The police officer who killed Indigenous teenager Kumanjayi Walker in 2019 was “racist” and had an “attraction” to adrenaline-style policing, a coroner’s inquest has found.
Walker, 19, died shortly after he was shot three times at close range by Constable Zachary Rolfe during a home arrest in Yuendumu, a remote Indigenous community in the Northern Territory (NT).
Rolfe - no longer a policeman - was charged with Walker’s murder and acquitted in 2022, sparking protests about Indigenous deaths in custody.
In delivering her findings, Judge Elisabeth Armitage said Walker’s death was “avoidable” and there was “clear evidence of entrenched, systemic and structural racism” within NT’s police force.
‘racist’ or just racist
The “racist” between quotes in the headline just means that that one word is a direct quote from someone or something, wheas the rest of the headline is paraphrased. In this case it’s a direct quote from a coroner’s inquest by Judge Armitage.
I’m not a fan of this style of quoting, since writing singular words between quotes could easily also be read as insincerity or sarcasm. But it seems to be pretty common in English language media.
Edit: Judge Armitage also writes that this police officer being racist isn’t just incidental, but rather that the police station he is working at apparently has a work-place culture that has normalised racism (as per the article)
It’s specifically quoting someone so that the guy can’t sue for defamation. The article isn’t calling him racist.