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 Cage's 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 Urunda 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. It is because you know they're looking at you, they're targeting you. Soon's the actually one black color. They're watching you.
They're getting a little bit overboard.
To be honest, everywhere I go in al 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, 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 who were 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 of the Northern Territory, I unagreeably say sorry Aratorians in the past, Hans and the injustices paused 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 from Schwartz Media and seven AM. This
is Ela Springs, Episode two. The Coppers. 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 com 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.
Today is not a very really a happy day for us.
It's another sad day.
Standing on the steps of the Supreme Court in 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 Wolprialda ned Jump, a jimp of hard graves.
I just say, when we are going to get justice, when no guns in the row remote community.
W I want no guns. Enough is enough, It's gotta stop.
When he killed Kim and Jie Walker, Zachary Roll fired three shots during a tempt 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 Walker had 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 in Our 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. An internal investigation found his use of force was not excessive, but during the inquest, Rolf 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 phone 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 Rolf 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 NT justice system. Even after all that time, witnessing Territory police up close, that inquest was still shocking.
The films and then a coming out at the same inquest, we discovered that the same group had these annual Christmas dinners where they gave our awards which were horrendously blatantly Alabama Sdale recis with Coon of the Year award and you know, blacking up stuff, and 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 fractual relationship between the police and original communities has always been a byproduct of colonization. But things really kicking the gay 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 crime 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 sales 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 a little bit. What happens when a kid is arrested.
What happens percedurally, what happens to Aboriginal 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 honest 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 aid services stretched beyond their limits, bill restrictions, plystone kids aren't met because they can't be met, and so an 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 Turmble 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 their own romand the facility is in Darwin, but kids from all 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 NTI 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 at I first discovered it than they realized that this had been going on for years and it was still going on, and it was like a bile that needed to be busted, that stuff for stuff that was going on in Dindale, which was explored by full Corners, was tortured 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 on don Dale and they earn that back on the streets of somewhere like Alice Springs, what do they go back as worse?
Their trauma and their injuries and damage are campaigned, So they come out more injured than they went in, and they haven't been rehabilitated in any each yeap 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 Gama to make this apology.
I know that I cannot change or I'm the past and as the police emissioner alongside with our police officers, yeah, we can commit to not repeat mistakes and the injustices.
Of the past.
All the territory police need to be accountable for the past treatment of Aboriginal people.
Standing next to the Commissioner was ar under woman Leanne Little. This is the coupe 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?
Yeah, okay, that's after the break.
So it's marine about quarters await U 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 anti 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 his 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.
I noticed 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, Leanna, 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 officers.
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 Alice 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 theyase.
Leanne was born and raised in Alice Springs. Her dadd was a construction worker, her 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 Alice Springs?
It was assistant commissioner was His name was sass Grant and he was my athletics coach and amazing man. And I actually didn't realize he was assistant commissioner 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, sprint.
And he always used to say to me that he thought I could make it to the Olympics and if horses and boyfriends thinking 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 Order Archi police force, ironically, so that's why I saut Australia. So they said you can go to the border. 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 non changed police forces racist and they didn't want me to experience that, so off I went. I hadn't ever seen the traffic light before, let alone around about, so things are 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.
Outlined to the lawyer at the times.
And missions of racism in the police force, and from there it sort of snowballed into a Human Rights and Echo Opportunity Commission court matter and it ended in an out of court settlement.
In the late nineties. Leanne Little left and retrained as a lawyer. In the twenty ten, working with the Attorney General to establish the Aboriginal Justice Unit. It was a job that took her all across the NT.
So we're here at un blood Watch, hid by invitation from the Central Man 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 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 Lee made a decision that I'm not sure many people in her position would make after her parents warned her the police were racist, after she felt pushed out of the force by her 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 the 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 and a police force and people should be able to work in a professional space and be their best, and not only do non original people don't want and Aboriginal 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 jewel 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 torrost Rattle on 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 complaint 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 the changes at a time when the powerful Territory Police union has said
it things cops are being unfairly blamed for racism. How do you change police officers who don't want to be changed? He said, 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, was a really fast runner, and I was a school captain and there was a disabled 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 she let her run. And I just sat there way let her run, and it made her day when she ran.
So I'm gonna get upset. Inclusivetivity is important.
Sometimes people just need a chance.
Yeah, Nate came from my mum. She was always she taught us.
She died twelve months ago, so raw.
Yeah. I just came across the tenth anniversary of my dad passing, and tenth I thought it'd be over it by then, but you don't get over it. You just deal with it.
I worry about who replaces people are my dad, Yeah, you know, they were warriors, still are and that fire in the belly stuff. You know, they dealt with so much more than what we deal with, and we think we're hard 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 little factors. Do you think that's a fair statement.
I think that'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 you know, 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, No 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 cannon mill. 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 Valor 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 our 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 day.
Do you see a long term figure here for yourself and your family.
At the moment, No, they're saying, I will 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. Was that chemical? Chemical is back on the country.