and her people. I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven AM. This is Alice Springs Episode two The Coppers. This episode was
first published in October last year. There's one story that sums up where things stand between the cops and the community. Here is twenty twenty two. Police officer Zachary Rolf has just been acquitted for the murder of a nineteen year old wolpery man Come and Jie Walker. There were no Indigenous people on the jury it was overwhelmingly white. His family had waited years for a verdict, and when it finally came, they were left reeling.
Toe day is not a very.
It's not a really a happy day for us.
It's another sad day.
Standing on the step to the Supreme Court and Alice springs their palpable grief, their anger and the deep despair showed the chasm that had grown between the police and the Aboriginal community. This is Senior walprialda ned jump, a jump of hard graves.
I just say, when we are going to get justice, when.
No guns in the Row remote community, we I want no guns. Enough is enough, It's gonna stop.
When he killed him and Jie Walker, Zachary Roll fired three shots during an attempt to arrest him. Walker was holding a pair of scissors at the time. A community officer who'd arrested Walker many times before said he'd never known him to resist arrest. He said, Walk out been in town for his granddad's funeral and it was agreed that he'd hand himself in after that, but he didn't get the chance to do that. A subsequent coronial inquest
into Walker's death took two years to run. Another two years in the life of Walker's family finishing earlier this year. The inquest revealed that Zachary Ralph had been involved in forty six use of force incidents in his three years and Alice Springs. One of the videos from his own body cam was the arrest of a fourteen year old. The kid jumps in a wheelie bin, Ralph kicks the
bin over while with child's inside. Soon, an internal investigation found his use of force was not excessive, but during the inquest, Rolph gave Frank a wide ranging testimony on the culture within the Northern Territory Police Force. The testimony would reveal what many had assumed for a long time. A culture of widespread racism exists within the force.
A series of explosive text messages downloaded from Constable Zachary Rolf's pione following his arrest in twenty nineteen have been read aloud to the court the current sergeant in charge.
Revelations with Nowhere to Hide in the form of testimony and texts from police officers presented to the inquest for all the world to see.
An unnamed officer texted Rolf saying, who'd you had a rough arvo? Yesterday, grubby constable role replying referring to Indigenous people as in another message to.
The level of racism was palpable because there was the text messages shared between the police officers that were involved in the operation and.
John Lawrence sc is the former president of the nt Bar Association. He touched down in the territory via Melbourne from Edinburgh in the eighties at the same time the Royal Commission into Death and Custody was happening, and for nearly four decades he's represented Aboriginal people in the intejustice system. Even after all that time, witnessing Territory police up close that inquest was still shocking.
And then a coming out at the same inquest, we discovered that the same group had these annual Christmas dinners where they gave out awards which were horrendously blatantly Alabama stale racis with Coon of the Year award and you know, blacking up stuff. I mean stuff that you know, honestly, I didn't think that we had descended to that level.
John takes the long view when he says that the fractured relationship between the police and Aboriginal communities has always been a byproduct of colonization, but things really kicking the gear during the intervention.
When the Intervention came in, one of the things that they spent millions on was setting up police stations in communities that previously didn't have any. Now, if you put a police station anywhere which was previously apparently crying free, you're going to end up within six months with a
lot of people arrested in chats with criminal offenses. I mean, I've joked that if I was an Aboriginal person in twenty twenty four, I wouldn't even walk past the courthouse because there's some kind of hoovering vacuum mechanism that could suck you in the front door, put you in a dock, and then put you down into the cells below, and you're in the black Maria van and off to jail you go. It's just that's how effective efficient our system has become. It's crazy shit.
Let's talk about the nuts and bolts of it a little bit. What happens when a kid is arrested.
What happens, percisely, what happens to original kids is that they get taken the court and they will be let's say tried, Now, what they are entitled to, like you and I, is due process, which includes, as your bastions, the presumption of innocence, the honess of proof being on the state which is beyond reasonable doubt, and it has
to be based on real admissible evidence. Now, these are the standard protections and safeguards that our system has in order to prevent injustice and wrongful convictions, but none of them really have any application. If you're a seventeen year old Aboriginal kid who's up for breaking entry or stealing cars, you're just whisked through a system at one hundred mile an hour.
