A police officer in Australia was found not guilty on Friday in the death of a 19-year-old Indigenous man whose shooting more than two years ago prompted widespread protests and worsened long-simmering tensions over the government’s treatment of the country’s native peoples.
The officer, Zachary Rolfe, 30, had been charged with murder and other counts after killing the teenager, Kumanjayi Walker, during an attempted arrest in a remote Australian community. After a closely watched trial that lasted over a month and featured testimony from more than 40 witnesses, Rolfe was cleared of all charges by a jury in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory in Darwin.
The prosecution had argued that Rolfe used excessive force and did not need to shoot Walker two additional times after the first shot. The defence argued that Rolfe, who had been stabbed by Walker with medical scissors as officers tried to apprehend him, had acted in self-defence.
Many Indigenous Australians had seen the case as a test of whether authorities could be held accountable after what they call decades of abuses. While no police officer has been convicted of murdering an Indigenous person in Australia, nearly 500 Indigenous people have died in police custody since 1991, when a royal commission made 339 recommendations to reduce such deaths.
“We kind of knew there was only a slim chance, but we hoped so hard,” said Yasmine Musharbash, a senior lecturer in anthropology at the Australian National University who has been living in Yuendumu, where Walker was killed, and who was with members of the community who gathered in the city of Alice Springs to hear the verdict announced.
In the weeks after Walker’s death in November 2019, people throughout the country turned out at dozens of protests against police brutality toward Indigenous Australians, who are roughly 12 times as likely to be in custody as non-Indigenous Australians.
For the last five weeks, many relatives and friends of Walker had gathered on the lawn in front of the courthouse in Alice Springs, where the case was broadcast, choosing to remain outside to avoid the trauma of hearing the details of his death again.
But on Friday, after a deliberation of seven hours by the jury, they filed in to hear the verdict.
“As they read through each charge and the jury said ‘not guilty,’ and then the next one is ‘not guilty,’ and the next one is ‘not guilty’ as well — we all sat there and quietly cried,” Musharbash said.
Robin Japanangka Granites, a Yuendumu community elder who was also at the courthouse in Alice Springs, said: “We’re just feeling a bit heartbroken. Today was a time when it went not our way, but the opposite.”
On the Thursday before his death, Walker, armed with an ax, had a run-in with members of the local police force in Yuendumu as they tried to arrest him for breaching a suspended sentence. He had been released from prison the month before after serving time for property crime charges and was supposed to be at a rehabilitation facility in Alice Springs.
Three days later, on Saturday, Rolfe and another officer entered the home of Walker’s grandmother, also in Yuendumu, which has a population of about 750 people and where Walker had gone for his grandfather’s funeral.
In the scuffle, Walker stabbed Rolfe in the shoulder with a pair of medical scissors. A fellow officer restrained Walker on the ground, and Rolfe shot him three times.
In the hours that followed, Walker did not receive adequate medical care, because staff members had evacuated the health clinic in Yuendumu earlier in the day over safety concerns after a number of break-ins. The nearest clinic was some 40 miles away. Though his relatives waited for news outside the police station, they were not told of his death until 10 hours later.
Speaking to reporters outside court in Darwin on Friday, Rolfe’s attorney, David Edwardson, said there had been no winners in the case. “A young man died, and that’s tragic,” he said. He added: “At the same time, Zachary Rolfe, in my view, was wrongly charged in the first place. It was an appalling investigation and very much regretted.”
After the verdict, Rolfe hugged supporters and family members, while Walker’s relatives let out wails of anguish. Rolfe is expected to return to his job as a police officer in the Northern Territory.
Residents of remote Australian communities, which have large Indigenous populations and are among the poorest in Australia, are not necessarily hostile to the police, Musharbash said.
“People are so incredibly good at distinguishing between people who stand with them and people who are dangerous to them, and they make that distinction for police, too,” she said. “They know what a good copper is like, and they love a good copper.”
But there is a strong sense in the community that the police should not use guns and should have some awareness of their needs, she added. Rolfe, who grew up in a wealthy family in Canberra, the capital, and spent years in the army before joining the police force, had never visited Yuendumu before the day of Walker’s death.
At a news conference outside the courthouse, Valerie Napaljarri Martin, an advocate for the Yuendumu community, spoke of the “anger and grief” of those who knew Walker.
“We demand an end to guns in our communities,” she said. “We have every right to speak and to say: This must stop. Do not silence us.”
