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.
a policeman? racist? why, I’m shocked, I tell you, just shocked.
Who shot a teen as soon as he saw they were aboriginal? No way!
That’s not how it went down but why let facts get in the way of a good story?
“Adrenaline-style policing”: new policing methodology just dropped. What are the pros and cons of it versus, say, Peelian community policing?
Pro: It’s radical and cool and you get to shoot your gun! Pew! Pew!
Con: You occasionally have cases of innocent minorities getting shot by racistsI think the police see these both as pros.
Nothing new about it, the US has been using it for decades.
I’m not just glad this was finally put right but also-
In her findings, Judge Armitage found that Rolfe made a “series of flawed decisions” that led to “officer-induced jeopardy” - a situation where police “needlessly put themselves in danger… creating a situation that justifies the use of deadly force”.
She also said Rolfe - a former soldier - found combat situations “exhilarating” and had an “attraction to adrenalin policing”. He had also ignored an arrest plan for Walker created by a female officer because he “thought he knew better”, Judge Armitage said.
We can finally start to well… police, police being adrenalin junkies and deliberately putting themselves in harms way.
Acquitted in 2022, seems like a retrial is in order. Corruption seems to be at play.
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‘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.