Kids are represented by crumbling legal eyed services, stretched beyond their limits by all restrictions. Pystine kids aren't met because they can't be met, and so around seventy percent of kids who are in detention are on remand presumed innocent under the law, but locked up nonetheless, and they end up in places locked Dondale.
This is the vision that has sent shockwaves around the world. This was not filmed in Gontanamo Bay or North Korea. This was filmed in the Northern Territory in our own country.
The events at the Dondale Center that were set out on four corners shocked and appalled Australians, and we are dealing with it with a Royal commission.
Dondale used detention center, the one Malcolm Tamble would eventually establish a Royal Commission over, was built in ninety one specifically to lock up kids between the ages of ten and seventeen, Some sentence to serve time there, others held there on romand The facility is in Darwin, but kids from El Springs are often shipped there, fifteen hours up the road, away from home, their families and all they know.
Most are Aboriginal. In fact, nearly eighty two percent of inmates in NTA prison are Aboriginal, even though they only make up thirty percent of the anti population. At times one hundred percent of all youth incarcerated here have been Aboriginal. John remembers the first time a case of a kid at don Dale was handed to him. All his years of experience couldn't prepare him for what he saw happening there.
No sooner had I first discovered it than I realized that this had been going on for years, and it was still going on, and it was like a boil that needed to be burst. That stuff for stuff that was going on in Dndale which was exposed by full Corners was torture and abuse, solitary confinement, assault, psychological batterings, all of that none more.
What does that do to kids saved? There's a kid that's been a don Dale and they end that back on the streets of somewhere like Alice Springs. What did they go back as worse?
Their trauma and their injuries and damage are compounded, So i'm are more injured than they went in and they haven't been reabilitate in any each yep or form. So they just go back to where they came from and the sacle goes on. It's this sacle of perpetuation, which is really what the legal situation here is.
Kids are made worse by a failing justice system. Some kids bend to its will, others are broken by it. If they do come out the other side, often the cycle they're in is all they've known and all they will know. That cycle starts and ends with the Coppers, a cycle that extends through its one hundred and fifty four year history, which leads to the police Commissioner rising to his feet at Garma to make this apology.
I know that I cannot change or the past, and as the police Emissioner, alongside with our police officers, we can commit to not repeat mistakes and the injustices of the past. All the territory police need to be accountable. One of the past treatment of original people.
Standing next to the Commissioner was rund a woman, Leanne Little. This is the cop who's been given the job of mending the relationship between the police and her people, the woman who has to take the apology and make it count. So what's their plan?
Ready?
Yeah, Okay, that's after the break.
So it's marine about a quarters to wait in the morning, and we are on our way to the well. The police headquarter is here in Alice Springs to speak to Leanne Little, and we're speaking to her at a time when the Chief Commissioner has just made an apology to the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory and she has now been charged with basically changing the culture of the force to address things like systemic racism, interpersonal racism, racial profiling.
I think, without a shadow of a doubt you could easily say it's the most difficult and challenging job within the force itself, and the relations between the Aboriginal community here and antique police are probably at an all time light. Alice Springs Police Station looks like a typical municipal building from the eighties, non threatening but imposing in a town of this size. It's only once you're inside it feels
like a cop shop. Protective glass shielding the front counter, interview rooms to the left, a limited access to anywhere beyond that. As we wait to be shown to a room to record the interview, Leanne arrives and signs in Daniel, Daniel, I knowed. She takes time to speak to the constable behind the glass, an Aboriginal man. She gives him her contact details and tells him to stay in touch. We're shown into a small office somewhere in the heart of
the building. Okay, we're ready to roll. First of all, Leanne, thank you very much for your time. Know how busy you are as we sit here now in twenty twenty four, just at the start of your journey in this role. Would you say that the Northern Territory Police is a racist institution.
No. I see some individuals that have been racist, and I see a lot of good officers that need more good offices around them, and I see a system where those good officers need tools to be able to make sure that those people who have behaviors because usually with the racism, people are sexist as well, people are homophobic. So it's a combination of attitudes, not just one alone. So you know, it needs to be everything that needs to be tackled.
So do you think that the original community of our springs trust the police as we sit here at the moment.
I think there's a lot of work to be done. I think there's a lot of tangible outcomes that need to be seen on the ground before people regain that trust in police. People should feel that when they call for police, and when police attend as an offender or a victim, that they're getting the service that they deserve.
Leanne was born and raised in Alice Springs. Her data was a construction and mum a school counselor. It was a safe upbringing with food on the table. Her parents often took kids in. Leanne was told not to ask questions, just to make them feel welcome. It's something that used to happen a lot when there was no wrong door for a kid to walk through. If they needed to get help from within their own community. So what was some of your first interactions with the police in ol Springs?
It was assistant commissioner was His name was Sauce Grant and he was my athletics coach and amazing man. And I actually didn't realize he was Assistant commission until I was in my teenage years, because I think I would have run faster if I knew it was a placement.
What was your event?
I was a sprinter sprinter and he always used to say to me that he thought I could make it to the Olympics and if horses and boyfriends sticking it in the way, I might have gone there.
The way things used to be has clearly informed how she's trying to address the issues confronting her people. As a young woman, she wanted to join the police force to instigate change, to run towards it.
My parents wouldn't let me join the ORDINARYOI police force, ironically, so that's why I sound Australia. So they said, you can go to the border. Do you know nobody there? Off you go? And they thought, because.
You don't want to be you don't want to be arresting family members and causing trouble for your.
Mob, and they at that time said the nun changed police force is racist and they didn't want me to experience that, so off I went. I hadn't ever seen the traffic light before, let learn around about, so things were very different for me down there. It was very lonely.
There's a photo over there from that time, leaning on a police car with the Adelaide skyline behind her. She's proudly wearing a police uniform, blue skirt, blue jumper and a big smile on her face. But being a black copper was never going to be easy. The picture doesn't come close to portraying the reality of what she was experiencing and what was ahead. Why did you decide to leave?
I get injured on duty, had a terrible accident and ended up sort of having to re evaluate my life. And then at that same time I outlined some to the lawyer at the times and missions of racism and the police force, and from there it sort of snowballed into a human rights and equ opportunity to commission court matter and it ended in an out of court settlement.
In the late nineties, Leale Little left and retrained as a lawyer. In the twenty ten she was working with the Attorney General to establish the Aboriginal Justice Unit. It was a job that took her all the christ the nt.
So we're here at un Blood to watch hid by invitation from the Central Land Council.
Her goal was to end the over policing and overincarceration of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. But in late twenty nineteen, while Leanne was putting the finishing touches on the Aboriginal Justice Agreement, kimen Ji Walker was killed. Like much of Australia, Leanne watched the inquest unfold. When she saw the racist text messages that it dredged up the deeply racist awards ceremony run by the elite Tactical Unit, she was incensed and she couldn't let it slide.
I rang the Police Commissioner and told him exactly how I felt. I think it was a little bit surprised. I suppose I was surprised that lots of other people didn't know what was happening. But that's how racism exists in the system, in small pockets, in large organizations, and they find people, you know, who think like that, who they're brave enough to say that too, and they sort
of stick together. But to be perfectly honest, I was impressed by what people were saying to me next that they too, as police officers, were ashamed and embarrassed and sorry for the you know what was exposed. I think it was a moment of shame and embarrassment and for me, the police force needed to own that if we were to move forward in fixing what needed to be fixed.
It was off the back of this call that Leanne made a decision that I'm not sure many people in her position would make. After her parents warned her the police were after she felt pushed out of the force by a treatment as the first Aboriginal police officer. After watching the inquest and seeing everything get laid bare, Leanne went back. She rejoined the police for the same reason she's ever done anything.
Because I think I can make a difference. I think that I really have the skills that can work with other people in a team to make a difference.
Now, as the Executive Director of the Community Resilience and Engagement Command for the Northern Territory Police Force, she's specifically tasked with tackling and rooting out racism in the force.
It sounds like a big task, but at the same time, there should be no racism in a police force and people should be able to work in a professional space and be their best and not only do non averageal people don't wantist and average and people don't want racism. So I think that's a perfect recipe for me to come in and create an environment and train people up and encourage people to call out racism when they see it, to have complaint mechanisms in place for people when it is raised.
Leanne has the duel task of stopping racism towards Aboriginal offices and changing the way cops police Aboriginal people. So where does she even start. She's aiming to get thirty percent Aboriginal on torrest Ratland the people on the force. She says, the lack of lived experience and decision making at every level has led to so many of the
problems here. There's also a number of other measures like training police and cultural awareness and strengthening complainte systems so officers have somewhere to go when they see or experience racism. As Leanne runs through these measures for me, I can't help but think it's like putting a band aid on a gaping wound. She's trying to make these changes at a time when the powerful Territory Police union has said
it things cops are being unfairly for racism. How do you change police officers who don't want to be changed? You say the blame shouldn't be all placed on them. It's a reminder that the most powerful person in the justice system is the cop on the beat. They're the ones that can taste pepper spray or shoot you on the spot.
They are the law.
Prosecutors can only prosecute, judges can only sentence. If a cop resists change, then that can be one cop too many, And to change things, Leanne is going to have to deal with every type of cop. The more we talk, the more real our conversation becomes. It feels like the enormity of the task is hitting her, and so returns to why she's persevering in spite of it all.
I remember when I was a kid going to school and I was really good at sport, like I was a really fast runner, and I was a school captain, and there was a able girl who had cerebral palsy, and I was in charge of who was on the relay, and she wanted to run, and everyone was saying to me, don't let her run, don't let her run. She'll you know, she's gonna We're gonna lose if you let her run. And I'll just sat there. Way let her run, And it made her day when she ran. So I'm going
to get upsets. Inclusivetivity is important.
Sometimes people just need a chance.
Yeah, Nate came from my mom. She was always she taught us. It's she died twelve months ago, so raw.
Yeah. I just came across the tenth anniversary of my dad passing. In tenth I thought it'd be over it by then, but you don't get over it, just deal with it.
I worry about who replaces people are my dad. Yeah, you know, they were warriors, still are and that fire and the belly stuff. You know, they dealt with so much more than what we deal with, and we think we're done by but when they go, you know, what are we like? We've got to keep fighting for what's what's fair.
Just seems to me that here in the territory, if you're Aboriginal, no matter how strong your role models have been, how they've nurtured and cared for you. Even in the best of circumstances, you are invariably that far away from crossing over to another line because of all the societal factors and attitude of little factors. Do you think that's a fair statement.
It's an absolute correct statement. No matter how wealthy I am, no matter how will I dress, no matter how high I am in as a position title, no matter what sort of car I drive, no matter how many degrees I've got. I've got five, I think. But for me it's irrelevant. I'm still an Aboriginal person that is not looked at for someone who's been successful. And I hate this question because people say, what did your parents do differently to be the way that you and your family
are to be who they are today? And I say you should be asking yourself that question. What didn't those other kids get or what has happened to them so that they didn't succeed?
We thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
After the interview, I spent a good part of the day walking around town. I landed at the Todd Tavern, the flash point that sparked the chaos that brought me to weller springs. In the first place, there's a front bar and a back bar. In the front bar were a couple of gray nomads sitting down for a cannonmill. The place is almost empty. As I turn the corner and go into the back bar, it's full of Aboriginal people speaking in language, playing Poky's and buying jugs of beer.
Two security guards march up and down the room. It's dark. The windows are almost entirely blacked out, so people can't see out, and people can't see in the front bar and the back bar sum up the gulf between the two worlds in one small town, one filled with light, comfort and room to think, the other dark, crowded and confined, a place known locally as the animal bar. As I looked out the window, some young Aboriginal kids with broad, cheeky smiles were pushing their faces up against the glass
of the tavern. One was being lifted up by our mum. Months earlier, kids not much older had been hurling themselves at the same windows, trying to break through. Later I'd find out that lawyers logged a human rights complain against the Antique government and police Commissioner Michael Murphy. The lawyers alleged that three unnamed Aboriginal police officers experienced racial vilification, derision,
and unequal pay for twenty years. In response, the police commissioner says he's committed to cultural reform of the force. In the meantime, the streets of Alice Springs remained divided, a listless hype bed of tension and chaos, people angered, knowing the leavers to change things are just out of reach. This is Alice Springs next episode. As politicians threaten hardline solutions, I'm returning to Arunda Country to explore a different way forward.
Territorians have stood up against nearly two decades of escalating crime and economy going backwards, and the erosion of our once iconic lifestyle.
But tomorrow is the start of a new days.
Do you see a long term future here for yourself and your family.
At the moment, No, they're saying, oh, we'll put everybody in jail.
Set the plan that everybody in the Northern Church who will either be a prisoner or a warden by the year twenty fifty.
I've seen a chemical here that actually.
Works with a chemical
Chemical is back on the country